To illustrate these ideas, the following discussion focuses specifically on Britain which, at the start of the twentieth century, is described by Walton (2000: 27) as possessing ‘a system of coastal resorts whose scale and complexity was unmatched anywhere else in the world’.
Prior to the 1950s there is no reliable data by which to chart the expansion in the numbers of domestic tourists in Britain, even though there is ample evidence from other sources (e.g., contemporary photographs of holiday crowds or summer passenger figures from railway companies) that show that mass forms of tourism were clearly established by the late 1930s.
On the eve of the Second World War, it is estimated that some 11 million holidays and an uncounted number of day excursions were being taken annually within Britain (Walvin, 1978), the vast majority of which were directed at the seaside resorts. In 1938, for example, Blackpool alone received an estimated 7 million visitors. But these are ‘snapshot’ data that do not establish clear trends.
However, by 1951, when the first of what was to become an annual survey of holiday-making was conducted by the British Travel Association (later to be redesignated the British Tourist Authority, both hereafter referred to as the BTA), an estimated 26.5 million holidays were taken by the British, including 1.5 million abroad. Figure 2.3 charts the expansion in total holidays taken between 1951 and 1970 and reveals a distinct pattern with pronounced growth throughout the 1950s, followed by a period of relative stability in the 1960s.
Explanation for the increased level of holidaymaking needs to take account of several factors:
● The latent demand that had built up in the latter part of the 1930s and during the war years was finally released as the Holidays with Pay Act 1938 came fully into force, creating popular expectations of an annual holiday.
● Real wages increased bringing improved living conditions and more widespread household purchases of luxury items, including holidays. The increased purchasing power of the lower-middle-class and the working-class populations was especially important in this respect (Walton, 2000).
● Holidays were actively promoted within the media, by transport operators and a rapidly developing travel industry, raising public awareness and fuelling demand.
Year 40
35
30
25
0
No.ofholidays(millions)
Total No.
of Holidays
Foreign Holidays
Domestic Holidays
1951 1955 1960 1965 1970
Figure 2.3 Growth of British holidaymaking, 1950–1970
● Programmes of modernisation and investment in new amenities in the modernist style had endowed many of the larger seaside resorts with enhanced levels of appeal, particularly to ordinary people (Hassan, 2003).
● Rising levels of mobility and reductions in the relative cost of travel, first through the development of public bus services and, subsequently, private car ownership, made resort areas more accessible.
The popularity of resort areas during the late 1930s and, especially, the 1950s – an era that has been interpreted as a ‘golden age’ for the traditional seaside (Demetriadi, 1997) – helped to draw a wider range of amenity-related activities that reinforced (and hence consolidated) the position of resorts within the wider urban framework. In some instances – for example at Bournemouth, the use of resorts as places of retirement had been noted during the nineteenth century (Soane, 1993) but this became a much more established trend in the inter-war years. By 1951 the proportion of the population that was of pensionable age in popular retirement resorts such as Worthing was almost 30 per cent (Walton, 1997b). At the same time, commuting populations began to develop in coastal towns that enjoyed rapid rail links to London and other major centres. Hence resorts such as Clacton, Southend and Walton on the Essex coast more than doubled their populations between 1911 and 1951 and the share of the total population for England and Wales that lived in resorts rose from 4.5 per cent in 1911 to over 5.7 per cent in 1951 (Walton, 1997b). This population growth had very positive impacts on local service economies that supported the increased numbers of permanent residents.
Part of the appeal of resorts to permanent populations – especially the elderly – lay in a combination of a nostalgic construction of the seaside as places of youthful enjoyment, married to a residual confidence in the therepeutic values of the seaside (Hassan, 2003).
However, of greater importance was the active promotion of resorts and the investment in civic amenities that many municipal authorities pursued. Walton (1997b) observes that the 1920s and 1930s marked a high point in local investment in seaside amenities – for example, promenades, parks, gardens, lido, tennis courts and golf courses – that were designed to appeal to new popular tastes and establish resorts as exciting and fashionable places (Hassan, 2003).
A key element in the consolidation of seaside resorts in this period was the related development of large-scale provision of affordable accommodation in holiday camps and caravanning and camping grounds. On popular coastlines, hierarchies of primary-, secondary- and even tertiary-level urban resorts had generally developed before 1920 (Figure 2.1), through natural processes of urban expansion and diffusion of activity into neighbouring places. After 1920, however, the spatial extension of tourism was reinforced by these new developments. In many instances, holiday camps were located in close proximity to resorts in order to take advantage of the resort amenities. However, the rising levels of demand for the affordable holidays that camps provided also encouraged encroachment onto previously undeveloped stretches of coastline, often in haphazard and poorly planned developments (Ward and Hardy, 1986). Figure 2.4 illustrates the distribution of camps in England and Wales in 1939 and emphasises the extent of development but, more importantly, also shows how in some areas extended zones of coastal tourism within what we might label ‘resort regions’ were being formed through the combination of urban resorts and camps. (As an example, Case Study 4.3 in Chapter 4 describes the resort region that has developed on the coast of north Wales.)
Within the overall patterns of growth in domestic tourism in Britain during the post-1945 period, there have been some significant changes in the geography of tourism. Long-term analyses of regional shifts are frustrated by the periodic redefinition of BTA regions and data areas. However, even allowing for the uncertainties that this practice creates, we may be
confident that there has been a pronounced development of tourism in the South West of England (and to a lesser extent in Wales) and relative stagnation and even decline in the older holiday regions such as the North West and the South East of England (which include traditional resorts such as Blackpool, Brighton and Eastbourne). Table 2.1 illustrates estimated regional shares of the domestic market for a selection of regions that are broadly consistent in definition at a range of dates and shows the extent to which the South West now dominates the British market.
These regional shifts in domestic tourism reveal, once again, the impact of transport technology. The comparative remoteness (especially of Cornwall) had ensured that in the nineteenth century, the South West had not been extensively developed as a tourist destination, although Devon did possess some established resorts of regional importance such as Torquay. However, tourism to Devon and Cornwall developed substantially from
Permanent holiday camps
Temporar y holiday camp/campsites
Scarborough Filey Scalby Cayton Bay
Cleethorpes Maltby le Mars
Skegness
Humberston
Mablethorpe Trusthorpe Chapel St. Leonards Ingoldmells
Mundesley Snettisham Gorleston on Sea
Cor ton Kessingland
Hemsby Caister on Sea Hopton on Sea Pakefield
Clacton Dowercour t Bay
Shoebur yness Minster Tanker ton
Acol Walmer Kingsdown Dymchurch
New Romney
Hayling Island Wootton
Ryde Seaview Bembridge Whiteclif f
Whiteley Bank Chale
Colwell Bay Nor ton Yarmouth
Brightstone Gurnard Weston super Mare
Burnham on Sea Williton
Sheerness Leysdown
Whitstable
Lulwor th Cove Bowleaze Seaton Cove
Paignton Brixham Plymstock
St. Austell Crown Hill Croyde Bay
Barr y Island
Sully Mur ton Bishopston
Por thcawl Aber ystwyth Bor th
Llandullas Vor yd
Prestatyn Colwyn
Bay Abergele
Towyn Rhyl Blackpool
St. Annes on the Sea Heysham Douglas
N
0 50km
Figure 2.4 Distribution of holiday camps in England and Wales, 1939
the turn of the twentieth century onwards, especially in response to the active promotion of the Great Western Railway (Thomas, 1997; Thornton, 1997), which invented the image of an ‘English Riviera’ for this region (see Chapter 8). From about 1960 onwards, rapid increases in car ownership and the spatial flexibility that the car permits have allowed widespread diffusion of tourism, not only across the South West, but into other peripheral localities too. The shift in holiday transport from the public modes of travel by train and bus to the private car has been one of the most persistent changes in the structure of tourism in Britain (Table 2.2) and has directly promoted many new tourist localities, as well as one of the most popular tourist pastimes: recreational motoring.