When did holidays become popular?
Anais Hintz
2025-05-03 02:59:33
Count answers: 3
The Great British Seaside Holiday actually began as the Great British Seaside Daytrip. 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. It wasn’t long before the working classes too were jumping on trains and joining their more affluent contemporaries at the beach. 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. 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. After the Industrial revolution, it became increasingly common for wakes weeks to be the week in which the factories and mills of northern England shut down. Remarkably it wasn’t until 1938 that the Holidays with Pay Act provided for one annual week of paid holiday for working class employees. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the seaside day trip did gradually become a week away.
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