Being as staycations are on the rise, we thought we’d take a look to see where they and holiday camps all began, in a brief ‘potted history’. We tend to take holidays for granted, our two weeks in the summer is for those who can afford it an annual ‘given’, a part of our culture.
But it wasn’t alway this way. In 1871 the first public holidays were announced under the Bank Holidays Act. Again, something which we now take for granted must have been a revelation for workers at the time.
Workers would take daytrips to the seaside from the factories, and around this time the seaside resorts grew and added attractions, many of them building piers. However the experience of the working class holidaymaker was quite different from their wealthy counterparts.
The wealthy would stay for a week, not just a day. They would also had ‘bathing machines’ which were crude carriages that actually took people into the sea. The machines were either pushed, or if you could afford drawn by a horse. Once in the sea the machines were designed to shield the occupants from view whilst in the sea. No such luxury for the working classes though!
Even though much or the UK’s manufacturing base has been eroded the practice of the ‘factory holiday’ still exists in companies like Ford, who will close for a given period every summer, and that is when the workers get to take their holidays, but luckily for their workers, they get weeks off, not days.
The machines disappeared at the turn of the 20th century, but bathing boxes still remain in a few places such as Brighton. Roll on to the thirties, and Butlins started building holiday camps as well as Warners, and by 1939, there were approximately 200 holiday camps in the UK. More
During the war many of the camps were used by the military either as training bases or for prisoner internment. After the war Pontins were created and through the fifties and sixties they along with other operators became a booming industry.
It was not to last however, as the advent of the cheap package holiday in the seventies started to impact on the camps, and by the eighties many were closing down. Those remaining today are a mix of the traditional and, the progressive. Many remain traditional, with family entertainment and activity at their core, a continuation of the ‘redcoat’ model.
More recently however, many locations are developing more exclusive accommodations, with lodges being built at many new locations, often with private hot tubs. You will see them advertised with a good looking couple holding champagne flutes aloft, whereas the traditional camps advertise a happy family skipping across the dunes.
It will be interesting to see how the industry develops over the next few years, as although the economy may recover, that doesn’t mean that in a few years time everyone will be hopping on a plane. With the growth in staycations attachments will form, and as long as the holiday parks give people the best of service they are likely to keep coming back.
By: Gareth Whieldon
