Why did seaside holidays become popular?
Cristian Schinner
2025-05-01 03:38:12
Count answers: 3
The great British seaside holiday came into its heyday in the post war years, the 1950s and 1960s. Now affordable to many through paid annual leave, thanks to the Holiday Pay Act 1938, the destinations of choice depended largely on where you lived. Many industrial towns had local holiday weeks when the local factory or plant would shut down for maintenance and all the workers would take their annual leave at the same time. In the 1950s and 1960s it was unusual for families to holiday abroad, most stayed in the UK. Whether it was a day out at the seaside or a fortnight, all British resorts offered fun and escape from daily life. Holiday camps, such as that featured in the TV sitcom ‘Hi-Di-Hi’, became popular in post war Britain with family entertainment and activities available for the equivalent of an average man’s weekly pay. The glory days of the great British seaside holiday came to an end with the arrival of the jet age and cheap package tour holidays to Spain where sunshine was almost guaranteed.
Sid Murazik
2025-05-01 02:18:18
Count answers: 1
In 1789 King George III started a fashion for sunbathing at Weymouth. Weymouth was Britain’s first seaside resort. The seaside holiday, then the seaside holiday camp, became popular, with Billy Butlin opening his first camp at Ingoldmells near Skegness in 1936. The tradition for a celebrity to turn on the Blackpool Illuminations didn’t begin until 1934 with Lord Derby. Britain’s first illuminations belonged to Morecambe, which was also the birthplace of Bingo and rivalled Blackpool as the northern English seaside resort from the late 1880s. The British seaside is a national institution: home of fish and chips, buckets and spades, and of course, socks and sandals. Despite the UK’s unpredictable weather, we flock to the beach on a summer’s day.
Waino Zemlak
2025-05-01 01:53:03
Count answers: 1
The middle classes were the first to take advantage of the marvellous new railway network spreading like a spider’s web across Britain in the 1840s, whisking them from the cities to seaside towns around the coast. Genteel resorts which had previously attracted the well-to-do, like Weymouth, Scarborough and Brighton, now saw an influx of new visitors while resorts such as Blackpool and Llandudno, Cromer and Minehead all grew up in response to the growing demand for a jolly day out in the healthy sea air. It wasn’t long before the working classes too were jumping on trains and joining their more affluent contemporaries at the beach. The increasing popularity of the seaside among all social classes can be seen in the building of the piers in Blackpool. Sunday, being the Sabbath, had always been a holiday, and by the middle of the nineteenth century most working people could also expect to get at least Saturday afternoon off. The Bank Holiday Act of 1871 provided for four official annual holidays in England, in addition to Christmas Day and Good Friday: Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and Boxing Day. Wakes weeks are often considered to be the origin of the British Summer Holiday. They began as religious festivals celebrating the feast day of the saint to whom the local church was dedicated. Once the railway arrived, thousands of working-class families took advantage of the wakes week holiday to spend the day at the seaside.
Hope Daugherty
2025-05-01 01:17:58
Count answers: 2
The great British seaside holiday only really began in the 18th century as people slowly moved from ‘taking the waters’ for their health at inland spas to the newly fashionable alternative of bathing in the sea. Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast, by virtue of already having been a mineral-spa town, styles itself Britain’s original seaside resort, but it was the Dorset town of Weymouth that reaped a notable royal seal of approval when King George III, following medical advice that a dip in the sea could help alleviate his ailments, spent 14 summers here between 1789 and 1805. From the mid-19th century a growing railway network, combined with the Bank Holidays Act, put seaside resorts on the map for the day-tripping masses, who eagerly made the most of their new public holidays by leaping aboard excursions laid on by canny train operators. While the health benefits of seawater and ozone were still a draw, it was the seaside as a place of entertainment that now grabbed the imagination. Piers sprang up and with them the carefree blend of the posh, pricy and sedate with the vulgar, cheap and racy that became a distinctive feature of the seaside experience.
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