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Divertissements et loisirs dans les sociétés urbaines à l’époque moderne et contemporaine

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Robert Beck
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Anna Madœuf

III - Contrôles et encadrements

Urban Space, Public Pleasure and Cultural Conflict: the Seaside Resort in England c. 1840-1939

John K. Walton

Testo integrale

  • 1 J. K. Walton, The English seaside resort: a social history 1750-1914 (Leicester, 1983); idem., «Th (...)
  • 2 None of these are perfect examples of the global dissemination of a British ‘innovation’, but (for (...)
  • 3 For the adaptability of association football, G. Armstrong and R. Giulianotti, Fear and loathing i (...)

1This chapter must begin by emphasizing the early importance and rapid development of the seaside resort in Britain: the seaside holiday is a British - more precisely, an English - invention and cultural export1. The seaside holiday, together with its urban expression, the seaside resort as a distinctive kind of urban space and entity, constitutes one of the key contributions Britain has made to the development of the modern world, along with (most obviously) the Industrial Revolution, the British Empire and association football2. It has become the most ubiquitous of this quartet, except in landlocked countries with limited capacity for generating indigenous demand for tourism; and even under these circumstances, media representations of beaches and other aspects of seaside tourism generate recognition and aspiration. Wherever it has travelled, the seaside holiday (like association football, and even like the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire) has been modified and adapted to suit the preferences and expectations of the recipient cultures, sometimes at two and three removes from its origins; but the hybridisations have come from a common root, and that root has in each case been firmly grounded in the peculiarities of the English3.

  • 4 Alain Corbin, Le territoire du vide (Paris, 1988); J. K. Walton, «Taking the history of tourism se (...)
  • 5 L. Tissot, Naissance d’une industrie touristique : les Anglais et la Suisse au xixe siècle (Lausan (...)
  • 6 John Urry, Consuming places (London, 1995).
  • 7 Christiana Payne, in Susan C. Anderson and Bruce H. Tabb (eds.), Water, leisure and culture (Oxfor (...)

2Alain Corbin, whose excellent, influential and much-translated Le Territoire du Vide suffers from limited awareness of the nature and importance of the English origins and early development of the therapeutic and recreational use of the sea and its environs on a commercial scale, has exercised an undue influence on writings on this theme outside Britain. Indeed, he gets the early history of the English seaside badly wrong, especially in the detail4. But he is stimulatingly right about the importance of the transformation of perceptions of the sea, at an elite cultural level, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards in driving the development of seaside tourism. Much the same, incidentally, could be said of attitudes to mountains; and the British played a similar role in the development of mountain tourism from the eighteenth century onwards5. The «romantic gaze» of John Urry’s influential imagining was a product of this cultural moment in Western Europe, as maritime and mountain landscapes came to conjure up the inner turbulence of the tortured self, the sublime thrill of contemplating a wildness that for most observers posed no immediate physical danger, and the spiritual encounter with Nature and Nature’s God6. In the British context we should also add a patriotic dimension to the romantic, the sublime and the evangelical, emphasizing the association between maritime trade, naval might, the heroism of sailors of all sorts, and the political and economic expansion of British power and influence from the eighteenth century onwards7.

  • 8 Alain Corbin is aware of these rituals, but does not develop the theme. See also J. K. Walton, «Se (...)
  • 9 J. Travis, «Continuity and change», 8-9; J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s holiday: a social hist (...)

3But, within Britain, there is more to the story than a revolution in elite aesthetic fashions and consciousness. Its roots probably lie in popular sea-bathing customs associated with the pursuit of health through annual bathing rituals at or around mid-August, especially the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on August 15, which can be found right across eighteenth-century Catholic Europe (and were even exported by Irish emigrants to the New York resort of Coney Island, where «Cure Day» was current in the mid-twentieth century), but also on English coastlines, especially in Lancashire where Catholic survival was particularly strong. Such traditions may well have provided the impetus for orthodox medical opinion to look for health-giving properties in sea-water, a trend which predated the revolution in maritime aesthetics8. The fashion for taking the waters at mineral springs, which in turn had popular antecedents, also paved the way for the adoption of sea-water cures as a variation on an established medical theme9.

  • 10 J. Travis, «Continuity and change», 31, note 13, for the full details.
  • 11 J. K. Walton, English seaside resort, Chapters 1-2.
  • 12 J. K. Walton, «The seaside resorts of England and Wales, 1900-1950», in G. Shaw and A. Williams (e (...)
  • 13 J. Beckerson, «Marketing British tourism: government approaches to the stimulation of a service se (...)
  • 14 Immerso, Coney Island, 4.

4So the rise of the English seaside resort as a distinctive kind of leisure space begins with the pursuit of health in the 1720s and 1730s (the earliest documented example of «polite», regulated sea-bathing under medical auspices comes from Whitby, North Yorkshire, in 1718, with nearby Scarborough close behind)10. It develops in step with the rise of a polite, hypochondriac, consuming «middling sort of people», anxious to become acceptable to the aristocracy and gentry. It becomes fashionable in the process, and the stage is set for it to gain both a distinctive aesthetic and a variety of incarnations through the second half of that century, running through the social scale from deeply provincial Allonby in Cumberland, a haunt of local farmers, through (allegedly) petit bourgeois Margate and sedate mercantile Bognor, to royal, fashionable, raffish Brighton11. From these origins the British seaside ramified and sub-divided through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, with characteristics varying between and within coastlines and individual resorts and changing subtly over time, to produce the most complex, precisely-graded and populous seaside resort system the world has known, with a total resident population, outside the holiday season, of well over 1.5 million by 1911 and two million by 195112. It was never well-known to the world at large, because what it offered was almost entirely for home consumption, with a few token gestures towards international markets on the south coast at places like Brighton and Torquay. Little or no attempt was made to market the British seaside to overseas visitors, even when a faltering and underfunded national tourism advertising campaign began in the inter-war years13. Hence, in part at least, the limited awareness of these phenomena outside Britain, which is well illustrated by a recent historian of Coney Island, who accepts that the New York resort’s claim to primacy among the popular and carnivalesque is challenged only by England’s Blackpool, but places the latter on the wrong coastline (North Sea instead of Irish Sea: the opposite side of the country) and makes the erroneous assumption that many of its working-class visitors came from Liverpool14.

  • 15 Pimlott, Englishman’s holiday; J. K. Walton, «The demand for working-class seaside holidays in Vic (...)
  • 16 H. J. Perkin, «The ‘social tone’ of Victorian seaside resorts in the North-West», Northern History (...)
  • 17 J. K. Walton, «The demand for working-class seaside holidays».

5Any attempt to depict and understand this system brings us straight into questions of space, status and culture - cultural capital, indeed - as they relate to the public consumption of leisure for profit. This applies at the level of the regional resort system, the individual resort and the sub-divisions that developed within it, and the nature of the spatial divisions and interrelationships was affected by time of day, day of the week and time of the year, in response to conventional assumptions about mealtimes and appropriate behaviour, to the evolution of the week-end and of attitudes to Sunday observance, and to patterns of holidaymaking based on school holidays, the «London season» and its impact on metropolitan manufacturing, the timing of customary holidays in industrial areas, and the varying impact of the Bank Holiday Act of 187115. Every British coastline that was accessible to major population centres developed a variety of resorts in the nineteenth century, each oriented predominantly and enduringly to a particular market: the predominantly industrial county of Lancashire, for example, whose «cotton towns» pioneered the working-class seaside holiday, had Blackpool for the secular, pleasure-loving and (increasingly) proletarian inhabitants of Manchester and the «cotton towns», Southport for serious-minded health-seeking and sermon-tasting Nonconformist business families from the same places (with impressive ecclesiastical buildings to match), and Morecambe for supervisory and white-collar workers who wanted a relaxed, respectable and not too raucous environment, to name only the most prominent places16. Not that demand flows ever fitted perfectly into county boundaries, of course, and (for example) much of the demand for holidays generated within industrial Lancashire also fed into North Wales, and to the eastern North Sea coast as well as that of the Irish Sea, while Morecambe’s railway alignment gave it more visitors from Yorkshire than Lancashire17.

  • 18 M. Chadefaud, Aux origines du tourisme dans les pays de l’Adour (Pau, 1987) ; Gabriel Désert, La v (...)
  • 19 E. Furlough, ‘Making mass vacations: tourism and consumer culture in France, 1930s to 1970s’, Comp (...)
  • 20 J. K. Walton, English seaside resort, Chapter 8.

6From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, similar complex systems could be found across many of the coastlines of Western Europe: one thinks of Désert’s Normandy, or Chadefaud’s south-western France, with their gradations from the centres of international fashion like Biarritz and Deauville (where the British aristocracy were much more in evidence from the Victorian years onwards than at the British seaside) to the «petits trous pas chers», and their changes of «social tone» (to borrow a common expression, and preoccupation, of Victorian England) as the season waxed and waned18. What was distinctive about England, however, was the early departure of international high society, which went abroad at an early stage in search of the excitements of roulette and the demanding security of an exclusive social ambience, together with the early, pervasive and not unrelated presence of the industrial and metropolitan working class. The rise of the popular seaside excursion, and even holiday, was a fact of life and subject for satire in England more than half a century before the great panic about paid holidays in the France of 1936, by which time the British middle classes, when on holiday, had learned either to live with the plebeians, or to avoid them by seeking out smaller places with difficult or expensive access and accommodation19. Everywhere on the British coastline, except in the smallest and most specialised niche-market resorts, a broad mix of visiting publics developed as soon as railways and rising real wages opened out the possibilities in the mid-nineteenth century, and this meant that juxtapositions between potentially conflicting classes and cultures were part of the common currency of seaside life and of its regulation and representation20.

  • 21 R. Shields, Places on the margin (London, 1991).
  • 22 J. K. Walton, English seaside resort, Chapters 6-8.
  • 23 Harvey Taylor, A claim on the countryside (Keele: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).
  • 24 See above, note 20.

7Under these circumstances desirable spaces, construed in terms of perceived healthiness and natural beauty as well as architecture and access to entertainment and amenity, became the objects of social competition for access and use across the whole of a changing and (in many respects) increasingly competitive society. This was especially the case at the seaside, where a limited length of stay and an expectation of competitive consumption and display intensified the pressures in an environment where the most valuable assets of all, the beach and the sea, were liminal spaces in terms of property-ownership as well as marginality. In this peripheral setting where land met sea and conventions and controls might be suspended or relaxed, uncertainty about property rights and the jurisdiction of authority posed enduring problems of regulation and control21. In contrast with the Mediterranean, the long gap between high and low tide created an extensive debatable land, and much of the foreshore was under the jurisdiction of the Crown, whether directly or through the Duchy of Lancaster or the Office of Woods and Forests, whose powers to develop, restrict access and use, regulate and charge rent were nevertheless open to challenge. When they were ceded or devolved, as happened increasingly as resort towns grew and their government systems became more sophisticated in the second half of the nineteenth century, they almost always passed into the hands of elected local government rather than private individuals22. Even at the height of the age of laissez-faire the British sustained a sense of common property and an expectation of access rights at the seaside, which resisted individualist assault even more strongly than the network of public footpaths across common land, which had to be defended stoutly in the courts and by direct action from time to time23. Under English law, then, reinforced by widely shared values and attachments, beaches could not be privatised, although access routes to them might sometimes be limited and local government was increasingly anxious to introduce controls over what kinds of behaviour might be proscribed or permitted, especially when dimensions of sexual morality, propriety and aesthetics were at issue24.

  • 25 J. Travis, «Continuity and change», 9-12; J. K. Walton, «The social development of Blackpool 1788- (...)
  • 26 J. Travis, «Continuity and change», 17; David N. Smith, The railway and its passengers: a social h (...)
  • 27 The best evidence on this is visual, and comes from the analysis of photographs of holiday crowds (...)
  • 28 J. K. Walton, English seaside resort, Chapter 8.

8The British seaside more generally was always potentially a democratically accessible space. It was so in its origins as a desirable location and destination, for (as noted earlier) ritual, communal and customary plebeian sea-bathing practices at August high tides, mixing pleasure and prophylaxis, predated the sea’s adoption by the emerging medical profession, alongside the mineral spring, as a cure for the diseases of the wealthy; and the doctors may well have picked up the hint from the popular practices. Such customs lasted strongly into the nineteenth century in the last redoubts of Catholic England and Wales, such as Lancashire (especially) and Monmouthshire, and in the former county their votaries transferred themselves to the cheap trains of the early railway age in the 1840s25. But the railways, like the steamers of the Thames estuary before them at Margate and Southend, democratised the seaside in terms of accessibility, although for at least a generation this was a limited democracy (rather like the parliamentary one!), as the desirable shorelines were rationed by the short-term availability of cheap tickets (at an extreme, at Dawlish in Devon, demanding a breakfast-time return after an early morning bathe), their confinement into week-ends unless reputably sponsored by employers or Sunday Schools, and their limited availability on Sundays on most lines through the restrictive mid-Victorian years26. But the «respectable» middle-class families who dominated the holiday markets of the 1850s and 1860s, at the point when working-class living standards began to improve, were never entirely free from the threatening proximity of the «great unwashed» in pursuit of what was alleged to be their annual bathe, at a time when the earliest examples of the «playful crowd» still generated fear rather than sympathetic interest of anthropological curiosity. And it seems clear that not until the 1950s were working-class families with young children able to afford to stay at the seaside: the Victorian plebeians at the seaside were young single men and young childless couples at the first crest of the poverty cycle and a boisterous point in the life-cycle, along with older couples whose children could contribute to the family budget27. Most of the developing urban spaces of the seaside - the bathing beach, the seaside promenade, the pier, the public park, the shopping street, and those entertainments that needed to keep at least some of their prices low to maximise attendances – were necessarily democratic in ways that went beyond the more segregated world of the spa; and this is partly why, after the young Queen Victoria turned her back on Brighton in the early 1840s, British seaside resorts were conspicuous by their lack of aristocratic or even fashionable patronage. Shared spaces brought contrasting ways of experiencing pleasure into contact, and generated cultural conflict28.

  • 29 Ibid; and see also Shields, Places on the margin; Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (...)
  • 30 D. Cannadine, Lords and landlords: the aristocracy and the towns 1774-1967 (Leicester, 1980); idem (...)

9So the internal history of many of the larger British seaside resorts resolves itself very largely into the resolution of conflicts over the allocation and use of desirable space: debates within the public sphere of the media, and above all about the public sphere of the promenade (in a broad sense: as arena for competitive display and flirtation, and for the direction of the appraising, sexualised gaze at other people; as tranquil amenity on which to relax and direct the gaze at seascape, cloudscape and romantic nature; or as liminal space in which to pursue hedonistic goals involving noise, jokes, drollery and foolery, perhaps fuelled by alcohol). Such debates were resolved, in an immediate sense, by local authorities: landowners at first, local government in negotiation with transport, entertainment and residential interests later. Where local government was powerful, and the «social tone» or place-identity/myth of the resort was clearly developed, conflicts could be resolved, or even pre-empted, on the side of «respectability»29. Landowners (whether aristocrats or development companies) could, and did, prohibit down-market buildings and impose regulations that forbade ‘nuisances’, including pubs, stalls and fairgrounds. In small resorts like Frinton (Essex) or Westgate (Kent), the proximity of popular neighbours led to the sanitising of public spaces through the prohibition of (for example) picnics, games, stalls offering cheap open-air amusements (even the classic Punch and Judy show), public houses and fish and chip shops, and the imposition of expensive bathing regimes designed to deter people of limited means and presumed uncultivated habits30.

  • 31 J. K. Walton, Blackpool (Edinburgh, 1998), for a case-study. For «gradient analysis», F.M.L. Thomp (...)
  • 32 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven and London, 2000). See also, for example, Simon Gunn, The (...)

10More moderate versions of such systems could be applied to the most developed or desirable parts of larger resorts, wherever there was a consensus that the «better-class» market would also pay be more reliable and best, or a moral and aesthetic preference for the decorous and modestly-dressed (flamboyant big spenders tended to go to the resorts of mainland Europe from an early stage, especially when Brighton became less raffish from the 1840s onwards). Piers charged tolls and had regulations of their own about behaviour, and in some resorts certain marine promenades also excluded the impoverished and undesirable in these ways. These even applied to Blackpool and to the popular Yorkshire resort of Bridlington for most of the nineteenth century. But the larger resorts could cultivate a mixed visitor economy by the allocation of certain areas to working-class visitors, and the zoning of attractions for them and of tolerance for boisterous behaviour into these districts. Such areas tended to be low-lying (here as elsewhere, gradient analysis was an important determinant of «social tone»), close to the old core of settlement and with unpretentious early accommodation without much in the way of planning or fashionable architectural styles and layout, and close to railway stations. These zoning systems were much easier to create and sustain in an age of mass transit systems, where the purchasing power of the better-off enabled them to escape by cab or carriage to the urban fringe and enjoy the view in select tranquillity, making voyeuristic incursions to the ‘popular’ districts on their own terms and when it suited them. So particular areas might be abandoned to the «lower orders» and become appropriate spaces for the toleration of fairgrounds, stalls, cheap shows and the sale of alcohol, and behaviour that would elsewhere be regarded as indecorous31. Such reserved spaces dedicated to, or at least permitting, the carnivalesque were not unique to the seaside, of course: Lynda Nead has documented some of them for London in Victorian Babylon, for example. But they were particularly necessary, and popular, in this setting, especially as the working-class invasion of the seaside gathered momentum in the late nineteenth century32.

  • 33 Robert W. Lewis, «Football hooliganism in England before 1914: a critique of the Dunning thesis», (...)
  • 34 F. M. L. Thompson, The rise of respectable society (London, 1988); Harold Perkin, The structured c (...)
  • 35 Gavy Cross (ed.), Worktowners at Blackpool (London, 1990); William Holt, articles on seaside crowd (...)
  • 36 Helen Meller, European cities 1890-1930s: history, culture and the built environment (Chichester, (...)
  • 37 J. K. Walton, British seaside, 96-101; J. K. Walton, «Consuming the beach: seaside resorts and cul (...)
  • 38 E. J. Hobsbawm, The age of Empire (London, 1987).
  • 39 J. Demetriadi, «English and Welsh seaside resorts, with special reference to Blackpool and Margate (...)

11By the turn of the century the worst problems were already receding, even in resorts that were too small for spatial sub-division and differential policing strategies to work. This was because the popular crowd was coming to be seen as better-behaved and less threatening. Norbert Elias’s «civilising process», distorted in Britain by historical sociologists of soccer hooliganism, works much better at the seaside than the football stadium, at least for this period (for the late twentieth century we need to develop a concept of the «decivilising process»)33. The working-class seaside visitor was more thoroughly disciplined (by school and regular work), more attuned to saving for both a rainy day and a good time, and more clothes- and consumer-oriented. The ‘respectables’ came to dominate the «roughs», a process with which historians are beginning to engage; and, in Harold Perkin’s phrase, the «crowd» became «structured», through its own internal dynamics (orderly movement, queuing, ebbing and flowing according to regular internalised timetables associated with mealtimes and attractions) as well as through the external pressures of policing and traffic management34. The dominant discourse saw crowds as neither violent nor threatening, but as amiable and tractable, and above all as natural, giant organisms that beat to their own rhythms35. Transgressions were isolated and viewed indulgently. Resorts boasted of their low rates of prosecuted crime, and invested in the «city beautiful» during the inter-war years, while the fairground theme-parks of the early twentieth century also pursued cleanliness and respectability in negotiation with local government. Even Blackpool’s notorious «Golden Mile», with its ramshackle freak-shows, was brought within a modified and consensual spirit of carnival and saturnalia, which accepted that the normal constraints of everyday life were relaxed, but also set the revised norms beyond which it was unacceptable to go36. This applied to the beach itself, where the inter-war years saw the spread of a much more relaxed attitude to «mixed bathing» and bodily exposure and display, with the rise of the cults of sun-bathing and fresh air37. Controversy continued to erupt at the margins and where frontiers were being moved, just as they did spatially where working-class areas expanded to threaten the tranquillity of nearby zones; but all of this was containable and the existing system could cope with it. The combination of the emergence and consolidation of spatial arrangements that minimised conflict, through a combination of market forces and local government policy, and the «reformation of manners» of the mature industrial working class, helped resorts to continue to grow and to maximise their markets (just as, for example, music-hall and then the cinema had done). This system ran in step with the life-cycle of the «traditional» working class as represented by E. J. Hobsbawm, with its identification with workplace, neighbourhood, pub, football and music-hall, and its conservative sartorial tastes as evidenced by the fully-clothed and formally-clad working-class throngs in Sunday suits and summer frocks to be seen on the beaches and promenades of popular resorts from the 1890s through to the 1960s, exactly following Hobsbawm’s model38. It was not to be disrupted until the advent of mass motoring, of inter-generational cultural conflict, of a new consumer culture and, somewhat later, of competition from new Mediterranean destinations, which conspired to disrupt a settlement based on enduring invented traditions, industrial holidays, railways and class distinctions, from the 1960s onwards. But that is another story39.

Note

1 J. K. Walton, The English seaside resort: a social history 1750-1914 (Leicester, 1983); idem., «The seaside resorts of Western Europe, 1750-1939», in S. Fisher (ed.), Recreation and the sea (Exeter, 1997), 36-56.

2 None of these are perfect examples of the global dissemination of a British ‘innovation’, but (for example) the American version of football derives from the same British roots as association football, and similar genealogies can be traced for different versions of the seaside holiday or beach resort.

3 For the adaptability of association football, G. Armstrong and R. Giulianotti, Fear and loathing in world football (Oxford, 2001); and for the British Empire, David Cannadine, Ornamentalism

4 Alain Corbin, Le territoire du vide (Paris, 1988); J. K. Walton, «Taking the history of tourism seriously», European History Quarterly 27 (1997), 573-81.

5 L. Tissot, Naissance d’une industrie touristique : les Anglais et la Suisse au xixe siècle (Lausanne, 2000) ; Jim Ring, How the English made the Alps (London, 2000).

6 John Urry, Consuming places (London, 1995).

7 Christiana Payne, in Susan C. Anderson and Bruce H. Tabb (eds.), Water, leisure and culture (Oxford, 2002).

8 Alain Corbin is aware of these rituals, but does not develop the theme. See also J. K. Walton, «Seaside resorts of Western Europe», 40; J. Travis, «Continuity and change in English sea-bathing, 1730-1900», in Fisher (ed.), Recreation and the sea, 8-11 ; M. Immerso, Coney Island: the people’s playground (Piscataway, N.J., 2002), 157.

9 J. Travis, «Continuity and change», 8-9; J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s holiday: a social history (London, 1947), 25-6.

10 J. Travis, «Continuity and change», 31, note 13, for the full details.

11 J. K. Walton, English seaside resort, Chapters 1-2.

12 J. K. Walton, «The seaside resorts of England and Wales, 1900-1950», in G. Shaw and A. Williams (eds.), The rise and fall of British coastal resorts (London, 1997), 21-48, for the full dimensions of this.

13 J. Beckerson, «Marketing British tourism: government approaches to the stimulation of a service sector, 1880-1950», in H. Berghoff et al. (eds.), The making of modern tourism (London, 2002), 133-57.

14 Immerso, Coney Island, 4.

15 Pimlott, Englishman’s holiday; J. K. Walton, «The demand for working-class seaside holidays in Victorian England», Economic History Review 34 (1981), 249-65.

16 H. J. Perkin, «The ‘social tone’ of Victorian seaside resorts in the North-West», Northern History 12 (1976), 181-94.

17 J. K. Walton, «The demand for working-class seaside holidays».

18 M. Chadefaud, Aux origines du tourisme dans les pays de l’Adour (Pau, 1987) ; Gabriel Désert, La vie quotidienne sur les plages normandes du Second Empire aux Années Folles (Paris, 1983). See also (for example) J. K. Walton and J. Smith, «The first century of beach tourism in Spain: San Sebastián and the playas del norte, from the 1830s to the 1930s», in J. Towner et al. (eds.), Tourism in Spain: critical perspectives (Wallingford, 1996).

19 E. Furlough, ‘Making mass vacations: tourism and consumer culture in France, 1930s to 1970s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998), 247-86; J. Golby and A. Purdue, The civilisation of the crowd: popular culture in England 1750-1900 (second edn., Stroud, 1999), 157-9.

20 J. K. Walton, English seaside resort, Chapter 8.

21 R. Shields, Places on the margin (London, 1991).

22 J. K. Walton, English seaside resort, Chapters 6-8.

23 Harvey Taylor, A claim on the countryside (Keele: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

24 See above, note 20.

25 J. Travis, «Continuity and change», 9-12; J. K. Walton, «The social development of Blackpool 1788-1914», Ph.D. thesis, Lancaster University, 1974, 234-7, 242-4.

26 J. Travis, «Continuity and change», 17; David N. Smith, The railway and its passengers: a social history (Newton Abbot, 1988).

27 The best evidence on this is visual, and comes from the analysis of photographs of holiday crowds in the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Archive and from film in the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection, National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield. For an approach to analysing such material, María Antonia PAZ, «Cine para la historia urbana: Madrid, 1896-1936», Historia Contemporánea 22 (2001), 179-213.

28 J. K. Walton, English seaside resort, Chapter 8.

29 Ibid; and see also Shields, Places on the margin; Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds.), Popular culture and social relations (Milton Keynes, 1986); N. Morgan and A. Pritchard, Power and politics at the seaside (Exeter, 1999); J. K. Walton, The British seaside: holidays and resorts in the twentieth century (Manchester, 2000); idem., «Popular entertainment and public order: the Blackpool Carnivals of 1923-4», Northern History 34 (1998), 170-88. For «place-myth» see Urry, Consuming places.

30 D. Cannadine, Lords and landlords: the aristocracy and the towns 1774-1967 (Leicester, 1980); idem. (ed.), Patricians, power and politics in nineteenth-century towns (Leicester, 1982), chapters on Bournemouth and Southport; J. K. Walton and J. Walvin (eds.), Leisure in Britain 1780-1939 (Manchester, 1983), chapters on Blackpool, Bournemouth and Ilfracombe; Laura Chase, «The creation of place image in inter-war Clacton and Frinton», Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex, 1999; Dawn Crouch, «Westgate on Sea 1865-1940», Ph.D. thesis, University of Kent, 1999.

31 J. K. Walton, Blackpool (Edinburgh, 1998), for a case-study. For «gradient analysis», F.M.L. Thompson, Hampstead: building a borough (London, 1974).

32 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven and London, 2000). See also, for example, Simon Gunn, The public culture of the Victorian middle class (Manchester, 2001).

33 Robert W. Lewis, «Football hooliganism in England before 1914: a critique of the Dunning thesis», International Journal of the History of Sport 13 (1996), 310-39; Jeffrey Richards, «Football and the crisis of British identity», in S. Caunce, E. Mazierska, S. Sydney-Smith and J. K. Walton (eds.), Relocating Britishness (Manchester, forthcoming 2003).

34 F. M. L. Thompson, The rise of respectable society (London, 1988); Harold Perkin, The structured crowd (Brighton, 1981).

35 Gavy Cross (ed.), Worktowners at Blackpool (London, 1990); William Holt, articles on seaside crowds in the Daily Dispatch, August 1934.

36 Helen Meller, European cities 1890-1930s: history, culture and the built environment (Chichester, 2001), Chapter 5; J. K. Walton et al., «Crime, migration and social change in north-west England and the Basque Country, c. 1870-1930», British Journal of Criminology 39 (1999), 90-112; J. K. Walton, Blackpool; Walton, British seaside, Chapters 4-6; Morgan and Pritchard, Power and politics.

37 J. K. Walton, British seaside, 96-101; J. K. Walton, «Consuming the beach: seaside resorts and cultures of tourism in England and Spain from the 1840s to the 1930s», in S. Baranowski and E. Furlough (eds.), Being elsewhere: tourism, consumer culture and identity in modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, 2002), 272-98.

38 E. J. Hobsbawm, The age of Empire (London, 1987).

39 J. Demetriadi, «English and Welsh seaside resorts, with special reference to Blackpool and Margate, 1950-1974», Ph.D. thesis, Lancaster University, 1995; idem., «The golden years, 1950-74», in Shaw and Williams, The rise and fall of British coastal resorts, 49-75; Walton, British seaside; J. K. Walton, «Blackpool and the varieties of Britishness», in Caunce et al. (eds.), Relocating Britishness.

Autore

University of Central Lancashire

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