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This book is the story of two holiday camp chains established in the 1930s that provided thousands with packaged pleasure. Warner and Butlin’s commercial camps emerged at the intersection of cultural shifts that politicised working-class leisure and consumption. Entertainment fostered in the post-war camps provided a forum for popular pleasure that reinforced the idea of a ‘national’ culture grown from the common experience of war.
Butlin and Warner, the big commercial chains of the 50s and 60s, are enmeshed in our social and cultural history. Dawson uncovers the significance of the holiday camps to the political, economic, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain, drawing on an impressive variety of sources, from government documents to trade journals, advertising, photographs, oral histories, literature, films and songs.
This unique volume will be of interest to academics and specialists of British social history, popular culture and tourism studies whilst remaining accessible to enthusiasts.
'This is an excellent book that examines the history of holiday camps and paid holidays.'
Brad Beaven, English Historical Review, vol 128, no 530, February 2013
Introduction: Creating a culture for leisure
1. Imagining consumers: Working-class families and paid holidays
2. Building the luxury holiday camp industry
3. Advertising holiday camp culture and inventing social harmony
4. War and the business of leisure
5. The 'People's Peace': Postwar pleasure and austerity
6. Planned pleasure, labour shortages and consumer resistance
Epilogue
Select Bibliography
Index