In the Great Gardens once here was held the Temple Street Fair, starting  bi-annually on the 1st of March and September, which sold a great variety of items such as clothes, haberdashery, livestock, toys, and food. There was also a range of street entertainment: exhibitions of wild beasts and birds, carnival sideshows, puppet shows, tumbling acts, conjuring and folk bands. A newspaper article of 17th February, 1780 reports that one of the sideshow acts, an ‘Aetheopian savage, or the SATYR, staying at The Plume of Feathers, Wine Street’. Then, on the 2nd March, come reports that he was removed to ‘a commodious Room, opposite the CROSS, in Temple Street, where during the fair he will be exhibited to the Curious’ as part of ‘The Grand Exhibition of Living Curiosities’, including birds, beasts and various characters such as an Irish Giant and a Polish dwarf. These kinds of shows were immensely popular into provincial fairs of the late-eighteenth century.

Farley’s Bristol Journal, 2nd March 1805, reports:

‘First annual Fair, the show of cattle (for the first time in Temple Street) was unusually great. Fat beasts, of which there was a considerable number, were dull of sale. Lean beasts sold quickly. Also a large show of horses at the Borough Wells – rather dear – good hacknies were scare and high priced.’

An advert from 1807 announces the arrival and display, at Temple Fair, of

‘Mr Potito – celebrated collector of living Curiosities [...] has brought forward the brightest and most beautiful assemblage of foreign animals and birds ever seen in Europe exhibited in six large and commodious caravans built for that purpose [...] one of the grandest and most extensive views of the wonderful production of nature ever beheld:

 

  • A noble lion – astonishing animal has limbs superior in size and strength to any horse or ox
  • A beautiful lioness
  • A Benegal tiger
  • 2 kangaroos
  • 2 panthers
  • 1 beaver
  • A leopard and leopardess
  • Ounce or Hunting Tiger
  • Satyr or Mandrill
  • Ursine Sloth
  • A Ravenous wolf
  • A Polar
  • 50 quadrupeds
  • Pelicans; Emews; Ostriches; Vultures; Black Swans; Curasors; Owls; Storks