Holidays and travel over time
Holidays Before the Railway
For most people in medieval and early modern England, holidays meant feast days and holy days. The word “holiday” derives from “holy day”. The Church calendar provided around forty such days per year, including Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and Michaelmas. These were not just religious occasions — they were the primary leisure breaks available to ordinary working people, who filled them with sport, dancing, fairs and communal feasting.
Travel for leisure was a privilege of the wealthy. In the eighteenth century, upper-class young men undertook the Grand Tour as a cultural education. The typical route included Paris, the Swiss Alps, and the cities of northern Italy — Venice, Florence and Rome. Young men spent months or years abroad, studying art, architecture and antiquities, and returned with Continental tastes and acquired artworks. It was expensive, time-consuming and available only to the elite.
Thomas Cook organised the first commercially promoted railway excursion in 1841 — a trip from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance rally. He went on to develop package tours to the seaside and eventually abroad, making leisure travel accessible to the middle classes and, later, the working class.
The Railway and the Seaside
The rapid expansion of the railway network after the 1840s transformed the British holiday. Resorts that had previously been accessible only to wealthy visitors who could travel by coach suddenly became reachable in hours from industrial cities. Blackpool, accessible by rail from Manchester and Preston from the 1840s onwards, grew from a small village into a major resort. Brighton, already fashionable among London’s elite, was transformed when the London–Brighton line opened in 1841, cutting the journey to under two hours.
Seaside resorts invested heavily in attractions: piers, promenades, theatres, bandstands and amusement arcades. The railway brought day-trippers and week-long holidaymakers alike. Blackpool built its famous tower in 1894, modelled on the Eiffel Tower. By the late nineteenth century, the seaside holiday had become a defining feature of working-class leisure culture in industrial Britain.
The Bank Holiday Act of 1871, introduced by Sir John Lubbock, created official public holidays — Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August, and Boxing Day. These were not paid holidays for most workers initially, but they established the principle of regular leisure time. Crucially, they coincided with the growth of cheap rail travel, making day trips and short breaks possible for millions.
Paid holidays came later and unevenly. Some workers had negotiated a week’s paid leave by the early twentieth century, but millions had none. The Holidays with Pay Act of 1938 required employers to give workers at least one week’s paid holiday per year — though war interrupted its full implementation. By the 1950s and 1960s, two weeks of paid annual leave was becoming the norm, fundamentally changing the scale of the British holiday market.
Holiday Camps and National Parks
The 1930s saw the rise of the holiday camp. Billy Butlin opened his first camp at Skegness in 1936, offering an all-inclusive holiday at a fixed price. Holiday camps were designed to give working-class families a full week’s holiday without the worry of organising food, accommodation and entertainment separately. By the early 1950s, Butlin’s camps were hosting around a million visitors a year. The holiday camp model represented a new democratisation of the British holiday.
The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 created the first national parks in England and Wales, designating areas of outstanding natural beauty for public enjoyment. The Peak District became the first national park in 1951. Improved bus and car ownership allowed day-trippers and hikers to reach the countryside in growing numbers through the 1950s and 1960s.
Package holidays to the Mediterranean expanded rapidly during the 1960s. Vladimir Raitz of Horizon Holidays organised the first modern package tour to Corsica in 1950, and the market grew quickly once jet aviation made the journey faster. By the early 1970s, millions of British holidaymakers were flying to Spain, Greece and Portugal each year. Low-cost airlines like Ryanair and easyJet, which expanded during the 1990s, further reduced the cost of foreign travel.
The consequence for British seaside resorts was devastating. Blackpool, Skegness, Margate and other traditional resorts faced declining visitor numbers from the 1970s onwards. They struggled to compete with guaranteed sunshine, cheap wine and modern hotels abroad. Some invested in new attractions — Blackpool added a major indoor entertainment complex. Others declined sharply, with high unemployment and derelict seafronts becoming a visible social problem by the 1980s.
The growth of cheap air travel and Mediterranean package holidays from the 1960s fundamentally changed British holiday patterns. Millions chose Spain and Greece over Blackpool and Scarborough. British seaside resorts experienced serious decline: by the 1970s many were losing visitors rapidly to foreign destinations.
Change and Continuity
Tracing holiday patterns from c.500 to the present reveals a clear pattern of gradual widening access. Medieval feast days were universally available but brief; the Grand Tour was exclusive and long. The railway opened the seaside to the urban working class; bank holidays and paid leave formalised leisure time; holiday camps democratised the week-away holiday; package holidays exported British leisure culture to the Mediterranean. Technology — the steam locomotive, the jet aircraft, the budget airline — was the decisive driver of each shift. Throughout, class shaped both what was possible and where people went.