The Victorian Era

How Did the Seaside Become Popular

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The seaside became popular in the Victorian period through a long process of change in the leisure patterns, the transport systems, the medical advice, and the social customs of the British people. The seaside resort itself was older than the reign — Brighton and Scarborough had been fashionable with the gentry since the eighteenth century — but it was the railway age that transformed the resort into the great popular holiday institution of the nation. The wider context of Victorian entertainment is set out in Victorian Entertainment and Leisure, and the parent overview is Victorian Cities, Transport, and Entertainment.

The Principal Resorts

The principal seaside resorts of the period were concentrated on the south coast, the east coast, and the north-west coast. On the south coast, Brighton — with George IV’s exotic Royal Pavilion (completed 1823 in the Indo-Saracenic style) — was the most fashionable; Hastings, Eastbourne, Bournemouth, Folkestone, Margate, Ramsgate, and Deal served the middle classes and the day trippers from London; Weymouth and Torquay served the west. On the east coast, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Felixstowe, Clacton, Southend, Whitby, and Scarborough were the principal resorts. The north-west coast was the playground of the industrial cities of Lancashire and the West Riding: Blackpool, Southport, Morecambe, and Llandudno received the holiday crowds of the mill towns, with their Wakes Weeks (a traditional week of holidays observed at different times in each mill town) sending whole streets down to the sea at once.

The Role of the Railways

The new railways were the principal cause of the rise of the seaside. Cheap excursion fares — a shilling return from Manchester to Blackpool, half-a-crown from London to Brighton — brought the coast within reach of working families for the first time. The Bank Holidays Act of 1871, which established Easter Monday, Whit Monday, and Boxing Day as bank holidays, and the August Bank Holiday Act of the same year gave the new working class time off, and the combination produced the Bank Holiday exodus that has continued to the present. Lancashire mill workers crowded to Blackpool during the Wakes Weeks, Londoners took the train to Brighton, Margate, and Southend, and the day trip and the week’s holiday became fixtures of working-class life.

The Role of the Doctors

The new medical advice gave the seaside a respectable basis. Physicians recommended sea bathing, sea air, and even the drinking of sea water as treatments for a wide range of complaints, and the seaside cure was prescribed for consumption, scrofula, rickets, anaemia, and nervous exhaustion. The bathing machine — a small wooden hut on wheels, drawn into the sea by a horse, in which the bather could undress and step directly into the water — preserved the modesty of the bather; invalids were wheeled along the promenades in bath chairs; and the resorts competed with one another in advertising the purity of their air and the mildness of their climate. The medical context is examined in Victorian Medicine and Public Health.

The Architecture of the Seaside

The great age of the seaside architecture was the second half of the nineteenth century. Brighton’s Madeira Terrace, the Chain Pier (1823, destroyed 1896), and the West Pier (1866) were among the earlier works; the Blackpool North Pier (1863), the Blackpool Central Pier (1868), the Southend Pier (1889, the longest pleasure pier in the world at 1.34 miles), and the Brighton Palace Pier (1899) were the great piers of the period. The piers offered bandstands, theatres, shops, and pavilions, and they were the heart of the resort’s entertainment. The great cliff lifts of the south coast — the Babbacombe Cliff Railway, the Saltburn Cliff Lift — were built in the same period, and the resort hotels — the Grand in Brighton, the Metropole in Blackpool, the Crown in Scarborough — were some of the largest buildings of their kind in the country.