Although tourism today is found widely across cities, countryside and coast, historically its development was most evident in the formation of resorts and there remains a strong, visible legacy of resort-based tourism within contemporary geographical patterns, both in Britain and elsewhere. In Britain, the first resorts were the inland health spas – towns and villages that possessed local mineral waters that were believed to have curative qualities and which attracted people who were seeking a remedy for particular conditions. Mineral water therapies were not an innovation – as the Roman remains at Bath testify – and the intermittent and
usually localised popularity of spas was a feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life in both Britain and Europe. However, in the mid-eighteenth century, watering places such as Buxton, Scarborough, Tunbridge Wells and Bath itself all enjoyed a significant increase in fortune, as mineral cures became widely popular amongst people of wealth. In Europe, spa towns such as Baden (in Germany) and Vichy (in France) flourished under similar conditions.
Initially, of course, spas were predominantly the resort of the sick, but because they were often promoted by shrewd entrepreneurs as exclusive places – many of which also benefited from royal patronage – the spas also developed as places of fashion that attracted leisure-seekers who had no need for a cure, but who were drawn by the social life that developed at the resort. In order that visitors might be entertained, facilities were provided not just for taking the waters, but for concerts and theatre, dances, walks and promenades, and at the best spas (Bath or Tunbridge Wells, for example) there soon emerged a microcosm of fashionable metropolitan life.
The geographic extension in this early form of tourism from inland spas to coastal resorts came about through an almost incidental shift in medical thinking that suggested that sea bathing and, in some cases, drinking of sea water was a more effective treatment than many of the cures offered at inland spas. Sea bathing was not, however, a new practice and both Corbin (1995) and Towner (1996) draw attention to much older cultures of sea bathing that were widely established across Europe and in parts of Britain and which were quite independent of the elite cultures that were soon to emerge in fledgling resorts. Towner (1996:
171) writes that ‘along the coasts of the Baltic, North Sea and Mediterranean there was a tradition in sea bathing that lay beyond the codified practices of the leisured classes’ and that
‘on the shores of the Mediterranean it was the peasant classes who bathed for pleasure well before it was adopted by the ruling classes’. In the British context, Walton (1983a: 11) makes a similar observation, noting that prior to the local expansion of resorts after 1800, a popular sea-bathing culture existed on the Lancashire coast, not emulating the rich but having a ‘prior and independent existence’. Comparable patterns have also been identified at Santander and San Sebastian on the northern coast of Spain (Walton, 1997a). Critically, though, such practices were seldom seen as engaging with a medicinal purpose and therefore attracted neither the advocacy of the professions nor the patronage of the wealthy that was crucial to the subsequent organised development of coastal resorts.
In Britain the first recorded uses of sea water treatments were noted in the Yorkshire coastal town of Scarborough as early as 1667 (where a local doctor – Robert Whittie – enjoyed considerable local success with a combination of mineral and sea water cures) and at nearby Whitby where, according to Travis (1997), a fashionable style of sea bathing was noted in 1718. However, credit for the wider promotion of sea water treatments is usually given to a Dr Richard Russell who practised near Brighton and who published an influential text on the subject in 1750 (see Case Study 2.1). Russell’s book rapidly caught the imagination of the upper classes (who were the only social group that could afford the time and the expense to travel to the seaside) and in a process that almost precisely mirrored the development of inland health spas, a string of fashionable and exclusive new sea bathing resorts sprang up, especially along those parts of the coasts of Kent and Sussex that were relatively accessible from London (Figure 2.1).
The new fashion for sea bathing (and, in due course, the seaside holiday) soon became what Walton (1997a: 37) describes as a ‘prominent cultural export’ that diffused from England into France, Germany and the Low Countries, and then later to Spain and Italy.
Corbin (1995) shows how a formal sea bathing season had been established in Dieppe, Boulogne and Ostende by 1785; the first German resort at Doberan was developed from 1794 (which is broadly contemporary with the development of Scheveningen as the leading Dutch resort); whilst the origins as a resort of San Sebastian in northern Spain can be traced to visits by the Spanish royal family around 1828 (Walton and Smith, 1996). This pattern of diffusion
was not, however, simply confined to Europe. The colonial influence of Britain in North America (where a network of inland spas was already established) led to the early development of coastal resorts on the eastern seaboard of the USA. Nahant (north of Boston), Long Branch (south of New York) and Cape May (south of Philadelphia) were all established as fashionable sea bathing resorts before 1800 (Towner, 1996).
These early coastal resorts reflected most, if not all, of the criteria set down in Butler’s model. They were small in scale and because they were exclusive, they depended upon a comparatively small group of visitors who were ‘early adopters’ of the fashion for sea bathing. The provision of basic infrastructure, such as lodging houses, was largely local in organisation and limited in scale, not least because the ‘season’ for seaside visiting – whilst an established feature – would have represented a comparatively brief sojourn within the extended patterns of visiting to places of fashion that were practised by elite groups at this time.
The extension of elite leisure practices from inland spas to sea bathing resorts was remarkable not only as a geographic process but also because it reflected quite profound changes in public attitudes towards the coastline. From a twenty-first century perspective, the attraction of the sea seems entirely natural, but historically the sea and its coastlines were viewed quite differently. As Corbin (1995) explains, the coast was often a place of fear and repulsion. It was a zone of tension, associated with pirates and smugglers, shipwrecks and places of invasion, whilst the sea itself was an unfathomable mystery, a home to monstrous creatures and a chaotic remnant of the Great Flood that was capable of unleashing
By circa 1750 By later 18th
century
By 1801 census
By 1851 census
By 1881 census
By 1911 census
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Figure 2.1 Expansion of sea bathing resorts in England and Wales, 1750–1911
awesome, destructive powers upon the coastline. As if to reinforce the point, the incidence of seasickness amongst early tourists who did venture onto the oceans must have confirmed for many that this was not a natural and proper place for people. Similar reservations were also evident in the internal arrangement of coastal settlements which were generally shaped by a need for protection from the elements rather than to take advantage of what would be later considered as a pleasing view (Urry, 1990).
Yet by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the sea and the coast had become central to the popular imagination. This attitudinal change may be broadly viewed as emanating from the Enlightenment in Europe and included the new popularity and influence of natural theology (in which the enjoyment of natural spectacles such as the sea was now seen as a celebration of God’s work); interest in ‘new’ sciences such as geology and natural history that focused attention upon coastlines as field laboratories; and the emergence of a public taste for the picturesque in the latter half of the eighteenth century and then the influence of the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century (see Corbin, 1995 for an extended discussion of this change in taste).
This realignment in public sensibilities did not only affect coastal areas, it was also fundamental to the early emergence of rural areas as new objects of the tourist gaze. Prior to the middle of the eighteenth century, the countryside – and especially wild regions of moorland and mountain – had, like the coast, been generally disregarded as places to be visited for pleasure. The pervasive preferences in rural landscape were for what Towner (1996: 139) describes as ‘the humanised scene of cultivation . . . as evidence of the successful mastery of nature’, and these sentiments were reflected in early tours of rural areas reported by writers such as Defoe (1724) and, later, Cobbett (1830). In contrast, mountain areas were perceived as untouched by the organising hand of civilised people and these places and their rough inhabitants were widely shunned and actively avoided (Plate 2.1). However, the eighteenth century was a critical period in the advancement of understanding of natural
Plate 2.1 Mountain landscapes in Snowdonia, UK: environments that were shunned before the Romantic Movement but are now revered objects of the tourist gaze
systems and relationships between people and nature, and in affluent society in Britain, Europe and North America, the wilder landscapes acquired a new level of attraction for people of taste (Bunce, 1994; Williams, 2003).
The new tastes for wilder landscapes introduced tourism to places that would eventually become highly valued destinations. In Britain, these included the English Lake District, upland Wales and highland Scotland (Andrews, 1989; Urry, 1994c), whilst in the USA, the Catskill Mountains were quickly adopted as a regular place of visiting for fashionable New York and Boston society (Demars, 1990). However, unlike early resort-based seaside tourism which was essentially place-specific, rural tourism was more typically focused upon touring as a practice and because of the difficulties of travel before the advent of the railway, it was generally conducted in very small, independent groups. The development of rural resorts (such as Windermere in the English Lakes) as places of popular visiting was generally delayed until the second half of the nineteenth century.