The Seaside, Health and the Environment in England and Wales since 1800

John Hassan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781840142655
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351882194
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The seaside has always held a special position in British history as a place of rest, relaxation and recuperation. Over the last 200 years many have made their way to the coast, attracted by the long sunshine hours, the clean ozone-charged air and the opportunities for bathing in and even drinking sea-water. Although the early health resort ideal began to give way to more pleasure orientated themes in the nineteenth century, the seaside holiday was still regarded by many as a wholesome and invigorating break from inland urban life well into the twentieth century. Yet with ever increasing numbers of visitors and rising levels of coastal pollution, this was by no means a forgone conclusion. The Seaside, Health and the Environment in England and Wales since 1800 explores the ways in which English seaside resorts continually reinvented themselves to take account of contemporary trends in popular leisure and maintain their hold on the public's imagination. Particular account is paid to the interwar years when new obsessions with outdoor activities such as sunbathing and tanning were purposefully adopted by the industry to define the modern image of the resort holiday. For these and other reasons the seaside holiday reached new peaks of popularity in the 1930s and 1950s, yet, this very success placed enormous pressures on the environmental amenities that people came to enjoy. As this work shows, environmental stresses were manifold, particularly pollution of the resorts' prime assets, their beaches. As such, serious questions are raised concerning why it took such a long time for a determined effort to be made to reverse beach pollution, and the lessons to be learned regarding the impact of negative images of the coast as a zone of danger and infection.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Preliminaries

Britain became an island as a result of the rise in sea levels by some 300 feet after the last Ice Age. This occurred as recently as some eight thousand years ago. The marine corridor thereby created became this land’s most important defining natural characteristic. The post-glacial separation of Britain from the European landmass was well understood by the late nineteenth century (Jukes Brown, 1893). Despite (or because of) the recent nature of the event and the subsequent colonization of the new island by people from Europe, to its inhabitants, constantly reminded that the last successful military invasion occurred about a thousand years ago, the coast itself gradually assumed enormous significance. As Sir Archibald Foster said in the preface to In Search of Neptune (Pye-Smith, 1990):

The coastline of the British Isles is the one feature which differentiates this country from the rest of Europe. Throughout our history it has been subject to invasion by man and the elements, but it has protected us in times of war and given us enormous pleasure in times of peace.

The significance of the coast was emphasized in the imagery employed by wartime leaders and popular singers in the 1940s as they sought to inspire the island race to resist foreign enemies. Island identity became so important to the national psyche in the late twentieth century that some English politicians even denied that we are ‘part of Europe’. As well as an actual physical defence and symbol of national independence, the coastal waters are more prosaically an important economic resource, supporting fisheries and industrial activity. Moreover, the 2700 miles of varied coastline of England and Wales offer natural and scenic qualities, which may help visitors to recover from physical or even spiritual ill-health. Coastal waters performed other economic and social functions discussed further below. Over time the wild coast was progressively tamed, developed and urbanized. Hence great pressures were imposed on the natural environment of the shoreline, which threatened to destroy its attractive qualities.

Within the last 20 years the fascination with the encircling coast and how it has distinguished and formed the character of the island’s peoples, particularly the English, has if anything intensified. Popular travel books by American authors, read by the English as much as by anyone, establish island status as the starting points of their narratives. The cover of Paul Theroux’s (1984) at times cynical study of ‘this floating island’ shows three people huddled together on deck-chairs on a wind-swept beach grasping umbrellas. Such ironical and self-deprecating images of how we amuse ourselves by the seaside are greatly enjoyed by the inhabitants. However, some may prefer Bill Bryson’s more affectionate Notes from a Small Island (1995). Even this starts off on a rather bleak evening on the Marine Parade, Dover. These writers are amazed that no part of the country is more than 75 miles from the sea.

One of the greatest attractions of the coastline is a sandy beach. The English no longer overpopulate their holiday beaches quite as much as they used to. Yet the demise of the English seaside holiday is often exaggerated, as up to 300 million visits to the coast are made each year and 35 million individuals spent some holiday time there in 1998 (Observer, 6 February 2000, p.27). It may well be that the concern about the natural and amenity value and condition of the shoreline and interest in its metaphorical and symbolic role are as great now as they ever were. This partly reflects the growth of interest in the environment. Now national newspapers devote considerable attention to issues like beach cleanliness, rising sea levels and coastal erosion, and controversies such as the disposal of the Brent Spar oil rig. Several popular television soaps, such as Baywatch, are centred on antics performed on, and plots based around, the beach.

Literatures

Many writings reflect the great contemporary interest in the coast. Alain Corbin has studied how western society between 1750 and 1840 came to view the seaside as no longer horrible, repulsive and unknown, but as a source of pleasure and revival. His book having been published in French in 1988, the English translation appeared as The Lure of the Sea in 1995. Partly a realist account of observed trends, for example the reasons for journeying to the seaside, and partly an interpretation of how changes in the way coastal landscapes were read through, for instance, the visual arts, poetry and other written material, this book explores the causes of the aristocratic and eventually bourgeois rush to the shore by the early nineteenth century. It is a compelling account of the origins of the seaside holiday. Although Corbin provides an exemplary exploration of evolving relationships between humanity and nature, within the time period studied the environmental impacts of the social and cultural trends he described were small and have been disregarded in this book.

In 1998, Leĕncek and Bosker published their study, The Beach: the History of Paradise on Earth, the earlier parts of which cover similar ground to Corbin’s book. An attractively written volume aimed at a mass audience, it also displays scholarly virtues, not least in the command of extensive literatures. As the blurb says: ‘Using a hugely entertaining historical account as its narrative framework, this book charts the evolution of the seaside from ancient societies to its present role.’ While it is a moving evocation of western society’s obsession with the beach, only a few pages at the end touch on the implications for the natural environment of the explosion in coastal tourism. In a sense Alex Garland’s novel, The Beach, made into a film that opened in Britain in February 2000, more explicitly raised difficult environmental issues than did Lĕncek and Bosker. Garland’s story is of young western backpackers’ search for an earthly paradise – a beach of white sands on a Thai island by a lagoon, its coral gardens unharmed, surrounded by jungle inhabited by strangely coloured birds, and hidden from the sea and passing boats by a high, curving wall of rock. The Beach, originally published in 1996, can be analysed at many levels, for example as a satirical reworking of themes explored in earlier novels like Lord of the Flies. This reader, however, was struck by the implied, but quite savage, criticism of westerners’ rapacious behaviour towards the few, officially protected, island Edens surviving in the world.

By contrast Britain, for example, is engaged in a hugely costly programme to restore the quality of our beach waters to a pre-industrial purity. This reflects the great sensibility towards the coastal heritage exhibited by modern society. However, Garland’s satirical lampooning of the capacity of rich, western drop-outs to pollute the beach is a fair, if unintended, comment on the long-term record of industrialized society’s impact upon the coastal zone. The works of Corbin, Lĕncek and Bosker, and Garland have all been very successful and all three in their different ways reflect modern humanity’s interest in the coastal environment.

Turning to the conventional historiography, professional scholars have now produced a rich literature on the seaside, particularly as a result of work published over the last two to three years. The present book touches on themes which are covered in many other fields, from marine engineering to environmental history. The following remarks must be confined mainly to those studies that have significantly influenced my own approach to the subject over the last several years. The scale and quality of recent research in relevant areas, however, especially in seaside history, become clear from Walton’s (2000) perceptive survey of the way the seaside holiday had been portrayed in various media from film to the academic literature, and from the excellent historiographical introductions provided by Morgan and Pritchard (1999) and Chase (2000). It is possible to make a distinction, as Chase (ibid., p.8) does, between many seaside histories, which are broadly chronological and narrative in approach, and sociological and cultural studies, which frame analyses of tourism and popular culture by reference to theoretical constructions drawn from these disciplines. However, the second has exercised a significant influence on the first, as is evident from John Walton’s recent work, as well as from Chase’s itself. Her study of issues relating to the modernity, identity and marginality of the inter-war seaside resort, Chase implies, embodies a third approach, that of cultural history. She places emphasis on the interpretation of visual evidence or behaviour by reference to modern social theory, and the approach is similar to that applied by sociologists and geographers to the study of landscapes and identity.

There remain genuine difficulties in selecting appropriate models to inform historical analyses of coastal activities. The field is often so multithematic and interdisciplinary that to seek to frame context or develop explanation solely by reference to any one theory, be it drawn from the economic, social, environmental or political sciences, might be inappropriate or overambitious. Another obstacle facing those who might prefer a more formal approach is the dearth of relevant, consistent time-series data against which to test hypotheses. This led to my own failures to collate comparative material on coastal waste disposal methods, or to estimate the extent to which resort populations were inflated by the summertime influx of tourists as a measure of the intensified load imposed upon the natural environment (see Tables 10.1 and 10.2).

Notwithstanding the earlier enjoyable surveys of Pimlott, Hern and Walvin, Walton’s The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750–1914 (1983b) is the recognized text on the subject. Walton’s book was informed by the issues that reflected the concerns of social and economic historians at that time. Consequently, Walton focused on the role of social structures, the demand for leisure in a growing economy and the management of the holiday crowd, the socioeconomic profiles of holidaymakers and social interaction among the classes at the seaside. He also studied those factors governing the objectives and behaviour of the municipal and business elites that formulated policies for the development of resorts. These issues had not been ignored in earlier works, but Walton pursued his investigation more systematically and in a much more exhaustive manner than had been attempted before. Walton also enlarged on Perkin’s (1976) preliminary thoughts concerning those factors that governed the ‘social tone’ of resorts.

While the academic literature has since proliferated, many historians, until recently, confined themselves to issues raised by Perkin and Walton. Within the English academic community, Urry pioneered interesting new lines of approach. He stressed the important and positive function of the holiday as an avenue of escape from everyday normality, while Shields (1991), whose work also exercised a significant influence upon seaside history in the 1990s, and Matless (1998) have reflected in a stimulating, if brief, manner on the cultural significance of coastal tourism. Urry explored the role of contemporary discourses and attitudes towards nature in sustaining the growth of coastal tourism. He noted the impact of Romanticism in stimulating the growth of scenic tourism and in instilling a faith in the health-giving properties of nature. As he said, acknowledging his indebtedness to Hern and Walton: ‘Much nineteenth-century tourism was based on the natural phenomenon of the “sea” and its supposedly health-giving properties’ (Urry, 1990, p.21). By the mid-Victorian years, seaside towns were invariably describing, and defining, themselves as ‘health resorts’. The nature of resort claims and tourist expectations regarding the environmental qualities of the coast, which were believed to enhance the benefits of the seaside holiday, will be explored further in this book. It would appear that growing numbers of people, influenced by contemporary ways of reading and admiring marine environments, chose to visit, settle by and use the coast for a variety of purposes, although many historians have tended to make assumptions about these processes rather than deeply study them.

The implications posed by mass tourism for the integrity of the natural amenities and wonders of the coast are a more central concern of the present study than is generally the case in seaside histories, yet it is simply following directions suggested by Walvin and even more by Pimlott, whose study of 1976 was originally published in 1947. Walvin (1978, p.65) stressed that the ‘prevailing medical and cultural orthodoxy’, which saw in the resorts an excellent antidote to the dangers and illnesses of the town, was a major factor in the surge in popularity of the seaside holiday after 1850. He also described the impact of mass tourism upon the coastal environment and noted the awkward dilemmas this posed in the 1930s for a small coastal protection movement whose agenda was constructed around issues relating to amenity, scenery conservation and the population’s rights of access to the shore. Pimlott’s narrative includes some insights on how the Victorian resorts evolved out of the spa, with its focus on supplying medical services to convalescents and others, and in therefore not representing ‘an entirely new type of resort’ (1976, p. 105). As he said, the belief in the value of coastal sojourns for health was ‘one of the main factors in the development of seaside holidays’. He stressed the pre-eminence of the ‘pulmonary interest’ at the most successful mid-Victorian resorts, which served the needs of the tubercular. Pimlott coupled his explanations for the success of the mid-nineteenth century resort with references to the immediately preceding ‘discovery of nature’, the English fascination with the sea, and its capacity for ‘stirring the emotions’ as exemplified in the poetry of Lamb and Cowper and Jane Austen’s Sanditon, as well as in the overwhelming emotional response of Charlotte Brontë to her first contact with the sea in 1839.

Walton’s early work (1978, pp.42–3; 1983b, pp. 130-44) contained some environmental history in that he stressed the role of the coastal resorts’ natural amenities in enhancing their appeal, and also in describing how such an appeal was undermined by inadequate sanitary arrangements. He has since explored environmental themes further and integrated new perspectives in his work (1998, pp. 7–28), most recently in a study of ‘The waters of San Sebastian: therapy, pleasure and identity’ (2002). He has even devoted a chapter to ‘Seaside environments’ (broadly defined) in his book on the twentieth-century British resort (Walton, 2000). It would be most surprising if such a perceptive and prolific scholar did overlook the environment, yet his treatment represents more a challenge to seaside historians to more fully engage with this dimension than a comprehensive and analytically developed approach to the subject in its own right. To this day, few historical studies of the English seaside engage in a dedicated manner with environmental problems. Walton’s latest foray deals with Spanish waters, and a study by Durie (1994) that touches on environmental issues is of the Scottish seaside. As far as I am aware, Travis (1993, pp. 157–66) is almost unique in offering a full exploration of the tensions and contradictions inherent in the English health resorts’ claims as regards their restorative environments, and the actual record of disease, pollution and poor sanitation in Victorian resorts. These remarks are not a criticism. They simply observe that seaside historians must investigate many themes, and that they often note the environmental dimension in an incidental or partial manner, and occasionally omit it altogether.

Approaches and methods

In 1752, Dr Russell advised that seawater therapy might help those suffering from, among other things, flatulence, leprosy, gonorrhoea and cancer. It was from this time that fashionable society headed for the coast in the hope that bathing in and drinking seawater would do them good. The notion that a trip to the seaside was health-giving put down deep roots in the national consciousness. And resorts capitalized on this, insisting that it was the special qualities of the coastal environment, the uplifting scenery, the long sunshine hours, the clean, ozone-charged air and, above all, the opportunities for undertaking many wholesome activities in the pristine sea, that generated the benefits of a English seaside holiday. In the twentieth century, however, doubts gradually emerged. By the 1990s, many, by contrast, were aware that exposure to the elements might cause tourists to contract an unpleasant infection from the sewage-polluted sea or increase the risks of skin cancer. The interaction between environmental conditions and the healthiness of the seaside is a theme running throughout this study.

The book endeavours to trace humanity’s changing relationship with nature over the last 200 years by examining ways in which the English have regarded, safeguarded or disregarded their country’s most defining natural asset and national emblem, the coast. What measures were taken to protect this invaluable resource so that it could continue to perform its many vital functions? In the course of exploring such questions, like others, I have relied quite heavily on sources such as travel and tourist guides, newspapers, publicity material, (often pseudo-) medical treatises, trade journals, local government records, manuscript material presented to official inquiries of one kind or another, and primary sources that deal with modern pressure groups. The careful reader will clearly recognize the partial objectivity of many of the sources. Such an approach is fairly typical of much seaside history, as is the use of visual art, railway posters or even shoreline architecture, as evidence of the way in which contemporaries wished to promote or perceive the holiday scene, although I was less aware of this at the beginning of the project than I am now. It is therefore only in the subject matter, not the method, that this book might be construed as an environmental history. Material about piers, funfairs, holiday postcards and beach dress have been studied at some length by other historians and will not be revisited here. A decision was made at the outset of the project largely to exclude themes that were ‘oceanic’, if not global, trans-boundary and international in character, such as those pertaining to Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the controversies posed by nuclear contamination, the dumping of toxic waste in the open sea or marine accidents. These are highly defined, complex and near-contemporary issues and to do justice to them would require several additional chapters. My focus is the more parochial problems of the English shoreline, such as the local difficulties that engaged the Coastal Anti-Pollution League, its precursors and successors, from the early Victorian period to the present day. This selection is driven partly by expediency and the need to keep the book’s length within reasonable bounds. However, the choice of topics is also influenced by their relevance to an investigation of the environmental, health/medical and socioeconomic forces whose interaction constitutes the binding concern, the nexus, of this study.

As previously implied, it covers so many topics that I have not been able to frame the discussion by explicit reference to any one model. However, concepts borrowed from several sources have influenced the narrative. Geographers have considered the environmental impacts of coastal tourism. Young (1973, p. 119) noted that tourists aggravate congestion owing to their most intensive use of the infrastructure and therefore, he might have added, of natural resources: ‘They travel more, shop more, visit more museums – even have more baths.’ Such behaviour can lead to some tourist regions becoming ‘saturated’. By implication, Young was suggesting that the most popular coastal areas might exceed their carrying capacity, with environmental deterioration resulting on both sides of the shoreline in the form of beach pollution and loss of landscape values. As Young observed, the pressures on the natural and physical assets of the coastal towns were concentrated during a frenetic brief season. It was difficult for local authorities with an income flow based on a small residential population to finance attempts to maintain or upgrade these assets.

Some regions acquired appeal through literary discovery. The natural beauties of the Lake District or North Devon, for example, were extolled by the Romantics and other writers. Such associations enriched the resorts’ cultural resources and contributed to the emergence of a distinctive identity. A glance through the guidebooks produced at any number of resorts, especially from the 1900s to the 1950s, will confirm that cultural and regional metaphors were fully exploited so as to claim a distinctive identity for a seaside town. Many references to the historic, cultural and literary associations and to the antiquities and physical remains of the surrounding area were made. A regional identity, as defined by landscapes and cultural associations, has certainly been celebrated for important recreational areas in the outlying north and west...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• General Editor's Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Georgian Origins
• 3 The Victorian and Edwardian Periods
• 4 Escape to Sun and Light
• 5 Fun, Crowds and Problems in the Inter-war Period
• 6 Post-war Golden Years and Controversies, 1945-1976
• 7 The Coastal Anti-Pollution League, 1958-1987
• 8 Environmental Awakening: the 1970s and 1980s
• 9 Muscular Activism and Pressure Groups in the 1990s
• 10 Past and Future Challenges
• References
• Index