Apart from a few obvious exceptions, the definition of a ‘leisure town’ in eighteenth-century England remains problematic. Using a list of the employers of manservants registered for taxation in 1780 this paper isolates the fifty-three ‘residential leisure towns’ outside Middlesex and Surrey where there were thirty or more such employers. It is suggested that the employment of manservants is, within limits, a useful indicator of a certain type of gentility and that the spread of such towns outside the Home Counties was very limited at this time.