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There were no caravans in Cromer 400 years ago, Benidorm's beach was deserted, and the Inca Trail was still in the hands of Conquistadors. Back then there were no holiday destinations because holidays, at least in the modern sense, did not exist. Holidays were entirely synonymous with religious festivals, rather than the rest and recreation with which we tend to associate them today.
The transition from piety to pleasure owes much to political, social and technological changes that have taken place in Britain's recent history. But the origin of the transition dates back to Tudor times, to prominent spa towns like Bath and Buxton. Spas, of course, are ancient inventions. It was the Romans, after all, who first put Bath on the map. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, the spa underwent something of a revival as the medical profession threw its weight behind the healing properties of mineral waters.
The early spa towns could hardly be called resorts. They catered for the sick and diseased, who came hoping to find physical and spiritual sustenance. If the hype was to be believed, almost every ailment imaginable, from leprosy and scurvy to fertility and melancholy, could be cured by a visit to the spa. At Bath, the waters were held in such high regard that Queen Elizabeth I was sent there by her doctors.
Royal patronage had the immediate effect of turning spas into health resorts for the rich. Lodging, shops, assembly rooms, theatres and bowling greens were built to meet the demands of a new clientele, seeking to recuperate from their exhausting lives of leisure.
However, it wasn't until after the Civil War, and the demise of Puritanism, that the popularity of spas really took off. In the second half of the 17th century, new spas began springing up all over the place. Epsom, Scarborough and Tunbridge Wells became established social centres for the upper classes, while London spas at Islington, Streatham, Richmond and Hampstead offered ideal weekend retreats.
Spas became part of the fabric of English life; they were self-contained centres of exclusivity, the Ascot and Henley of their day. They remained popular well into the 19th century, but were eventually undermined by the more sophisticated spas of Continental Europe, and advances in medical knowledge.
It seems bizarre that an island nation like Britain should take so long to discover the simple pleasures of a swim at the seaside. But swimming was long associated with Roman decadence. In the 16th century, a Cambridge undergraduate would face a double flogging if found guilty of bathing in one of the county's rivers or pools; and a second offence meant expulsion. Only after the Restoration did public bathing became more socially acceptable.
Freed from puritanical constraints, the rise of the British seaside followed the path laid down by the spa resorts. The medical profession's belief in the therapeutic properties of saltwater kick-started the move from town to coast. Opened in 1796, the Royal Sea Bathing Infirmary at Margate offered a saltwater cure for the poor. But the seaside was largely the realm of the rich, with small and fashionable resorts growing up around what soon became new centres of high society.
Scarborough, already established as a spa town, slid easily into its new role as a fashionable seaside getaway. But it was Brighton that set the standard for others to follow. Its close proximity to London was crucial to its success, but once again royal visits, most notably by the Prince of Wales in 1783 and 1784, helped to cement its reputation.
The first half of the 19th century saw massive growth in the popularity of seaside resorts. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing, Britain was experiencing some drastic demographic changes, as the country's economic momentum shifted from the countryside to the towns. Boats and trains were connecting people and places like never before, and city living, with its attendant miseries, inspired thoughts of escape. This was the Romantic era, characterised by a new-found reverence for the natural world. The sea acquired a lure and mystique that most found difficult to resist.
Industrialisation turned the Victorian seaside resort into a holiday destination for the masses. Here was a place that catered for all classes and ages. Among the donkey rides and travelling fairs, the piers and bathing machines, the brass bands and firework displays, the shrimping and the shell-collecting, were the origins of the modern family holiday.
On 5 July 1841, 570 passengers paid a shilling each to travel by train from Leicester to a temperance rally in Loughborough. The excursion was organised by a young Thomas Cook, and marked the beginning of a new career for a wood turner, temperance reformer, and travel agent in the making.
Cook was never driven solely by commercial considerations. There was an element of moral instruction in his desire to bring organised travel to the masses. His motivation was not only to make holidays more widely available, but to raise their tone, to dilute the holiday excess with a dose of education. In 1851, he organised excursions to the Great Exhibition in London, bringing 165,000 people from Yorkshire alone.
The same civilising philosophy was adopted by many of the travel agencies that followed Cook's lead. In his early forays into the travel market, Sir Henry Lunn, for instance, catered primarily for religious ministers and their families. Likewise, Lunn's future partner, the Polytechnic Touring Association, started out from humble beginnings. In 1872, it opened a holiday home in Brighton for the Polytechnic's poor.
Cook, meanwhile, had his sights set on more distant shores. The Continent had been the exclusive playground of the rich, with France, Italy and the Swiss Alps the most popular haunts. Only the wealthy could afford to employ the couriers and guides that were needed to navigate language barriers, passport problems and all the other obstacles of foreign travel. But Cook realised that through careful organisation, he could become a universal courier and guide, bringing distant and exotic places into the reach of those who could otherwise not afford them. With specially printed guide books, and the age-old principle of safety in numbers, he made foreign travel hugely attractive to the middle classes.
Characteristically, Cook's first foreign tour was educational in tone, taking tourists from Leicester to the Paris Exhibition of 1855. The trip, meticulous in every detail, was a great success, and the prototype for millions of future foreign excursions to Europe and beyond. Cook was not without his critics, of course. There were those who grumbled about the insularity and vulgarity of it all. But criticism has never done much to dent the overwhelming popularity of the package holiday.
Nothing has had such a profound effect on how we take our holidays as the development of air travel. The impact of the aeroplane mirrors that of the steam train over 100 years earlier, but on a massive scale. Air travel has made the world accessible to more people than ever before.
European air travel didn't really take off until after the First World War, with fledgling cross channel services between London, Paris and other major cities. Seating arrangements were primitive: some passengers were obliged to sit in an open cockpit, where birdwatching was the only in-flight entertainment on offer.
These kinds of discomforts didn't come cheap. In 1921, the cost of a single air fare from London to Paris was £6 6s – about £180 in today's money. But even in these early days, competition between airlines was fierce. Eventually, it was the German airline, Lufthansa, that came to dominate the European market during the interwar years. In the late 1920s, the airline was carrying about 90,000 passengers a year on all its routes. Today, it's once again Europe's largest air carrier, with traffic reaching 44.5 million passengers in 2003.
Regular transatlantic services didn't start until after the Second World War. In 1947, airlines carried 209,000 passengers across the North Atlantic, while 415,000 travelled by sea. By 1957 the numbers were about equal, but a year later the airlines were leaving the shipping companies in their wake. That year, almost 1.3 million passengers crossed the Atlantic by plane, compared to the 964,000 who preferred to go by boat. By 1970, the game was almost up for the shipping companies. Ten million air passengers equated to almost 40 times the number travelling by sea.
During the late 1970s, the cost of air travel continued to fall. Freddie Laker's Skytrain service offered flights from London to New York for a then-astonishing £118, helping set a new trend for low-cost airlines. Cheap package holidays and the amazing value of long-haul flights mean that more and more people now take their holidays abroad. In 2003, a staggering 200 million outbound passengers filed their way through the UK's airports. And with no sign of a slow-down, this number is expected to double by 2020.
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