The first comprehensive study of the emergence of Devon's seaside resorts. Relating the development of these resorts to the wider processes of social and economic change, it explains why early tourists were drawn to the remote Devon coast and shows how fishing villages were transformed into fashionable watering places. Themes covered include bathing rituals and sea-water drinking, health cures and cholera epidemics, sophisticated amusements and improving recreations, paddle-steamers and excursion trains.
The seaside is the 20th century's pre-eminent global tourism site and this work examines political and power relations in modern seaside resort development. As an historical study of seaside tourism in Devon - England's most popular domestic holiday desitination - it reveals the complex interplay between ideology, class and power and the comsumption of landscape and place.
This detailed academic cultural study looks at the rise and fall of the seaside holiday in Britain. John K. Walton offers a broad interpretation of the holidays and resorts, looking at who went, where they went, what they did, and how they were entertained.
Barry Island was one of the most cherished leisure spaces in twentieth-century south Wales, the playground of generations of working-class day-trippers. This book considers its rise as a seaside resort and reveals a history that is much more complex, lengthy and important than has previously been recognized. As conventionally told, the story of the Island as tourist resort begins in the 1890s, when the railway arrived in Barry. In fact, it was functioning as a watering place by the 1790s. Yet decades of tourism produced no sweeping changes. Barry remained a district of ‘bathing villages’ and hamlets, not a developed urban resort. As such, its history challenges us to rethink the category of ‘seaside resort’ and forces us to re-evaluate Wales’s contribution to British coastal tourism in the ‘long nineteenth century’. It also underlines the importance of visitor agency; powerful landowners shaped much of the Island’s development but, ultimately, it was the working-class visitors who turned it into south Wales’s most beloved tripper resort.
A century ago, Britain was locked in a devastating worldwide conflict that would change every aspect of society. This book explores life in Devon between 1900 and 1914, offering a revealing glimpse of a world now long-vanished before war broke out. Devon was no backwater; its railways and shipping were busy bringing tourists in and sending vast quantities of produce out. It was, though, a county of contrasts and change. Farming had reinvented itself after the late Victorian depression, but villages were in decline; churches and chapels were full but religion bitterly divided communities; the wealthy enjoyed extravagant lifestyles on great estates but their authority was under attack. Devon's upper-, middle- and lower-class schools perfectly reflected the Edwardian social hierarchy, but as the county's elections revealed, society was being torn asunder by bitter controversies over exactly who should have the vote, rule the country, and control the Empire. It was a worrying time overseas too: Great Britain's supremacy was increasingly challenged, and the warships in Devon's harbours and army manoeuvres on the moors drew many comments as the storm clouds began to gather over Europe. Using mainly contemporary sources, this engaging book examines the attitudes and experiences of people across all social classes in this tumultuous era.
Healing with water provides a medical and social history of English spas and hydropathic centres from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that demand for healing rather than leisure drove the growth of a number of inland resorts which became renowned for expertise and treatment facilities. These aspects were actively marketed to doctors and patients. It assesses the influence of these centres on broader patterns of resort development, leisure and sociability in Britain. The study explores ideas about water’s healing potential and the varied ways it was used to maintain good health and treat a variety of illnesses. Water cures were endorsed by both orthodox and unorthodox practitioners and attracted growing numbers of patients into the twentieth century. It examines how institutions and skilled workers shaped the development of specialist resorts and considers why the NHS support for spa treatment declined from the 1960s.
Resorts and Ports draws together a group of case-studies which for the first time explore the changing relationships between port and resort activities in a cross-section of European maritime settings over three centuries. The book will interest academics in tourism studies, history, geography and cultural studies, as well as providing essential information and analysis for policy makers in coastal regeneration.
