A Day Out at Carter’s Steam Fair

[Ad- gifted experience] We all love a good fun fair and have been to quite a few over the last few years! When it comes to a fun fair, we tend to look for cool rides, fun games, and the lovely lights as it hits evening time, lighting up the place around you. When we went to Carter’s Steam Fair, we were delighted by the variety of new rides we had not ever seen before, as well as the stunning designs on all of these restorations!

Carter’s Steam Fair is a traveling fair is a vintage fun fair, with rides that run on steam engines or on manual operations by the user of the ride. This was an entirely new experience for our family – from things that looked like other rides we had been on in the past, to new rides we had never seen before. One of the first rides we went on, a carousel, had a person in the middle who was managing the coal that was being used to run the carousel. This ride also had music playing – which you could watch being played through a giant, wooden music box with a drum attachment, ticking along as we road.

It’s a really interesting collection of rides, which is what we focused on. There were plenty for younger children – mini-versions of the carousel, cars that could be road around, and one of those rides that you can use a lever to move up into the air. Other rides, however, felt far more unique to the venue and to this time period. There was a spinning-cup style ride, that Kai and Dann really loved, where they were in a cart, going quickly around a center building. However, they had a peddle at the bottom of their cart, which could be pressed quickly in time with movement, to fling their cart back and forth! This needed to be operated by them, so they were in control of how fast they swung or if they used it at all, which was pretty neat!

Another interesting ride was a giant swing, where two people could sit across from each other. Kai sat across from Dann and Robin sat across from Amelia. Each person was given a rope that lead above the other person’s head, and they were instructed to pull on their rope when they wanted to move in that direction, kind of like “pumping” your legs when swinging, but together to build up momentum to rock back and forth.

The most impressive ride that we went on, in my opinion, was one that was just Kai and I. It was a giant boat, that swung back and forth using a coal engine, where you could pick your seat. Some of the seating said VERY BRAVE, while others said BRAVE – we picked the BRAVE bit. There were more seating which wasn’t marked as being special at all. Inside this boat, we needed to put our arms behind our backs, around a wooden frame, to hold ourselves in place (there were no seat belts or anything). Then the boat rocked back and forth, getting higher and higher, until you were literally parallel to the ground, just holding on. It was a RUSH. Our bottoms were flying up from the seat, our stomachs were in knots, and we felt like we were daredevils, leaving with jelly arms and talking about how brave we both were!

Along with all of these rides, there were a number of games at Carter’s Steam Fair – we ended up playing Hook a Duck, the strongman hammering games, knocking over cans, rolling balls to get specific numbers and attempting to knock over coconuts – though we stayed away from the gun games that were also present there. Many of these games were a prize every time, which is always nice as everyone feels like a winner.

The entire Steam Fair worked on a token system, with money being exchanged for tokens. Each ride and game took a set amount of tokens, which needed to be paid before interacting with it. When you purchase large numbers of tokens at once, you can also get cards for Free Rides, which equal any amount of token needed for the specific ride you want to use it on. There were also a small number of stalls that worked on cash only, selling small bites to eat, popcorn, cotton candy, hot drinks and slushies.

We were all very impressed with the selection of rides at Carter’s Steam Fair and really enjoyed how Victorian it all felt. The artwork on everything was truly inspiring – clearly being restored with great care and understanding of the artform. This fun fair is sort of famous, having been featured in a bunch of movies and TV shows, including Paddington 2, Rocket Man and 28 Days Later, just to name a few. It was really cool to experience the fair, especially after Dann and I saw this exact fair in Rocket Man!

As Carter’s Steam Fair is a traveling fair, you can check out where they are stopping next through their website.

You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!