Victorian Garden Games: How Britain Played Outside Before Screens

Before anyone could play croquet, quoits, or lawn bowls on a garden lawn, someone had to invent a machine that could cut the grass short enough to play on. That machine arrived in 1830, built by an engineer named Edwin Budding in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Within two decades of his invention, the Victorian middle class had lawns, and within a decade of having lawns, they had turned them into stages for some of the most inventive outdoor play Britain has ever seen.

Victorian garden games were not casual. They were events. The garden party was a structured social occasion, and the games at its centre were taken seriously, discussed in the press, codified in rulebooks, and manufactured by a small number of specialist makers. Chief among those makers was Jaques of London, established in 1795, which had been making games since before the Victorian era began and would go on to standardise several of the sports that still fill British gardens today.

What makes Victorian garden games interesting is not just their history, but what they reveal about how people have always needed to play outside together, without a screen in sight. Average outdoor play time for Victorian children has been estimated at four to six hours per day. The Children and Nature Network, which tracks trends in childhood outdoor time globally, reports that modern British children average less than an hour. The games themselves have not changed. The time available for them has.

The Lawn as Social Space: A Victorian Invention

It sounds simple, but the smooth grass lawn is not a natural thing. Before Edwin Budding's lawn mower, keeping grass short required teams of men with scythes, working at dawn before the dew dried. That was an aristocratic luxury. The mechanised mower, first sold commercially in the 1830s and refined through the 1840s and 1850s, brought the manageable lawn within reach of the Victorian middle class for the first time.

The social historian Asa Briggs, whose landmark study Victorian Things (published by the Penguin Press and widely held in university libraries) documents the transformation of domestic material culture in this period, describes the Victorian garden as a deliberate social construction. It was a performative space as much as a natural one, designed to display the household's taste, order, and prosperity. Games were part of that display.

Railways played a role too. By the 1860s, the national rail network meant that families could visit each other's homes easily, that guests could arrive from a distance, and that the garden party could become a genuine social institution rather than a purely local affair. You invited people from far enough away that they needed to stay. And they needed to be entertained.

The result was a culture in which outdoor games became a serious domestic priority. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds extensive collections of Victorian leisure objects, trade catalogues, and illustrated guides to garden entertainments, documenting how thoroughly games had become embedded in the fabric of Victorian middle-class life by the 1870s.

The Games They Played: Croquet, Quoits, Skittles and Lawn Bowls

Victorian garden games were not a single tradition but a collection of games with very different origins, gathered together by the specific conditions of the era: smooth lawns, leisure time, mixed company, and a domestic consumer market that was willing to buy proper equipment.

Croquet was the star of the Victorian garden. John Jaques II displayed commercial croquet equipment at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and Jaques published the first English rulebook in 1857. By the 1860s it was everywhere. What made it exceptional was its openness to women: croquet was the first competitive sport men and women played together under the same rules, a social fact the British Museum's collections of Victorian illustrated press document extensively. The All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon, founded in 1868 and supplied by Jaques, became the sport's social home.

Quoits is older than Victoria. The game appears in English records going back centuries, and the poet Geoffrey Chaucer mentions ring-throwing games in his 14th-century writings, a lineage that places quoits among the oldest continuous outdoor games in Britain. Jaques of London was selling quoits sets from the 1840s, and the basic equipment, a metal or rope ring thrown at a stake, has not changed since. You can find quoits sets at Jaques of London today made to the same principle.

Lawn bowls had its first standardised written rules published in 1849, making the codification contemporary with the Victorian garden game boom. The game itself is ancient, but the Victorian period gave it a formal structure and a consumer market. Garden skittles, the outdoor cousin of the ancient alley game, moved from inn yards and lanes into the domestic garden in the Victorian period, becoming a garden-party staple alongside croquet and quoits. Badminton arrived in 1873, invented at Badminton House in Gloucestershire when the Duke of Beaufort's guests improvised a net game using a cork with feathers. Badminton England's official history traces the sport's origins to exactly that country house setting.

What Made Victorian Play Different

The comparison between Victorian outdoor play and modern outdoor play is striking, though it needs to be handled carefully. Victorian children of the working class had little leisure time, long working hours in many cases, and constrained lives that bear no resemblance to modern childhood. The picture of long, unstructured outdoor play applies most clearly to middle-class Victorian children, and it is that class that Victorian garden games were designed for and sold to.

For those children, outdoor play was genuinely different in its duration and independence. Research into historical childhood patterns, including work by the historian Hugh Cunningham at the University of Kent, whose book The Children of the Poor documents changing childhoods across social classes from the 17th century, suggests that even middle-class Victorian children spent substantially more time in unstructured outdoor activity than their modern equivalents.

The World Health Organisation's guidelines on physical activity for children recommend at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per day. The NHS echoes this: the NHS physical activity guidelines for children aged 5 to 18 recommend at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity every day. Victorian garden games delivered this almost incidentally. Croquet, quoits, and lawn bowls are moderate-intensity activities. Children who played them for an afternoon were meeting their activity needs without anyone measuring it.

The psychologist Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent decades documenting what happens when children and adults engage in unstructured play, including outdoor games. His research identifies play as essential to social bonding, emotional regulation, and cognitive development. Victorian garden games were not designed with any of this in mind, but they delivered it: mixed-age play, turn-taking, negotiated rules, physical coordination, and extended attention without adult direction.

The Games That Survived 170 Years

Not all Victorian garden games made it to the 21st century in recognisable form. Some, like the elaborate Victorian archery parties described in period novels, became too specialised for ordinary domestic life. Others adapted and thrived. Croquet, quoits, garden skittles, and lawn bowls are all still played today in essentially the same form as they were in the 1860s and 1870s.

The endurance of these games is worth thinking about. They survived two world wars, the invention of cinema, television, video games, and smartphones. They survived the compression of the British garden as urban housing became denser. They survived because they are genuinely good games. They are competitive without being physically exclusive. They are social without requiring large numbers. They are quick to set up and slow to master.

The World Croquet Federation, founded in 1989, now oversees competitive play in over 30 countries. Bowls England governs one of the oldest codified outdoor sports in the country. Quoits clubs still exist across the north of England and Wales, where the game has the strongest traditional following. Garden skittles is sold in its original wooden form and played at fetes, parties, and on back lawns across Britain.

Jaques of London has been part of this continuity from the beginning. The same company that displayed equipment at Crystal Palace in 1851 and published the croquet rulebook in 1857 still makes garden games using FSC-certified timber, tested to UKCA and CE standards. The lineage is unbroken. The games are the same. The quality is better.

Bringing Victorian Play to Your Garden

A garden croquet set is the most complete way to bring Victorian garden games into modern family life. It is a game that works for children from around age six, adults of all ages, and grandparents equally. It rewards patience and tactical thinking more than physical strength, which means a ten-year-old can genuinely beat an adult who is not paying attention. That is a relatively rare quality in a garden game.

The Jaques of London garden games range also includes quoits, skittles, and other Victorian-era games made with FSC-certified timber and independently tested to UKCA and CE standards. These are not novelty items or decorative props. They are working games built to last, made by the same company that standardised them in the first place.

Frequently Asked Questions About Victorian Garden Games