Paul Fitzpatrick: December 2025

Unfortunately for most of us, there came a point in our young lives when we discovered that the goodies handed out on Xmas morning, were not in fact gifts from an omnipresent pensioner with a hipster beard.

Our little worlds could have fallen apart, but why throw the Xmas baby out with the bathwater when you’re still receiving gifts aplenty, getting time off school, and always have a trip to the Kelvin Hall Fair to look forward to.

Constructed as an exhibition centre in the 1920’s, the Kelvin Hall is testament to its time… a glorious redstone building with a palatial entrance.
Fit for purpose, it could be transformed into hosting any type of event you wished for, and for a few weeks a year our wishes came true.

Walking through that entrance when the fair was in full swing was exhilarating, a full out attack on the senses.

First thing to hit you was the noise – sirens & klaxons, the whoops and screams of thrill-seeking punters, and of course, music…. 70s hits coming at you from every angle.

Then there were the smells – somewhat curious combinations, the sweet aroma of freshly spun candy floss, blended with the not so sweet stench of elephant dung, whiffing over from the neighbouring circus.

And finally, the lights – bright and glitzy, just like Vegas, it could be any time of the day, we were oblivious.

Finances permitting you could spend all day in the place, but just like their Vegas counterparts, Kelvin Hall showmen were pros when it came to parting fools from their money.
Frittering away your last chunk of change in the Penny Arcade in the vain hope of extending your stay was common fare… retreating, defeated and broke, with a deluge of coins dangling over the edge of the Penny Falls machine.

It was the rides that were the biggest attraction though and we all had our favourites and various strategies to make the most of them.

My go-to was the Waltzers, especially if the ‘waltzer guy’s’ were on hand to super-charge the spinning motion – although this was a deed normally reserved for any young ladies they were looking to impress.

Watching these guys weave their way effortlessly around the heavy machinery, snake like, waltzer to waltzer, holding court and charming their prey was quite a sight. They were probably only a few of years older than us, but light years ahead when it came to street smarts.

For what it was worth, our well rehearsed strategy was to jump aboard the Waltzer seating the most eligible girls. Our logic being that the Waltzer lotharios had already earmarked this Waltzer for special attention, and it was about to be spun off its axis into the River Kelvin.

The girls were oblivious to us of course, swept up by the attention of the Waltzer Guys, all the more so since David Essex had glamorised the trade in That’ll Be The Day.

I wonder in this age of equality whether ‘Waltzer Gals’ are a thing now?

Another fun amusement was the Rotor, a ride that relied on centrifugal force to vigorously pin its participants to the cylinder wall whilst the floor below disappeared.
Rotating at dizzying speeds, you’d be mired to the wall like a bug to flypaper, until the giant Nutri-Bullet of a contraption came to a halt and the floor returned.

It wouldn’t have been Glasgow if there weren’t a few gallus punters ready to challenge Newton’s law of motion, preferring to be propelled upside down, or onboarding with a bellyful of burgers, jacket potatoes, toffee apples and lashings of Irn Bru.

Not surprisingly, a full belly and centrifugal force is not a great combo.

Everyone had their favourite – the Ghost Train, the Dodgems, the Rib-Tickler, the Cyclone and the Chairoplanes to name a few, but apart from the odd scramble for a specific ‘killer-dodgem’, I don’t remember much waiting time.

The rides were the draw but we’d inevitably be lured into playing selected salon games too. Ridiculous challenges made to look ridiculously easy, with impressive yet ultimately elusive prizes on display to tempt you.

I think we were all enticed into attempting to shift superglued coconuts from their shy’s with weightless foam balls, but the one I always fell for was the basketball con, rigged with undersized hoops and ultra-bouncy basketballs. My motivation was to claim one of the marquee gifts on offer…. “big Teddy on the top row for me please” but to no avail, it was a task Michael Jordan would have struggled to master.

In all my visits I never saw any of our gang win anything other than a goldfish with a ninety second life expectancy, and that was by hooking a few plastic yellow ducks out of a puddle of water. A challenge befitting 5-year-olds.

Finally, if by any good fortune we had any change left in our pockets, there was the Penny Arcade, home to a plethora of money-draining slot machines, primed to clean us out.

To be fair, we never went there expecting to profit, and if you walked out with enough change to treat yourself to a bag of chips for the journey home, it was considered a win.

Looking back, the Kelvin Hall was like preschool for future theme park experiences, and by 1974 we had moved onto the big-boy rides at Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach, particularly The Grand National and The Big Dipper.

Then, later in life, some of us were fortunate enough to venture further afield to the Disney and Universal theme parks, on the pretence that it was ‘all for the kids’.
The rides and the entertainment in Florida are on a different level, but despite the razzmatazz It’s hard to look past those fun days at the Kelvin Hall, when the waltzer guy was geein’ it laldy!

Coming back to the music for a second, I’m not sure if supermarket muzak really does influence shopping behaviour, but there’s no question that the catchy, upbeat music curated at the Kelvin Hall got the adrenaline pumping and fueled a compulsion to spend your last farthing and to ‘go again’.

Every now and then I’ll hear a random song, which instantly transport me back to that medley of bright lights, cacophonic sounds, and weird smells.
Here’s a few to jog your memory….

*For more Fairground Follies please give a read to Mark Arbuckle’s excellent piece…. link below

https://onceuponatimeinthe70s.com/2021/11/23/fairground-attraction-its-got-to-be-ee-ee-perfect/