Seaside Resorts

In its modern guise, the seaside resort, as a recognizable kind of specialized coastal leisure settlement, came into being in Western Europe from the early eighteenth century onward, originating in England (perhaps in Liverpool, perhaps on the coast of Yorkshire). It had antecedents in ancient Mediterranean societies, especially in the Roman Empire, and popular summer gatherings associated with sea-bathing rituals and pleasures, although ill-documented, were clearly common over a much wider area. The novelty in the eighteenth-century West was the development of sea-bathing, and the enjoyment of seaside environments, into the basis for seasonal businesses, the transformation of urban economies, and incorporation into the rapidly expanding consumer societies of the first Industrial Revolution. The therapeutic use of the sea was formalized under medical direction, while coastal [Page 1251]environments (like mountains) were revalued as desirable destinations under the aesthetic canons of the romantic and the sublime.

From such beginnings, seaside resorts expanded, proliferated, and spread to new parts of Europe and the globe in the age of “Industry and Empire,” the first communications revolution, and the first globalization. During the century after 1750, they multiplied along almost all the English coastlines, especially within reach of London, and (alongside the inland spa resorts, but increasingly overtaking them) they became gathering places for landed society and the rapidly expanding professional and industrial middle classes of the “first industrial society.” In the process, they became centers for ostentatious, public consumption and display. As the main motive for visiting the seaside shifted from health to pleasure and emulation, shops and amusements proliferated, and marine promenades and parks became arenas for fashionable sociability and the intersection of the searching, appraising gaze of the competitive consumer. The arrival of railways at British coastal pleasure resorts from the 1840s onward opened up more popular markets, which were already becoming visible, and cheap trains brought the industrial working classes to the seaside in growing numbers on summer weekends and eased the path of middle-class families for longer visits, including seasonal commuting. This brought rapid expansion to some resorts, and in northern and midland England, traditional popular holidays were adapted to seaside uses long before the coming of holidays with pay (mainly in the 1920s and 1930s). By 1911, over one hundred English seaside resorts housed nearly one and a half million permanent residents, and in the late-nineteenth century, Blackpool became the world's first working-class seaside resort, with around four million annual visitors by 1913, drawn mainly from industrial northern England. This was part of the wider development of popular consumer culture, including cheap fashions, fast food (fish and chips), and the rise of spectator sport and popular entertainment industries. The seaside became a place to see, be seen, seek entertainment, spend money, show off, and (literally) “dress up,” pretending through dress and presentation of self to higher status than in everyday life. Seaside “pleasure palaces,” which found room for all classes, included copies of the Eiffel Tower, with entertainments in the base and grounds (especially the famous Blackpool Tower of 1894); Winter Gardens; and pleasure piers offering fairgrounds, stalls, and dancing. But the beaches were also crowded. The Mitchell and Kenyon archive of fairground films displays this popular consumer culture in action at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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