Leisure and Commerce: Seafront Rivals in England’s First Seaside Resorts
Abstract
During the first half of the 18th century, the earliest seaside resorts were created in England in small coastal towns that had previously made their living as commercial and fishing ports. Today many seaside resorts are still co-located with ports, ranging from small, quaint fishing and leisure harbours to major container and ferry ports. In most towns, industrial places of work are in areas near the periphery or where the edge of the town was located when the factories or mills were being created in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, the harbour inevitably lies at the heart and on the front of a settlement that might become a seaside resort, and often this aspect of their story has continued alongside the new leisure industry that has come to dominate their identity. Therefore, this could lead to conflicts over time between polite society and the commercial realm, and respectable visitors and themen and women servicing the harbour and its shipping. Over 300 years, the detailed geographical and economic relationship between leisure and commerce on seafronts has evolved, and new arrangements are being reached as visitor numbers have increased and as commercial facilities have expanded. This paper will consider a number of 18thcentury English and Welsh ports that pioneered sea bathing and seaside holidays. Today, some are seaside resorts, some are purely ports, and a small group havemanaged to negotiate a more or less uneasy relationship between these two apparently conflicting functions.
Keywords: leisure, commerce, seaside resorts
References
A journey from London to Scarborough. (1734). London, England: Caesar Ward and Richard Chandler.
A guide to all the watering and sea-bathing places. (1810). London, England: N. p.
Alsop, W. (1832). A concise history of Southport, etc. Southport, England:William Alsop.
Ascott, D. E., Lewis, F., & Power, M. (2006). Liverpool 1660– 1750: People, prosperity and power. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press.
Bailey, F. A. (1955). A history of Southport. Southport, England: A. Downie.
Berry, S. (2005). Georgian Brighton. Chichester, England: Phillimore & Co.
Borsay, P. (1991). The English urban renaissance. Oxford, England: Clarendon.
Borsay, P. (2000). Health and leisure resorts 1700–1840. In P. Clarke (Ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain 1540–1840 (pp. 775–804). Cambridge, England: University Press.
Brodie, A. (2012). Liverpool and the origins of the seaside resort. The Georgian Group Journal, 20, 63–76.
Brodie, A., Ellis, C., Stuart, D., & Winter, G. (2008). Weymouth’s seaside heritage. Swindon, England: English Heritage.
Buck, S., & Buck, N. (1728). South-West Prospect of Liverpoole. British Library Maps (K.Top.18.76.a), The British Library, London, England.
Calvert, J. (1987). ‘The means of cleanliness:’ The provision of baths and wash-houses in early Victorian Liverpool. Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 137, 117–136.
Cartwright, J. J. (Ed.) (1888). The travels through England of Dr Richard Pococke. London, England: Camden Society.
Chalklin, C. W. (1974). The provincial towns of Georgian England: A study of the building process, 1740–1820. Montreal, Canada:McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Chalklin, C. W. (2001). The rise of the English town, 1650– 1850. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Defoe, D. (1968). A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain (Vol. 2). London, England: Frank Cass.
Enfield, W. (1773). An essay towards the history of Leverpool. London, England: Printed for J. Johnson.
Freeling, A. (Ed.) (1839). Picturesque excursions; Containing upwards of four hundred views, at and near places of popular resort. London, England: Ackermann & Co.
Gill, C. (1993). Plymouth: A new history. Tiverton, England: Devon Books.
Glazebrook, T. K. (1862). A guide to Southport, North Meols in the county of Lancaster: With an account of the places in the immediate neighbourhood (2nd ed.). London, England.
Gregory, R. A., Raynor, C., Adams, M., Philpott, R., Howard- Davies, C., Johnson, N., Hughes, V., & Higgins, D. A. (2014). Archaeology at the waterfront 1: Investigating Liverpool’s historic docks. Lancaster, England: Oxford Archaeology North.
Hembry, P. (1990). The English spa 1560–1815: A social history. London, England: Athlone.
Jarvis, A. (2014). Liverpool: A history of ‘The Great Port.’ Liverpool, England: Liverpool History Press.
Lewis, J. (1736). The history and antiquities, as well ecclesiastical and civil, of the Isle of Tenet, in Kent. London, England: J. Lewis.
Liverpool’s First Directory. (1987). Liverpool, England: Scouse Press.
Lloyd, D.W. (1974). Buildings of Portsmouth and its environs. Portsmouth, England: Portsmouth City Council.
Longmore, J. (1989). Liverpool Corporation as landowners and dock builders, 1709–1835. In C. W. Chalklin and J. R. Wordie (Eds.), Town and countryside: The English landowner in the national economy, 1660–1860 (pp. 116– 146). London, England: Unwin Hyman.
Macky, J. (1714–1723). A journey through England (3 vols.). London, England.
Maxwell, A. (1755). Portsmouth: A descriptive poem in two books. Portsmouth, England.
Miskell, L. (2011). A town divided? Sea-bathing, dock- building and oyster-fishing in nineteenth-century Swansea. In P. Borsay and J.Walton (Ed.),Resorts and ports: European seaside towns since 1700 (pp. 113–125). Bristol, England: Channel View Publications.
Mitchell, B. R. (1962). Abstract of British historical statistics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Moss, W. (2007). Georgian Liverpool: A guide to the city in 1797. Lancaster, England: Palatine.
MrH. (1757). Ajournal of eight days journey from Portsmouth to Kingston upon Thames. London, England.
Newlands, J. (1856). Report on the establishment and present condition of the public baths & wash-houses in Liverpool. Liverpool, England.
Peet, H. (Ed.) (1908). Liverpool in the reign of Queen Anne, 1705 and 1708. Liverpool, England: Henry Young.
Porter, R. (1982). English society in the eighteenth century. London, England: Allen Lane.
Rideout, E. H. (1927). The old custom house, Liverpool. Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 79, 141–174.
Riley, R. C. (1972). The growth of Southsea as a naval satellite and Victorian resort. Portsmouth, England: Portsmouth City Council.
Ritchie-Noakes, N. (1984). Liverpool’s historic waterfront. London, England: hmso.
Robinson, F. (1848). A Descriptive history of Southport . . . on the western coast of Lancashire. London, England: Hall & Co.
Rolf, V. (2011). Bathing houses and plunge pools. Oxford, England: Shire.
Setterington, J. (N.d.). View of the ancient town, castle, harbour, and spaw of Scarborough. British Library Maps (K. Top. 44.47.b), The British Library, London, England.
Sharples, J., & Stonard, J. (2008). Built on commerce: Liverpool’s central business district. Swindon, England: English Heritage.
Shaw, P. (1734). An enquiry into the contents, virtues and uses of the Scarborough Spaw-Waters. London, England: Peter Shaw.
Shaw, P. (1735). A Dissertation on the contents, virtues and uses, of cold and hot mineral springs; particularly, those of Scarborough: In a letter to Robert Robinson. London, England: Ward and Chandler.
Stewart-Brown, R. (1911). Maps and plans of Liverpool and district by the eyes family of surveyors. Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 62, 143–174.
Temple Patterson, A. (1966). A history of Southampton, 1700–1914 (Volume 1). Southampton, England: Southampton University Press.
The Scarborough Miscellany for the Year 1732. (1732). London, England.
The Scarborough Miscellany for the Year 1733. (1733). London, England.
The Scarborough Miscellany for the Year 1734. (1734). London, England.
Tibbles, A. (2003). A new painting of Liverpool: A prospect of Liverpool about 1725. Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 152, 21–25.
Touzeau, J. (1910). The rise and progress of Liverpool from 1551–1835. Liverpool, England: Liverpool Booksellers Co.
Tyrer, F. (1968–1972). The great diurnal of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire (3 vols.). Chester, England: Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire.
Von Kielmansegg, F. (1902). Diary of a journey to England in the years 1761–1762. London, England: Longmans & Co.
Walton, J. K. (1983). The English seaside resort: A social history, 1750–1914. Leicester, England: Leicester University Press.
Whyman, J. (1980). A three-week holiday in Ramsgate during July and August 1829. Archaeologia Cantiana, 96, 185–225.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
1. Copyright
Copyright for all articles published in Academica Turistica - Tourism and Innovation Journal is held by individual authors. Authors are themselves responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce copyright material from other sources.
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete the Publication Agreement and Copyright Licence, based on the Open Access Model Publishing Agreement.
Articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.
Under the terms of this license, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their articles. They can archive the pre-print and post-print or publisher's version of their work. They will, however, assign to Academica Turistica - Tourism and Innovation Journal (AT–TIJ) the permanent right to electronically distribute their manuscript and, after it has appeared in AT–TIJ, they may republish their text as long as they clearly acknowledge AT–TIJ as the place of the original publication.
2. Author Fees
Article submission, processing and/or publishing fees are not charged.
