I found this thread from nearly 6 years ago, which talks about the need to have a top / bottom view.
https://fritzing.org/forum/thread/2011/
However, I still can’t find that this is possible. I want to use it to design circuits, and then use the digram to actually build them. However if everything is mirrored underneath, I’m actually more likely to make mistakes…
I would have thought this is a fairly common need, am I just missing how to do this?
Unfortunately you aren’t missing anything. Perfboard processing is still top only. Fritzing development had stopped for a few years and is just restarting. There are a number of custom parts (usually labelled with top view) that have been created to make perfboard easier, but that is all so far.
Peter
It is high on the feature list, but many bugs are still higher. Find and vote for the issue on github, even that can help ( I managed to reduce the backlog by about 300 issues, but it still difficult to not get lost 
OK, thank you both. Despite the lack of development during that period, it still seems to be the number one circuit design tool, If it got to the stage where it saved me time, I would be glad to make a small donation in return for using it. Good luck, and I’ll keep an eye out!