Chapter 27 - Tourism and Recreation

Summary

Introduction

Seaside holidays have a long history. They were popular for several hundred years (100 BCE – 400) among the ruling classes of the Roman Empire: these visited the coast of Campania, the Bay of Naples, Capri and Sicily for swimming, boating, recreational fishing and generally lounging about (Balsdon, 1969). But thereafter seaside holidaying largely fell out of fashion. In the mid-18th century, the leisured classes again began frequenting seaside resorts, largely as a result of the health benefits proclaimed by Dr. Richard Russell of Brighton, England, in 1755 (Russell, 1755). Seaside resorts such as Brighton and Weymouth developed in England, substantially helped by the royal patronage of Kings George III and George IV of Great Britain (Brandon, 1974). After the end of the Napoleonic wars, similar developments took place across Europe, for example at Putbus, on the island of Rugen in Germany (Lichtnau, 1996). The development of railway and steamship networks led both to the development of long-distance tourism for the wealthy, with the rich of northern Europe going to the French Riviera, and to more local mass tourism, with new seaside resorts growing up to serve the working classes of industrialised towns in all countries where industrialisation took place. In England, whole towns would close down for a “wakes week”, and a large part of the population would move to seaside resorts to take a holiday: for example, in 1860 in north-west England, 23,000 travelled from the one town of Oldham alone for a week in the seaside resort of Blackpool (Walton, 1983). Between 1840 and 1969, the population of Blackpool (based almost entirely on the tourist industry) grew from 500 to 150,000 (Pevsner, 1969).

This relatively local mass tourism industry gave way to the modern mass tourist industry from the 1960s onwards. This was facilitated mainly by the introduction of, first, large passenger jet aircraft in the 1960s and, then, large-bodied jet aircraft in the 1970s, which (like the railways a century earlier) enabled relatively cheap mass transit over long distances that were not previously feasible (Sezgin et al., 2012).

Present nature and magnitude of tourism

International tourism has grown immensely over the last half century. In 1965, the number of international tourist arrivals worldwide was estimated at 112.9 million.