Cricket, cocaine and cocoa houses: 5 ways Victorians spent their free time

While gardening was previously a pastime of the elite, these suburban spaces made the hobby more accessible to working-class Victorians.

• Read more | History explorer: Victorian gardens

In wealthier households, a notable trend in private gardening during the Victorian period was carpet bedding (arranging low growing plants into brightly coloured patterns). Patterns were available for households to copy, and there was a preference for using hardy plants with a one-year life cycle.

“In urban areas, by the mid-19th century, trying to grow perennial plants (those that should last several years) meant you were on a hiding to nothing,” explains garden historian Twigs Way. As pollution increased, only the hardiest plants could survive. “Better to plant annuals and then just re-plant.”

Cricket: a favourite sport among Victorian men

Working conditions in Victorian Britain were notoriously long and gruelling, but there were several significant developments in worker’s rights from the middle of the 19th century onwards.

Through acts such as the Factory Act of 1847, the Master and Servant Act of 1867 and the 1875 Employers and Workmen Act, it was increasingly recognised that greater protection was needed to promote wellbeing and more manageable working conditions.

One of the first groups of people to benefit from improved working hours in the Victorian people were male white-collar workers in the middle class. With more spare time on their hands, many turned to a growing sport: cricket.

The 1860s was the heyday of cricket

Initially, many people just played the game, but over time it increasingly became a sport that people wanted to watch too. The rise of the railways helped transform cricket into a spectator sport, allowing fans to travel to popular matches. Big-name players like WG Grace could attract thousands of eager spectators.

“The 1860s was the heyday of cricket,” explains historian Ruth Goodman. “There were hundreds of clubs formed up and down the country, all jostling for a space to play”.

• Read more | Batting for the British Empire: how Victorian cricket was more than just a game

The sport quickly became a part of British identity (and soon spread through the British empire as a form of soft power). As Souvik Naha wrote in the July 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine: “The timeless, leisurely nature of cricket in the mid-19th century was imbued with the wistful imagery of a bucolic past set in contrast with the industrial present, rooting the sport strongly within English history and culture."

“And this was an ideal to which Victorians were introduced at the youngest of ages. The public school system mythologised the sport as the ultimate lesson in morals, justice, religion and life itself. By playing cricket, boys – and later girls, non-Christians, and colonial people – would become exemplary citizens of the British empire.”

Football: a Saturday afternoon spectacle

By the 1880s, football was gaining traction as a hobby among working-class men.

Changes brought about by the Factory and Workshop Act of 1878 meant that work on Sundays for for children, young people, and women had been banned – and working hours on Saturdays in particular were now shorter. With more free hours on their hands, many workers turned to football as an alternative to cricket, which was generally seen as a middle-class sport.

• Read more | 5 facts about the history of football

In the early days, elements like team sizes and pitch dimensions varied from place to place, with different clubs adopting their own practices. Football clubs sometimes even shared grounds with cricket clubs, as both sports vied for space to accommodate their growing followings. Much like cricket, football gradually transformed from a participatory sport to a spectator event, with people traveling by train to watch games in neighbouring towns.

A key moment in the development of the game came in October 1863, when representatives from a dozen schools and clubs met at the Freemasons’ Tavern in London to form the Football Association (FA) and agree a set of official rules under which they could all play.

“The game had come a long way from the ‘mob football’ of the Middle Ages when, typically, large groups of men would battle to move a ball from one end of a village to the other,” explains Julian Humphrys in a July 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine.

“By the early 19th century, organised matches with clearly defined rules were being played at public schools. However each school had its own particular code, which made the organisation of competitive matches problematical.”

Later in the century, the game’s rules were further codified, and 1872 marked another milestone: the first ever international football match, played between Scotland and England.

Cocoa houses: the temperance movement’s answer to the pub

While pubs gained popularity among working-class men in the 19th century, a growing temperance movement sought to provide a different type of social space. As an alternative, temperance advocates introduced cocoa houses, which offered a non-alcoholic, family-friendly social spaces.

• Read more | A brief history of the temperance movement in Britain and Ireland

“The cocoa house was an inviting space where people could enjoy a hot drink and engage in conversation without the pressure to consume alcohol,” explains historian Ruth Goodman.

While most of these venues have disappeared, their legacy endures, with faded signs and traces of their influence still visible in some British towns.

While cocoa houses were free from alcohol, they weren’t always teetotal spaces (at least by modern standards!). If you opted for a chocolate-based drink in the 1860s and '70s, it may well have contained an unexpected ingredient: coca leaves, the raw ingredient essential to the modern drug known as cocaine.

"Strange as it seems to us now, cocaine [was] very much the paracetamol of Victorian Britain," Dr Douglas Small said on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. "It [was] in almost everything. Cold and flu remedies, seasickness lozenges." Bizarrely, it was even recommended, explained Small, to alleviate morning sickness.

• Listen on the podcast | Cocaine: a Victorian sensation

Reading: a solitary escape

Thanks to a rise in literacy levels and the expansion of libraries and affordable printing, reading became a popular pastime across Victorian Britain.

From novels and newspapers to instructional guides and serialised short stories, Victorians enjoyed a wide variety of reading materials. Particularly popular were penny dreadfuls, a name given to the cheap and sensational serials typically printed on flimsy paper and costing one penny each.

• Listen on the podcast | Life writing: how to create a Victorian bestseller

Charles Dickens is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, enjoying a popularity that far exceeded previous authors. His stories were serialised in newspapers of the day, which helped build their popular appeal among a wide range of audiences – from the poor to Queen Victoria – before being published as full novels.