Britain invented the seaside resort in the 18th century. It has regretted it on and off ever since
even more unpleasant. To icy seas, leaden skies and average annual temperatures of 10°C Billy Butlin added low, wooden huts to house holidaymakers; a Tannoy system to rouse them each morning; and stringent rules to confine them to those huts by 11.15pm. Butlin, observed the author Bill Bryson, had repackaged “the prisoner-of-war camp as holiday, and, this being Britain, people loved it.”
Yet despite the continuing distress to intellectuals, some Britons do seem to enjoy the seaside, and persist in not merely going there but living there in large numbers. Partly this is an accident of geography: Britain is so narrow that everyone lives within 75 miles of the coast; but it is not just that. More than 5.3m people live in the coastal towns of England and Wales. On average 12.5m people chose to visit Blackpool between 2017 and 2019, while Oxford attracted 8m.
Mr Theroux’s incomprehension is not an option: to understand Britain, you need to understand its coasts.Travel to the seaside and their decline is evident: the towns of today are housed like hermit crabs in structures—Imperial Hotels and Pleasure Piers—made for other eras and other inhabitants. The fashion for sea-bathing began in Britain in the 1700s. It was encouraged by royalty: the ailing, inbred Hanoverians took to the water in the hope of curing their ills.
If they ever did. When observers working for Mass Observation, a social-research group, visited Blackpool in the 1930s they noted “how little laughter there was in Blackpool crowds”. It was less changes in fashion than in transport that did for the British seaside. Epidemiologists speak of “lifetime travel tracks”: the sum of all the plots of a person’s footprints on a map over the course of their life.
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