ESSAYS BY THE WAY
VII — Holiday Towns
By “Scrutator. ”
Now that the holidays are over and we are anxiously adding up the sums on the counterfoils of our cheque books, in the feverish hope that the total won’t come to what it does, now is the appropriate time, whilst the memories are still fresh with us, to talk about holiday towns.
In the good old days, long before the time of central heating, sanitation, and pure water supplies, there was, I suppose, no such thing as a holiday town. In those days folk made holiday in their own towns, the town that they worked and lived in all the year round, but which on occasion was given over to the tourney or the fair. Probably it was largely a question of travel and the difficulties of travelling -a pilgrimage in those far-off times was not an affair to be lightly undertaken, and even at the end of the 18th century, when travelling by stage and coach had reached something like perfection, a visit to relations (see novels of the period by Miss Jane Austen) was for ordinary mortals a tremendous business. For the more favoured people, the “Quality” as they were called to distinguish them, I suppose, from the “Quantity, ” there were the spas, the earliest of our holiday towns. They may be called the ‘‘Stage-coach
towns’’; Bath, Hampstead, Epsom, and Tunbridge Wells are amongst these holiday or health resorts of the Dick Turpin era.
Of the seaside towns, though Brighton and Weymouth, and even Margate and Ramsgate, may be said to have had their beginnings in the stage-coach period, they, with all the other coastal camps, really developed with the railways, only, instead of Dick Turpin and other rapacious highwaymen, we have rapacious landladies, most of whom “had seen better days, ” or so they said, though how any of their days could have been better from their point of view I do not know. The phrase had, I believe, some vague reference to a more genteel past, though possibly, with the more flagrant of the species, it might have been expected to excuse a woeful deficiency in the matter of cooking and cleanliness.
If you wish to get an idea of our seaside holiday towns in the early railway period, I cannot do better than recommend you to the contemporary pages of Punch, where John Leach’s drawings give a pictorial record of that eventful epoch.
The rise of the holiday town may be said to be in
direct ratio to our urbanisation: even to this day NEW PREMISES FOR MESSRS. MADELON CHAUMET, LTD., 35 BERKELEY STREET, W. l.
Joseph Emberton, A. R. I. B. A., Architect.
VII — Holiday Towns
By “Scrutator. ”
Now that the holidays are over and we are anxiously adding up the sums on the counterfoils of our cheque books, in the feverish hope that the total won’t come to what it does, now is the appropriate time, whilst the memories are still fresh with us, to talk about holiday towns.
In the good old days, long before the time of central heating, sanitation, and pure water supplies, there was, I suppose, no such thing as a holiday town. In those days folk made holiday in their own towns, the town that they worked and lived in all the year round, but which on occasion was given over to the tourney or the fair. Probably it was largely a question of travel and the difficulties of travelling -a pilgrimage in those far-off times was not an affair to be lightly undertaken, and even at the end of the 18th century, when travelling by stage and coach had reached something like perfection, a visit to relations (see novels of the period by Miss Jane Austen) was for ordinary mortals a tremendous business. For the more favoured people, the “Quality” as they were called to distinguish them, I suppose, from the “Quantity, ” there were the spas, the earliest of our holiday towns. They may be called the ‘‘Stage-coach
towns’’; Bath, Hampstead, Epsom, and Tunbridge Wells are amongst these holiday or health resorts of the Dick Turpin era.
Of the seaside towns, though Brighton and Weymouth, and even Margate and Ramsgate, may be said to have had their beginnings in the stage-coach period, they, with all the other coastal camps, really developed with the railways, only, instead of Dick Turpin and other rapacious highwaymen, we have rapacious landladies, most of whom “had seen better days, ” or so they said, though how any of their days could have been better from their point of view I do not know. The phrase had, I believe, some vague reference to a more genteel past, though possibly, with the more flagrant of the species, it might have been expected to excuse a woeful deficiency in the matter of cooking and cleanliness.
If you wish to get an idea of our seaside holiday towns in the early railway period, I cannot do better than recommend you to the contemporary pages of Punch, where John Leach’s drawings give a pictorial record of that eventful epoch.
The rise of the holiday town may be said to be in
direct ratio to our urbanisation: even to this day NEW PREMISES FOR MESSRS. MADELON CHAUMET, LTD., 35 BERKELEY STREET, W. l.
Joseph Emberton, A. R. I. B. A., Architect.