When you move past the sweet nostalgia drive haze of these spaces there is a political history that is an often overlooked but important factor to the British Seasides history. The growth and development of the Seaside in the 20th Century is the manifestation of the changing conditions in the interwar period that affected both social and economic aspects of life in Britain. This changing landscape meant more workers had the time and money to pursue leisure activities which private entrepreneurs and local government schemes were happy to provide.

   

The campaigns for leave and more importantly paid leave went beyond the Victorian philanthropic ideals and were supported by union campaigns and collective bargaining, politicians, newspapers and the public. This work will give a short overview of campaigns for paid holiday (the reading list provides good starting point for more detailed accounts) and will then focus on three sites ‘of pleasure’ around England to show how this manifested itself in the built environment.

It’s worth noting that these new Pleasure Beaches and mass entertainment complexes weren’t always  embraced and viewed positively. Mass Observations study described the sites as “a symbol of the modernised primitivism of the passive working classes“¹ and historian J.B.Priestly distinguished between those who preferred countryside to mass entertainment ‘those patrons of the New Blackpool, which knows what to do with the passive and listless’, while I have tried to be objective in my assessment of this viewpoint I can’t help but think these comments show a lack of understanding of the desire for pleasure and to absorb forms of entertainment with what free time there was when removed from the labour intensive roles often occupied by the working class.



There is a history of Spa towns across the UK with many of the Upper Classes going to the waters for health. These were health driven trips rather than a pleasure driven excursion. With the introduction of rail in the 19th century a more interconnected country and from these beginnings, there emerged a distinctively working-class holiday industry during the period of falling prices at the end of the nineteenth century; and the new pattern of demand began to generate employment in lodging-house keeping, building, retailing and other services.



The lifestyle of the new visitors often generated conflict with the established branches of the holiday trade, but the working-class season, augmenting as it did an already swelling rush to the sea by workers in the expanding white-collar occupations, providing new impetus to growth in the many Victorian resorts. Blackpool provides the most obvious example here, but Southend, Cleethorpes, Yarmouth. Scarborough, Morecambe and several others can be seen to fit this pattern. In the north of England, at least, the most rapid large-scale resort growth of the late nineteenth century came where the working-class presence was more strongly felt, and it was the resorts which adapted best to this new stimulus which expanded fastest.²

This swell of visitors was increased when industries collectively agreed on weeks where they would close meaning a majority of workers would flock to the nearest section of the coastline. In the North West they were called ‘wake weeks’ and in Scotland ‘trades fortnights’. However these were often unpaid breaks so workers had to hold back their earnings to prepare for a week with no income. Before the First World War the emphasis was on working conditions but after this the idea of paid leave started to be considered as an important goal. Some economic historians have argued that a proportion of gains in employment conditions were taken by workers in the form of leisure rather than increased income³ and by the beginning of the 1920’s formal agreements on paid leave between employers and employees covered an estimated one million works.⁴



Though this number fluctuated in the 1920s with some agreements being revoked when the economy shrank but by the 1930s the idea was firmly embedded in the conscience of the public. Unions were adopting holidays with pay as a primary goal, The Daily Express newspaper formally endorsed the idea and even Conservative MPs printed literature in support. The Labour Party adopted Holidays with Pay as one of its key platforms for the next election which would have happened before 1940 if not for the outbreak of the Second World War. During the summer months of 1937 they conducted a ‘Seaside Campaign’ with about 72 seaside resorts approached by the party's National Executive Committee, and it was hoped that not less than twenty meetings would take place each week.⁵



All of these culminated in the The Holidays with Pay Act which was passed in 1938. It was not comprehensive legislation giving only 1 weeks holiday per year which was short of the two weeks the unions had been campaigning for and didn’t cover all workers (just those whose rates of pay were set by trade boards). It is fair to say this act wasn’t a driving force for creating change for workers but more reflected the changes that were already taking place. When the holidays with pay committee published its report there were already 3 million manual workers who were under some form of collective agreements. Adding this to non-manual worker figures there were 7.75 million workers out of a total occupied population of 18.5 million were in receipt of holiday pay.⁶

It wouldn’t be until the 1990s when the Labour government implemented the EU working time directive giving 6 million works more holiday and 2 million paid leave for the first time⁷ but it was in these interwar years paid holidays became thought of as a right, as a right workers exercised and the built environment that was created as a result can still be seen today.

Endnotes