In the 18th century, sea water was seen as medicine, and a small fishing village became the birthplace of the seaside holiday.
This episode tells the story of how railways, factory workers, and holiday camps turned the British coast into the nation’s playground.
It also asks why cheap flights to Spain nearly destroyed it, and how some resorts are now being reborn.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:22] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the third and final part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:00:32] In part one, we looked at Punch and Judy, the strange, violent puppet show.
[00:00:39] In part two, we turned to the unusual, and even more violent, history of fox hunting.
[00:00:46] And in today's episode, we step back from any single tradition to tell the story of the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday: where it came from, how it took over a century of national life, why it nearly died, and what is happening to it now.
[00:01:07] We've got a lot to get through, so let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:16] In 1750, an English doctor named Richard Russell published a book in Latin.
[00:01:25] Its name, or at least its English name, was "A Dissertation on the Use of Sea Water in the Diseases of the Glands".
[00:01:36] In it, he argued that sea water was a powerful medicine. Both drinking it and bathing in it had all sorts of magical results. It could cure glandular problems, skin conditions, tumours, even venereal disease.
[00:01:56] The book was a hit. It went through six editions. And in a roundabout way, it ended up creating an entire industry: the British seaside holiday.
[00:02:11] Now, to understand why Dr Russell's book was so important, you have to understand what came before it.
[00:02:21] In 1750, the idea of going to the coast for fun would've sounded mad to most people in Britain. The coast was where fishermen worked. It was cold, it smelled of fish, the sea was dangerous, and respectable people certainly did not go there for pleasure.
[00:02:43] Russell changed that, almost single-handedly, by reframing the sea as a hospital.
[00:02:52] In 1753, he built a grand house on the seafront at a small fishing village in Sussex called Brighthelmstone. Wealthy patients began arriving to take his treatments, which involved drinking sea water, bathing in the sea, and following various complicated regimens designed to flush their systems clean.
[00:03:19] Russell's basic prescription was that the patient should bathe in cold sea water at sunrise, several times a week, for as long as they could stand it.
[00:03:31] He also recommended drinking sea water, sometimes mixed with milk, sometimes with crab's eyes or burnt sponge. To modern ears, the recipes sound almost medieval. To Russell's patients, they sounded like cutting-edge medicine.
[00:03:53] And for a generation at least, they were; people believed in them.
[00:03:59] Brighthelmstone was shortened to Brighton, and it started to grow. New lodging houses went up.
[00:04:08] Bathing machines became popular. These were small wooden huts on wheels, which were dragged into the shallows by horses.
[00:04:18] They allowed a respectable woman to change into a bathing costume, walk down a few steps directly into the sea, swim about a bit, and then come back out, all without any man seeing her in a state of undress, which of course was very important back in those days.
[00:04:39] Then in 1783, Brighton received a royal visitor: the future King George IV, who was then the Prince of Wales. Now, this young prince was something of a hedonist; he drank and ate too much, and his physicians advised the 21-year-old to go to Brighton to seek the medicinal properties of the sea.
[00:05:08] He liked the place. He kept coming back. And eventually, he built a vast and slightly ridiculous palace on the seafront, which he called the Royal Pavilion.
[00:05:21] And if you've been to Brighton, you'll know it's still there today. It has domes and minarets, and looks less like an English seaside house than an Indian palace.
[00:05:34] The entire thing cost a fortune, and was the subject of plenty of mockery in the London papers.
[00:05:42] But it set the tone for Brighton.
[00:05:46] The town filled up with grand white-fronted terraces, gambling houses, theatres, and the whole apparatus of a Georgian playground for the rich. By the time George IV died in 1830, Brighton had a population of more than forty thousand people, more than ten times what it had been when Dr Russell first arrived.
[00:06:15] Other resorts soon followed, or grew in parallel: Scarborough, Margate and Weymouth on the coast, as well as inland spa towns such as Bath.
[00:06:28] The whole apparatus of the early British seaside was in place by the early nineteenth century. The lodging houses. The pump rooms. The seafront promenades. The polite, well-dressed crowds taking their morning walk along the front.
[00:06:45] But at this point, it was still a pursuit of the wealthy, the aristocracy.
[00:06:52] A trip to the seaside took several days. It wasn't exactly compatible with a job. And it cost serious money.
[00:07:02] The vast majority of people in Britain had never been near the coast in their lives, not for pleasure at least.
[00:07:10] The thing that would change all of that was a new piece of technology: the railway.
[00:07:19] Railways arrived in Britain in the 1830s, and within a generation, they had remade the country.
[00:07:28] For our purposes, the key year is 1846, when the railway reached Blackpool, on the north west coast of England, about fifty kilometres north of Liverpool.
[00:07:41] Until then, Blackpool was a small Lancashire village on a windy stretch of the Irish Sea coast, of no great importance to anybody.
[00:07:53] Within a few decades, it would be the most visited seaside resort in the country.
[00:08:00] The reason was geography.
[00:08:04] In the 19th century, the north of England was the great economic powerhouse of the country.
[00:08:11] And Blackpool sat within easy train reach of the great industrial towns of the area, like Manchester, Liverpool, Preston, Bolton, and Bradford.
[00:08:23] These were the mill towns, the cotton and wool towns, where hundreds of thousands of people put in long, hard, weeks in the factories.
[00:08:34] When the railway first arrived in Blackpool, the visitors were still mainly the "respectable" middle classes. And for them, a trip to the seaside was still the genteel, slightly medicinal sort of activity that you heard about a few minutes ago.
[00:08:52] And if you were a seaside town trying to attract these respectable visitors, there was one thing you needed: a pier.
[00:09:02] A pier, if you aren't familiar with the word, is a long raised platform that stretches out from the beach into the sea.
[00:09:13] Blackpool's first pier, the North Pier, opened in 1863. It was a quiet promenade, somewhere to stroll, take the bracing sea air, and exchange polite nods with other well-dressed visitors.
[00:09:31] But over the following decades, wages rose, train fares fell, and the factory workers began to arrive in far greater numbers.
[00:09:43] Many came during Wakes Weeks, when the mills in a particular town shut down and workers had a rare week off. Suddenly, a cheap train could take them from the factory floor to the beach in just a couple of hours.
[00:10:00] But this new crowd wanted a different kind of pier.
[00:10:06] Just five years after the North Pier, in 1868, a second pier opened a short walk down the front. This was the Central Pier, and it was a different beast entirely: dancing, music, drinking, and cheap entertainment, all aimed squarely at the new, working-class crowds.
[00:10:31] The two piers stood within sight of each other. Both were open to anyone, but every visitor to Blackpool knew which pier was meant for them.
[00:10:43] And it was the working classes who quickly became the dominant force. By the 1880s, Blackpool was getting hundreds of thousands of working-class visitors every summer.
[00:10:57] And this format of "cheap and cheerful", transforming the seaside holiday into something accessible to everyone in society, was incredibly successful.
[00:11:09] Brighton followed suit. So did Margate, and practically every other seaside town. By the late Victorian period, the seaside was no longer just for the wealthy. It was for everybody.
[00:11:24] As for what you actually did there, a Victorian day at the seaside had a recognisable rhythm to it.
[00:11:32] You arrived on a morning train, found your boarding house, dropped your bags, and walked down to the front.
[00:11:39] You took your shoes off and paddled in the shallows.
[00:11:43] You ate fish and chips out of a newspaper.
[00:11:46] You watched a Punch and Judy show on the sand.
[00:11:49] You queued up for the donkey rides.
[00:11:51] In the afternoon, you walked along the pier, and perhaps paid a penny to look at the strange wonders in a peep-show booth.
[00:12:01] In the evening, there was a music hall performance, or a brass band on the bandstand, or a singalong in the pub.
[00:12:10] By the time you fell into bed, sunburned and full of beer, you had had the kind of holiday your great-grandparents could not even have imagined.
[00:12:21] Alongside the railways, there were two more things that made it work.
[00:12:27] The first was the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, which created the very idea of the modern public holiday.
[00:12:37] Before this, ordinary workers had almost no guaranteed holiday; they were at the whim of a kind boss letting them have a day off.
[00:12:48] After 1871, they had four official bank holidays a year, in addition to Christmas and Good Friday.
[00:12:58] And for hundreds of thousands of people, every one of those bank holidays became an excuse to get on a train to the coast.
[00:13:09] The second thing that made it work was an entire ecosystem of seaside entertainment, much of it imported from elsewhere and rebadged as British.
[00:13:21] There were donkey rides for the children.
[00:13:24] There were brass bands on the pier.
[00:13:26] There were saucy postcards, those rude, comic, cartoon-style cards that became their own minor art form.
[00:13:34] There was fish and chips, which was itself a fusion of fried fish brought to Britain by Jewish immigrants and chipped potatoes from somewhere on the Continent.
[00:13:45] And there was Punch and Judy. As you will remember from part one of this mini-series, Mr Punch had started life as an Italian street puppet character before finding his calling, his perfect English home, on a windy British beach.
[00:14:03] And from the 1880s to the 1950s, for about seventy years, this was the centre of British leisure.
[00:14:14] If you lived in a city, the seaside was where you went to escape.
[00:14:20] If you ran a hotel or a boarding house in Brighton or Blackpool or Skegness, you ran a thriving business, with a guaranteed flow of customers.
[00:14:32] If you were a child, summer meant sand in your sandwiches, salt in your hair, and a sunburned nose.
[00:14:40] It seemed like the British seaside holiday was a permanent fixture of life in Blighty, in Britain.
[00:14:49] And as paid holidays became more common, the seaside stopped being just a day trip. It became a full week away.
[00:14:59] In 1936, a young entrepreneur named Billy Butlin capitalised on this, opening a new kind of seaside resort at Skegness, on the east coast of England. He called it a holiday camp.
[00:15:15] The idea was simple. For one fixed low price per week, a family could get accommodation, three meals a day, and constant entertainment, all in one place. Dance halls. Swimming pools. Sports fields. Singalongs. Children's activities. Everything organised, everything included, no nasty surprises on the bill.
[00:15:42] The first Butlin's camp at Skegness was a phenomenal success.
[00:15:48] The opening week alone brought ten thousand booking requests.
[00:15:53] After the Second World War, Butlin's expanded, opening new camps up and down the country. And a handful of rivals copied the winning formula.
[00:16:05] This was the absolute peak of the British seaside.
[00:16:10] But within a generation, it would have all but disappeared.
[00:16:16] The killer was the package holiday.
[00:16:19] From the late 1950s onwards, cheap charter flights began carrying British holidaymakers to the Mediterranean, principally to Spain.
[00:16:30] The Costa del Sol, the Costa Brava, the Balearic Islands: all of them were suddenly accessible to ordinary British people for not much more than the cost of a week at Butlin's.
[00:16:44] And what they offered was something Britain could not match: reliable, practically guaranteed sunshine.
[00:16:54] It's hard to overstate how decisive this was.
[00:16:58] The British seaside had built its entire offer around the idea that ordinary people could escape the city, breathe sea air, and have a good time, and the weather almost didn't matter. It might rain, sure, but you'd have a lot of fun.
[00:17:17] Spain offered something different.
[00:17:21] Or rather, it offered the same thing, but minus the rain, wind and black clouds. Instead, you'd get glorious sun, and sea water that was actually pleasant to be in, and didn't leave your teeth chattering and your fingers blue if you stayed in it too long.
[00:17:40] There were other factors too, other non-sun-related factors.
[00:17:45] The post-war British holidaymaker was richer than ever before.
[00:17:51] New package holiday companies started up to do the planning for you. They handled the flight, the airport transfer, the hotel, and the meals. You did not need to speak any Spanish. You did not need to organise anything. You handed over your British pounds in Britain, got on a plane in Britain, and woke up the next morning next to a Mediterranean beach.
[00:18:17] You could probably even start your day off with a full English breakfast and a pint of English beer.
[00:18:24] Given all this, by the 1970s and 1980s, the great British seaside resorts were in deep trouble.
[00:18:35] Boarding houses closed. Piers fell into disrepair.
[00:18:40] Towns that had thrived on summer visitors found their high streets boarded up.
[00:18:47] Some resorts pivoted into cheap hotels and low-cost temporary accommodation, for example for homeless people.
[00:18:56] And these towns experienced very high levels of economic deprivation.
[00:19:03] By the early 2000s, Margate had one of the highest unemployment rates in the south of England.
[00:19:10] This was a town that had once been one of the most popular resorts on the south coast.
[00:19:17] Blackpool had become a place stand-up comedians would poke fun at, the home of cheap stag and hen parties.
[00:19:27] In cultural terms, the seaside was somewhere between a sad memory and a joke.
[00:19:34] But then, gradually, something else began to happen. Things started to get better, or at least, a new trend appeared.
[00:19:45] Starting with Margate, many of these former seaside towns started to reinvent themselves as new artistic centres for creatives who had been pushed out of London by high prices. A new wave of restaurants, bars, and design shops followed.
[00:20:05] Margate, and other seaside towns like it, started to be talked about as a fashionable place to spend a weekend. These are places you can still get to pretty easily, by train or by car from London, and they now have boutique hotels, coffee shops, and restaurants.
[00:20:27] Now, this is not the case in every seaside town, and many British seaside towns remain in serious trouble.
[00:20:36] The towns that have recovered have come back mainly because they are close enough to London.
[00:20:41] In other parts of the country, the picture is much bleaker.
[00:20:45] Towns like Blackpool and Skegness have struggled for decades to find a new economic identity, and have become known for high levels of unemployment, deprivation, and political disenchantment, with politicians starting to talk about the so-called "seaside town problem".
[00:21:06] And even in the success stories, not everyone is delighted.
[00:21:13] Long-time residents have watched local cafés become artisan bakeries, their favourite pubs become hipster wine bars, and their rent double in a decade.
[00:21:25] Sure, it's good news if you own a hotel in Margate, but for everyone not catering to the well-heeled London tourist, it's turning your town into something that feels very different.
[00:21:39] Still, the tourists are coming back, and they are bringing their money with them. People are once again going to Margate for the weekend, for the first time in fifty years.
[00:21:53] And just as in the Victorian era, a modern weekend in Margate has its own recognisable rhythm.
[00:22:01] You arrive on a Friday evening on the fast train from London.
[00:22:06] You drop your bag at a small hotel run by a former London chef.
[00:22:12] You eat at a restaurant where the menu is short and the staff have well-groomed beards and tattoos.
[00:22:19] You walk along the seafront on Saturday morning, past the same Victorian buildings that have been there for a hundred and fifty years, and visit the contemporary art gallery.
[00:22:32] You buy a coffee from a place that roasts its own beans. It costs as much as a coffee in central London, but on your City salary, you don't worry too much about the price.
[00:22:45] So, to wrap up this mini-series, like Punch and Judy, and like the fox hunt, the British seaside has been many different things over its three centuries of existence.
[00:22:57] Each generation has remade it. Each remaking has lasted for a while, and then given way to something else.
[00:23:06] What the next remaking will look like, we will see. But it seems we are not quite finished with our seaside yet.
[00:23:16] OK, then, this is it for today's episode on the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday, and the final part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:23:27] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:31] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode, and of the whole mini-series.
[00:23:37] Have you ever been on a trip to the British seaside? Where did you go, and what did you think?
[00:23:43] I'd love to know, so let's get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:55] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:00] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:22] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the third and final part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:00:32] In part one, we looked at Punch and Judy, the strange, violent puppet show.
[00:00:39] In part two, we turned to the unusual, and even more violent, history of fox hunting.
[00:00:46] And in today's episode, we step back from any single tradition to tell the story of the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday: where it came from, how it took over a century of national life, why it nearly died, and what is happening to it now.
[00:01:07] We've got a lot to get through, so let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:16] In 1750, an English doctor named Richard Russell published a book in Latin.
[00:01:25] Its name, or at least its English name, was "A Dissertation on the Use of Sea Water in the Diseases of the Glands".
[00:01:36] In it, he argued that sea water was a powerful medicine. Both drinking it and bathing in it had all sorts of magical results. It could cure glandular problems, skin conditions, tumours, even venereal disease.
[00:01:56] The book was a hit. It went through six editions. And in a roundabout way, it ended up creating an entire industry: the British seaside holiday.
[00:02:11] Now, to understand why Dr Russell's book was so important, you have to understand what came before it.
[00:02:21] In 1750, the idea of going to the coast for fun would've sounded mad to most people in Britain. The coast was where fishermen worked. It was cold, it smelled of fish, the sea was dangerous, and respectable people certainly did not go there for pleasure.
[00:02:43] Russell changed that, almost single-handedly, by reframing the sea as a hospital.
[00:02:52] In 1753, he built a grand house on the seafront at a small fishing village in Sussex called Brighthelmstone. Wealthy patients began arriving to take his treatments, which involved drinking sea water, bathing in the sea, and following various complicated regimens designed to flush their systems clean.
[00:03:19] Russell's basic prescription was that the patient should bathe in cold sea water at sunrise, several times a week, for as long as they could stand it.
[00:03:31] He also recommended drinking sea water, sometimes mixed with milk, sometimes with crab's eyes or burnt sponge. To modern ears, the recipes sound almost medieval. To Russell's patients, they sounded like cutting-edge medicine.
[00:03:53] And for a generation at least, they were; people believed in them.
[00:03:59] Brighthelmstone was shortened to Brighton, and it started to grow. New lodging houses went up.
[00:04:08] Bathing machines became popular. These were small wooden huts on wheels, which were dragged into the shallows by horses.
[00:04:18] They allowed a respectable woman to change into a bathing costume, walk down a few steps directly into the sea, swim about a bit, and then come back out, all without any man seeing her in a state of undress, which of course was very important back in those days.
[00:04:39] Then in 1783, Brighton received a royal visitor: the future King George IV, who was then the Prince of Wales. Now, this young prince was something of a hedonist; he drank and ate too much, and his physicians advised the 21-year-old to go to Brighton to seek the medicinal properties of the sea.
[00:05:08] He liked the place. He kept coming back. And eventually, he built a vast and slightly ridiculous palace on the seafront, which he called the Royal Pavilion.
[00:05:21] And if you've been to Brighton, you'll know it's still there today. It has domes and minarets, and looks less like an English seaside house than an Indian palace.
[00:05:34] The entire thing cost a fortune, and was the subject of plenty of mockery in the London papers.
[00:05:42] But it set the tone for Brighton.
[00:05:46] The town filled up with grand white-fronted terraces, gambling houses, theatres, and the whole apparatus of a Georgian playground for the rich. By the time George IV died in 1830, Brighton had a population of more than forty thousand people, more than ten times what it had been when Dr Russell first arrived.
[00:06:15] Other resorts soon followed, or grew in parallel: Scarborough, Margate and Weymouth on the coast, as well as inland spa towns such as Bath.
[00:06:28] The whole apparatus of the early British seaside was in place by the early nineteenth century. The lodging houses. The pump rooms. The seafront promenades. The polite, well-dressed crowds taking their morning walk along the front.
[00:06:45] But at this point, it was still a pursuit of the wealthy, the aristocracy.
[00:06:52] A trip to the seaside took several days. It wasn't exactly compatible with a job. And it cost serious money.
[00:07:02] The vast majority of people in Britain had never been near the coast in their lives, not for pleasure at least.
[00:07:10] The thing that would change all of that was a new piece of technology: the railway.
[00:07:19] Railways arrived in Britain in the 1830s, and within a generation, they had remade the country.
[00:07:28] For our purposes, the key year is 1846, when the railway reached Blackpool, on the north west coast of England, about fifty kilometres north of Liverpool.
[00:07:41] Until then, Blackpool was a small Lancashire village on a windy stretch of the Irish Sea coast, of no great importance to anybody.
[00:07:53] Within a few decades, it would be the most visited seaside resort in the country.
[00:08:00] The reason was geography.
[00:08:04] In the 19th century, the north of England was the great economic powerhouse of the country.
[00:08:11] And Blackpool sat within easy train reach of the great industrial towns of the area, like Manchester, Liverpool, Preston, Bolton, and Bradford.
[00:08:23] These were the mill towns, the cotton and wool towns, where hundreds of thousands of people put in long, hard, weeks in the factories.
[00:08:34] When the railway first arrived in Blackpool, the visitors were still mainly the "respectable" middle classes. And for them, a trip to the seaside was still the genteel, slightly medicinal sort of activity that you heard about a few minutes ago.
[00:08:52] And if you were a seaside town trying to attract these respectable visitors, there was one thing you needed: a pier.
[00:09:02] A pier, if you aren't familiar with the word, is a long raised platform that stretches out from the beach into the sea.
[00:09:13] Blackpool's first pier, the North Pier, opened in 1863. It was a quiet promenade, somewhere to stroll, take the bracing sea air, and exchange polite nods with other well-dressed visitors.
[00:09:31] But over the following decades, wages rose, train fares fell, and the factory workers began to arrive in far greater numbers.
[00:09:43] Many came during Wakes Weeks, when the mills in a particular town shut down and workers had a rare week off. Suddenly, a cheap train could take them from the factory floor to the beach in just a couple of hours.
[00:10:00] But this new crowd wanted a different kind of pier.
[00:10:06] Just five years after the North Pier, in 1868, a second pier opened a short walk down the front. This was the Central Pier, and it was a different beast entirely: dancing, music, drinking, and cheap entertainment, all aimed squarely at the new, working-class crowds.
[00:10:31] The two piers stood within sight of each other. Both were open to anyone, but every visitor to Blackpool knew which pier was meant for them.
[00:10:43] And it was the working classes who quickly became the dominant force. By the 1880s, Blackpool was getting hundreds of thousands of working-class visitors every summer.
[00:10:57] And this format of "cheap and cheerful", transforming the seaside holiday into something accessible to everyone in society, was incredibly successful.
[00:11:09] Brighton followed suit. So did Margate, and practically every other seaside town. By the late Victorian period, the seaside was no longer just for the wealthy. It was for everybody.
[00:11:24] As for what you actually did there, a Victorian day at the seaside had a recognisable rhythm to it.
[00:11:32] You arrived on a morning train, found your boarding house, dropped your bags, and walked down to the front.
[00:11:39] You took your shoes off and paddled in the shallows.
[00:11:43] You ate fish and chips out of a newspaper.
[00:11:46] You watched a Punch and Judy show on the sand.
[00:11:49] You queued up for the donkey rides.
[00:11:51] In the afternoon, you walked along the pier, and perhaps paid a penny to look at the strange wonders in a peep-show booth.
[00:12:01] In the evening, there was a music hall performance, or a brass band on the bandstand, or a singalong in the pub.
[00:12:10] By the time you fell into bed, sunburned and full of beer, you had had the kind of holiday your great-grandparents could not even have imagined.
[00:12:21] Alongside the railways, there were two more things that made it work.
[00:12:27] The first was the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, which created the very idea of the modern public holiday.
[00:12:37] Before this, ordinary workers had almost no guaranteed holiday; they were at the whim of a kind boss letting them have a day off.
[00:12:48] After 1871, they had four official bank holidays a year, in addition to Christmas and Good Friday.
[00:12:58] And for hundreds of thousands of people, every one of those bank holidays became an excuse to get on a train to the coast.
[00:13:09] The second thing that made it work was an entire ecosystem of seaside entertainment, much of it imported from elsewhere and rebadged as British.
[00:13:21] There were donkey rides for the children.
[00:13:24] There were brass bands on the pier.
[00:13:26] There were saucy postcards, those rude, comic, cartoon-style cards that became their own minor art form.
[00:13:34] There was fish and chips, which was itself a fusion of fried fish brought to Britain by Jewish immigrants and chipped potatoes from somewhere on the Continent.
[00:13:45] And there was Punch and Judy. As you will remember from part one of this mini-series, Mr Punch had started life as an Italian street puppet character before finding his calling, his perfect English home, on a windy British beach.
[00:14:03] And from the 1880s to the 1950s, for about seventy years, this was the centre of British leisure.
[00:14:14] If you lived in a city, the seaside was where you went to escape.
[00:14:20] If you ran a hotel or a boarding house in Brighton or Blackpool or Skegness, you ran a thriving business, with a guaranteed flow of customers.
[00:14:32] If you were a child, summer meant sand in your sandwiches, salt in your hair, and a sunburned nose.
[00:14:40] It seemed like the British seaside holiday was a permanent fixture of life in Blighty, in Britain.
[00:14:49] And as paid holidays became more common, the seaside stopped being just a day trip. It became a full week away.
[00:14:59] In 1936, a young entrepreneur named Billy Butlin capitalised on this, opening a new kind of seaside resort at Skegness, on the east coast of England. He called it a holiday camp.
[00:15:15] The idea was simple. For one fixed low price per week, a family could get accommodation, three meals a day, and constant entertainment, all in one place. Dance halls. Swimming pools. Sports fields. Singalongs. Children's activities. Everything organised, everything included, no nasty surprises on the bill.
[00:15:42] The first Butlin's camp at Skegness was a phenomenal success.
[00:15:48] The opening week alone brought ten thousand booking requests.
[00:15:53] After the Second World War, Butlin's expanded, opening new camps up and down the country. And a handful of rivals copied the winning formula.
[00:16:05] This was the absolute peak of the British seaside.
[00:16:10] But within a generation, it would have all but disappeared.
[00:16:16] The killer was the package holiday.
[00:16:19] From the late 1950s onwards, cheap charter flights began carrying British holidaymakers to the Mediterranean, principally to Spain.
[00:16:30] The Costa del Sol, the Costa Brava, the Balearic Islands: all of them were suddenly accessible to ordinary British people for not much more than the cost of a week at Butlin's.
[00:16:44] And what they offered was something Britain could not match: reliable, practically guaranteed sunshine.
[00:16:54] It's hard to overstate how decisive this was.
[00:16:58] The British seaside had built its entire offer around the idea that ordinary people could escape the city, breathe sea air, and have a good time, and the weather almost didn't matter. It might rain, sure, but you'd have a lot of fun.
[00:17:17] Spain offered something different.
[00:17:21] Or rather, it offered the same thing, but minus the rain, wind and black clouds. Instead, you'd get glorious sun, and sea water that was actually pleasant to be in, and didn't leave your teeth chattering and your fingers blue if you stayed in it too long.
[00:17:40] There were other factors too, other non-sun-related factors.
[00:17:45] The post-war British holidaymaker was richer than ever before.
[00:17:51] New package holiday companies started up to do the planning for you. They handled the flight, the airport transfer, the hotel, and the meals. You did not need to speak any Spanish. You did not need to organise anything. You handed over your British pounds in Britain, got on a plane in Britain, and woke up the next morning next to a Mediterranean beach.
[00:18:17] You could probably even start your day off with a full English breakfast and a pint of English beer.
[00:18:24] Given all this, by the 1970s and 1980s, the great British seaside resorts were in deep trouble.
[00:18:35] Boarding houses closed. Piers fell into disrepair.
[00:18:40] Towns that had thrived on summer visitors found their high streets boarded up.
[00:18:47] Some resorts pivoted into cheap hotels and low-cost temporary accommodation, for example for homeless people.
[00:18:56] And these towns experienced very high levels of economic deprivation.
[00:19:03] By the early 2000s, Margate had one of the highest unemployment rates in the south of England.
[00:19:10] This was a town that had once been one of the most popular resorts on the south coast.
[00:19:17] Blackpool had become a place stand-up comedians would poke fun at, the home of cheap stag and hen parties.
[00:19:27] In cultural terms, the seaside was somewhere between a sad memory and a joke.
[00:19:34] But then, gradually, something else began to happen. Things started to get better, or at least, a new trend appeared.
[00:19:45] Starting with Margate, many of these former seaside towns started to reinvent themselves as new artistic centres for creatives who had been pushed out of London by high prices. A new wave of restaurants, bars, and design shops followed.
[00:20:05] Margate, and other seaside towns like it, started to be talked about as a fashionable place to spend a weekend. These are places you can still get to pretty easily, by train or by car from London, and they now have boutique hotels, coffee shops, and restaurants.
[00:20:27] Now, this is not the case in every seaside town, and many British seaside towns remain in serious trouble.
[00:20:36] The towns that have recovered have come back mainly because they are close enough to London.
[00:20:41] In other parts of the country, the picture is much bleaker.
[00:20:45] Towns like Blackpool and Skegness have struggled for decades to find a new economic identity, and have become known for high levels of unemployment, deprivation, and political disenchantment, with politicians starting to talk about the so-called "seaside town problem".
[00:21:06] And even in the success stories, not everyone is delighted.
[00:21:13] Long-time residents have watched local cafés become artisan bakeries, their favourite pubs become hipster wine bars, and their rent double in a decade.
[00:21:25] Sure, it's good news if you own a hotel in Margate, but for everyone not catering to the well-heeled London tourist, it's turning your town into something that feels very different.
[00:21:39] Still, the tourists are coming back, and they are bringing their money with them. People are once again going to Margate for the weekend, for the first time in fifty years.
[00:21:53] And just as in the Victorian era, a modern weekend in Margate has its own recognisable rhythm.
[00:22:01] You arrive on a Friday evening on the fast train from London.
[00:22:06] You drop your bag at a small hotel run by a former London chef.
[00:22:12] You eat at a restaurant where the menu is short and the staff have well-groomed beards and tattoos.
[00:22:19] You walk along the seafront on Saturday morning, past the same Victorian buildings that have been there for a hundred and fifty years, and visit the contemporary art gallery.
[00:22:32] You buy a coffee from a place that roasts its own beans. It costs as much as a coffee in central London, but on your City salary, you don't worry too much about the price.
[00:22:45] So, to wrap up this mini-series, like Punch and Judy, and like the fox hunt, the British seaside has been many different things over its three centuries of existence.
[00:22:57] Each generation has remade it. Each remaking has lasted for a while, and then given way to something else.
[00:23:06] What the next remaking will look like, we will see. But it seems we are not quite finished with our seaside yet.
[00:23:16] OK, then, this is it for today's episode on the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday, and the final part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:23:27] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:31] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode, and of the whole mini-series.
[00:23:37] Have you ever been on a trip to the British seaside? Where did you go, and what did you think?
[00:23:43] I'd love to know, so let's get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:55] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:00] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:22] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the third and final part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:00:32] In part one, we looked at Punch and Judy, the strange, violent puppet show.
[00:00:39] In part two, we turned to the unusual, and even more violent, history of fox hunting.
[00:00:46] And in today's episode, we step back from any single tradition to tell the story of the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday: where it came from, how it took over a century of national life, why it nearly died, and what is happening to it now.
[00:01:07] We've got a lot to get through, so let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:16] In 1750, an English doctor named Richard Russell published a book in Latin.
[00:01:25] Its name, or at least its English name, was "A Dissertation on the Use of Sea Water in the Diseases of the Glands".
[00:01:36] In it, he argued that sea water was a powerful medicine. Both drinking it and bathing in it had all sorts of magical results. It could cure glandular problems, skin conditions, tumours, even venereal disease.
[00:01:56] The book was a hit. It went through six editions. And in a roundabout way, it ended up creating an entire industry: the British seaside holiday.
[00:02:11] Now, to understand why Dr Russell's book was so important, you have to understand what came before it.
[00:02:21] In 1750, the idea of going to the coast for fun would've sounded mad to most people in Britain. The coast was where fishermen worked. It was cold, it smelled of fish, the sea was dangerous, and respectable people certainly did not go there for pleasure.
[00:02:43] Russell changed that, almost single-handedly, by reframing the sea as a hospital.
[00:02:52] In 1753, he built a grand house on the seafront at a small fishing village in Sussex called Brighthelmstone. Wealthy patients began arriving to take his treatments, which involved drinking sea water, bathing in the sea, and following various complicated regimens designed to flush their systems clean.
[00:03:19] Russell's basic prescription was that the patient should bathe in cold sea water at sunrise, several times a week, for as long as they could stand it.
[00:03:31] He also recommended drinking sea water, sometimes mixed with milk, sometimes with crab's eyes or burnt sponge. To modern ears, the recipes sound almost medieval. To Russell's patients, they sounded like cutting-edge medicine.
[00:03:53] And for a generation at least, they were; people believed in them.
[00:03:59] Brighthelmstone was shortened to Brighton, and it started to grow. New lodging houses went up.
[00:04:08] Bathing machines became popular. These were small wooden huts on wheels, which were dragged into the shallows by horses.
[00:04:18] They allowed a respectable woman to change into a bathing costume, walk down a few steps directly into the sea, swim about a bit, and then come back out, all without any man seeing her in a state of undress, which of course was very important back in those days.
[00:04:39] Then in 1783, Brighton received a royal visitor: the future King George IV, who was then the Prince of Wales. Now, this young prince was something of a hedonist; he drank and ate too much, and his physicians advised the 21-year-old to go to Brighton to seek the medicinal properties of the sea.
[00:05:08] He liked the place. He kept coming back. And eventually, he built a vast and slightly ridiculous palace on the seafront, which he called the Royal Pavilion.
[00:05:21] And if you've been to Brighton, you'll know it's still there today. It has domes and minarets, and looks less like an English seaside house than an Indian palace.
[00:05:34] The entire thing cost a fortune, and was the subject of plenty of mockery in the London papers.
[00:05:42] But it set the tone for Brighton.
[00:05:46] The town filled up with grand white-fronted terraces, gambling houses, theatres, and the whole apparatus of a Georgian playground for the rich. By the time George IV died in 1830, Brighton had a population of more than forty thousand people, more than ten times what it had been when Dr Russell first arrived.
[00:06:15] Other resorts soon followed, or grew in parallel: Scarborough, Margate and Weymouth on the coast, as well as inland spa towns such as Bath.
[00:06:28] The whole apparatus of the early British seaside was in place by the early nineteenth century. The lodging houses. The pump rooms. The seafront promenades. The polite, well-dressed crowds taking their morning walk along the front.
[00:06:45] But at this point, it was still a pursuit of the wealthy, the aristocracy.
[00:06:52] A trip to the seaside took several days. It wasn't exactly compatible with a job. And it cost serious money.
[00:07:02] The vast majority of people in Britain had never been near the coast in their lives, not for pleasure at least.
[00:07:10] The thing that would change all of that was a new piece of technology: the railway.
[00:07:19] Railways arrived in Britain in the 1830s, and within a generation, they had remade the country.
[00:07:28] For our purposes, the key year is 1846, when the railway reached Blackpool, on the north west coast of England, about fifty kilometres north of Liverpool.
[00:07:41] Until then, Blackpool was a small Lancashire village on a windy stretch of the Irish Sea coast, of no great importance to anybody.
[00:07:53] Within a few decades, it would be the most visited seaside resort in the country.
[00:08:00] The reason was geography.
[00:08:04] In the 19th century, the north of England was the great economic powerhouse of the country.
[00:08:11] And Blackpool sat within easy train reach of the great industrial towns of the area, like Manchester, Liverpool, Preston, Bolton, and Bradford.
[00:08:23] These were the mill towns, the cotton and wool towns, where hundreds of thousands of people put in long, hard, weeks in the factories.
[00:08:34] When the railway first arrived in Blackpool, the visitors were still mainly the "respectable" middle classes. And for them, a trip to the seaside was still the genteel, slightly medicinal sort of activity that you heard about a few minutes ago.
[00:08:52] And if you were a seaside town trying to attract these respectable visitors, there was one thing you needed: a pier.
[00:09:02] A pier, if you aren't familiar with the word, is a long raised platform that stretches out from the beach into the sea.
[00:09:13] Blackpool's first pier, the North Pier, opened in 1863. It was a quiet promenade, somewhere to stroll, take the bracing sea air, and exchange polite nods with other well-dressed visitors.
[00:09:31] But over the following decades, wages rose, train fares fell, and the factory workers began to arrive in far greater numbers.
[00:09:43] Many came during Wakes Weeks, when the mills in a particular town shut down and workers had a rare week off. Suddenly, a cheap train could take them from the factory floor to the beach in just a couple of hours.
[00:10:00] But this new crowd wanted a different kind of pier.
[00:10:06] Just five years after the North Pier, in 1868, a second pier opened a short walk down the front. This was the Central Pier, and it was a different beast entirely: dancing, music, drinking, and cheap entertainment, all aimed squarely at the new, working-class crowds.
[00:10:31] The two piers stood within sight of each other. Both were open to anyone, but every visitor to Blackpool knew which pier was meant for them.
[00:10:43] And it was the working classes who quickly became the dominant force. By the 1880s, Blackpool was getting hundreds of thousands of working-class visitors every summer.
[00:10:57] And this format of "cheap and cheerful", transforming the seaside holiday into something accessible to everyone in society, was incredibly successful.
[00:11:09] Brighton followed suit. So did Margate, and practically every other seaside town. By the late Victorian period, the seaside was no longer just for the wealthy. It was for everybody.
[00:11:24] As for what you actually did there, a Victorian day at the seaside had a recognisable rhythm to it.
[00:11:32] You arrived on a morning train, found your boarding house, dropped your bags, and walked down to the front.
[00:11:39] You took your shoes off and paddled in the shallows.
[00:11:43] You ate fish and chips out of a newspaper.
[00:11:46] You watched a Punch and Judy show on the sand.
[00:11:49] You queued up for the donkey rides.
[00:11:51] In the afternoon, you walked along the pier, and perhaps paid a penny to look at the strange wonders in a peep-show booth.
[00:12:01] In the evening, there was a music hall performance, or a brass band on the bandstand, or a singalong in the pub.
[00:12:10] By the time you fell into bed, sunburned and full of beer, you had had the kind of holiday your great-grandparents could not even have imagined.
[00:12:21] Alongside the railways, there were two more things that made it work.
[00:12:27] The first was the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, which created the very idea of the modern public holiday.
[00:12:37] Before this, ordinary workers had almost no guaranteed holiday; they were at the whim of a kind boss letting them have a day off.
[00:12:48] After 1871, they had four official bank holidays a year, in addition to Christmas and Good Friday.
[00:12:58] And for hundreds of thousands of people, every one of those bank holidays became an excuse to get on a train to the coast.
[00:13:09] The second thing that made it work was an entire ecosystem of seaside entertainment, much of it imported from elsewhere and rebadged as British.
[00:13:21] There were donkey rides for the children.
[00:13:24] There were brass bands on the pier.
[00:13:26] There were saucy postcards, those rude, comic, cartoon-style cards that became their own minor art form.
[00:13:34] There was fish and chips, which was itself a fusion of fried fish brought to Britain by Jewish immigrants and chipped potatoes from somewhere on the Continent.
[00:13:45] And there was Punch and Judy. As you will remember from part one of this mini-series, Mr Punch had started life as an Italian street puppet character before finding his calling, his perfect English home, on a windy British beach.
[00:14:03] And from the 1880s to the 1950s, for about seventy years, this was the centre of British leisure.
[00:14:14] If you lived in a city, the seaside was where you went to escape.
[00:14:20] If you ran a hotel or a boarding house in Brighton or Blackpool or Skegness, you ran a thriving business, with a guaranteed flow of customers.
[00:14:32] If you were a child, summer meant sand in your sandwiches, salt in your hair, and a sunburned nose.
[00:14:40] It seemed like the British seaside holiday was a permanent fixture of life in Blighty, in Britain.
[00:14:49] And as paid holidays became more common, the seaside stopped being just a day trip. It became a full week away.
[00:14:59] In 1936, a young entrepreneur named Billy Butlin capitalised on this, opening a new kind of seaside resort at Skegness, on the east coast of England. He called it a holiday camp.
[00:15:15] The idea was simple. For one fixed low price per week, a family could get accommodation, three meals a day, and constant entertainment, all in one place. Dance halls. Swimming pools. Sports fields. Singalongs. Children's activities. Everything organised, everything included, no nasty surprises on the bill.
[00:15:42] The first Butlin's camp at Skegness was a phenomenal success.
[00:15:48] The opening week alone brought ten thousand booking requests.
[00:15:53] After the Second World War, Butlin's expanded, opening new camps up and down the country. And a handful of rivals copied the winning formula.
[00:16:05] This was the absolute peak of the British seaside.
[00:16:10] But within a generation, it would have all but disappeared.
[00:16:16] The killer was the package holiday.
[00:16:19] From the late 1950s onwards, cheap charter flights began carrying British holidaymakers to the Mediterranean, principally to Spain.
[00:16:30] The Costa del Sol, the Costa Brava, the Balearic Islands: all of them were suddenly accessible to ordinary British people for not much more than the cost of a week at Butlin's.
[00:16:44] And what they offered was something Britain could not match: reliable, practically guaranteed sunshine.
[00:16:54] It's hard to overstate how decisive this was.
[00:16:58] The British seaside had built its entire offer around the idea that ordinary people could escape the city, breathe sea air, and have a good time, and the weather almost didn't matter. It might rain, sure, but you'd have a lot of fun.
[00:17:17] Spain offered something different.
[00:17:21] Or rather, it offered the same thing, but minus the rain, wind and black clouds. Instead, you'd get glorious sun, and sea water that was actually pleasant to be in, and didn't leave your teeth chattering and your fingers blue if you stayed in it too long.
[00:17:40] There were other factors too, other non-sun-related factors.
[00:17:45] The post-war British holidaymaker was richer than ever before.
[00:17:51] New package holiday companies started up to do the planning for you. They handled the flight, the airport transfer, the hotel, and the meals. You did not need to speak any Spanish. You did not need to organise anything. You handed over your British pounds in Britain, got on a plane in Britain, and woke up the next morning next to a Mediterranean beach.
[00:18:17] You could probably even start your day off with a full English breakfast and a pint of English beer.
[00:18:24] Given all this, by the 1970s and 1980s, the great British seaside resorts were in deep trouble.
[00:18:35] Boarding houses closed. Piers fell into disrepair.
[00:18:40] Towns that had thrived on summer visitors found their high streets boarded up.
[00:18:47] Some resorts pivoted into cheap hotels and low-cost temporary accommodation, for example for homeless people.
[00:18:56] And these towns experienced very high levels of economic deprivation.
[00:19:03] By the early 2000s, Margate had one of the highest unemployment rates in the south of England.
[00:19:10] This was a town that had once been one of the most popular resorts on the south coast.
[00:19:17] Blackpool had become a place stand-up comedians would poke fun at, the home of cheap stag and hen parties.
[00:19:27] In cultural terms, the seaside was somewhere between a sad memory and a joke.
[00:19:34] But then, gradually, something else began to happen. Things started to get better, or at least, a new trend appeared.
[00:19:45] Starting with Margate, many of these former seaside towns started to reinvent themselves as new artistic centres for creatives who had been pushed out of London by high prices. A new wave of restaurants, bars, and design shops followed.
[00:20:05] Margate, and other seaside towns like it, started to be talked about as a fashionable place to spend a weekend. These are places you can still get to pretty easily, by train or by car from London, and they now have boutique hotels, coffee shops, and restaurants.
[00:20:27] Now, this is not the case in every seaside town, and many British seaside towns remain in serious trouble.
[00:20:36] The towns that have recovered have come back mainly because they are close enough to London.
[00:20:41] In other parts of the country, the picture is much bleaker.
[00:20:45] Towns like Blackpool and Skegness have struggled for decades to find a new economic identity, and have become known for high levels of unemployment, deprivation, and political disenchantment, with politicians starting to talk about the so-called "seaside town problem".
[00:21:06] And even in the success stories, not everyone is delighted.
[00:21:13] Long-time residents have watched local cafés become artisan bakeries, their favourite pubs become hipster wine bars, and their rent double in a decade.
[00:21:25] Sure, it's good news if you own a hotel in Margate, but for everyone not catering to the well-heeled London tourist, it's turning your town into something that feels very different.
[00:21:39] Still, the tourists are coming back, and they are bringing their money with them. People are once again going to Margate for the weekend, for the first time in fifty years.
[00:21:53] And just as in the Victorian era, a modern weekend in Margate has its own recognisable rhythm.
[00:22:01] You arrive on a Friday evening on the fast train from London.
[00:22:06] You drop your bag at a small hotel run by a former London chef.
[00:22:12] You eat at a restaurant where the menu is short and the staff have well-groomed beards and tattoos.
[00:22:19] You walk along the seafront on Saturday morning, past the same Victorian buildings that have been there for a hundred and fifty years, and visit the contemporary art gallery.
[00:22:32] You buy a coffee from a place that roasts its own beans. It costs as much as a coffee in central London, but on your City salary, you don't worry too much about the price.
[00:22:45] So, to wrap up this mini-series, like Punch and Judy, and like the fox hunt, the British seaside has been many different things over its three centuries of existence.
[00:22:57] Each generation has remade it. Each remaking has lasted for a while, and then given way to something else.
[00:23:06] What the next remaking will look like, we will see. But it seems we are not quite finished with our seaside yet.
[00:23:16] OK, then, this is it for today's episode on the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday, and the final part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:23:27] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:31] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode, and of the whole mini-series.
[00:23:37] Have you ever been on a trip to the British seaside? Where did you go, and what did you think?
[00:23:43] I'd love to know, so let's get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:55] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:00] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
