Resorts and Ports

European Seaside Towns since 1700

Peter Borsay, John K. Walton, Peter Borsay, John K. Walton

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781845412005
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Histories of seaports and coastal resorts have usually been kept in separate compartments. This book brings them together and looks at how resort development affected historic ports during the rise and development of the seaside holiday in Europe from the 18th century to the 20th, and what the attributes of ports (fishing, harbour crafts, the whiff of the exotic, fishermen's homes and families) contributed to the attractions of resorts. Case-studies drawn from across Europe, from Wales and the Netherlands to Norway, Latvia and Spain, bring original perspectives to bear on these histories and relationships, and consider their influence on seaside heritage and regeneration at a time when coastal settlements are increasingly using their past to secure their future. The book will interest academics in tourism studies, history, geography and cultural studies, as well as provide essential information and analysis for policy-makers in coastal regeneration.

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Resort–Port Relationship

PETER BORSAY and JOHN K. WALTON

The Specialisation Hypothesis

When, in 1943, John Betjeman compiled his volume on English Cities and Small Towns in the Collins Britain in Pictures series, he devoted separate sections to ‘Ports’ and ‘Spas and Watering Places’. To reinforce the distinction, he declared,

After the visit of George III to Weymouth in the eighteenth century, watering places sprang up on the coast, and they must not be confused with the sea ports, where the sea is chastened by harbour bars and docks. In watering places, everything is a preparation for playing on the edge of the sea and for looking at it.¹

He was, excusably, wrong about both timing and causation,² but historians have tended to embrace this separation of functions, with resorts and ports generating discrete historiographies.³ Underpinning such an approach has been the notion that industrialisation and rapid urbanisation brought about a greater specialisation of urban function, since towns were defined not so much by their position in a regionally defined hierarchy as by their economic role. As Penelope Corfield has argued of the eighteenth century,

A new and more specialized terminology began to be adopted. Towns were now talked of in terms of their leading economic functions. As well as traditional concepts of market towns and ports, other places became identified as dockyard towns, manufacturing towns, spas, holiday resorts …⁴

In practice, seaports and coastal resorts grew side by side from the eighteenth century onwards, responding to the same sets of processes, of consumption as well as production, of the spread of rising living standards and aspirations, of the fashion cycle, of globalisation and increasing mobility. The emergence of seaside resorts formed an integral part of the industrialisation process rather than constituting a subsequent consequence of this long and complex sequence of developments. This is worth emphasis because it has not always been understood,⁵ and it should also be stressed that these were not geographically isolated developments but often shared the same locations or adjacent ones. It is widely recognised that resorts were not necessarily, or even usually, built on virgin sites and that many had developed out of fishing settlements and ports, but such economic roles are usually described as ‘decayed’ and ‘moribund’.⁶ Some historians have acknowledged that it was not necessarily so easy to distinguish a resort from a port, since both functions could continue to operate in tandem,⁷ and that the reality on the ground was far messier than the specialisation hypothesis would suggest. P. J. Waller, for example, has argued that ‘seaside towns were not homogenous types … they often combined holiday facilities with other pursuits, usually shipping and fishing’, and that ‘the history of pleasure resorts … is more complicated than a story of property tycoons and corporations sniffing ozone and cashing in on an inevitable boom. One factor is evidently the potential for alternative business. A certain level of port traffic would not upset the holiday trade’.⁸ In fact, a large number of railway connections to emergent resorts were built with the primary intention of developing freight traffic to commercial harbours, and the resorts, with their fluctuating, unreliable and inconvenient seasonal traffic, were the secondary beneficiaries of such initiatives.⁹

Contemporary guidebooks – which might be inclined to hide the presence of intrusive aspects of trade and commerce from potential visitors – could not conceal the obvious fact that conventional business activity mixed freely with the business of pleasure in some maritime settlements. Baedeker in 1894 pronounced Folkestone on the Kent coast ‘a cheerful and thriving seaport and watering-place’ and Dover, with its ‘large outer tidal basin and two spacious docks’ to accommodate the continental mail packets, ‘a favourite bathing-place and winter-resort’; on the east coast, Lowestoft was ‘a fashionable sea-bathing resort’ and ‘important fishing-station’, and Yarmouth ‘the most important town and port on the E. Anglian coast … is also a very popular watering-place and in the summer is flooded almost daily with excursionists’.¹⁰ An annual guide to Seaside Watering Places for the season 1900–1901 was typical in including among its entries the major fishing or shipping ports of Southampton, Swansea, Brixham, Falmouth, Plymouth and Grimsby, as well as many minor ones.¹¹ Clearly, resorts and ports were not mutually exclusive categories of settlement. This is not to say that in any particular location these functions were equally balanced or that, over time, one did not come to dominate and maybe drive out the other. Many small ports and fishing villages gradually completed a long-term transition, evolving into resorts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but without necessarily losing older activities altogether. The two roles could co-exist over a considerable period of time so that any simple story of one automatically displacing the other, as the forces of specialisation kicked in, is difficult to sustain. Instead, a more nuanced and complicated account needs to be developed of how resort and port interacted with each other. The studies in this volume explore this relationship and the various transitions under way through a set of detailed case studies ranging across Britain and Europe. The term ‘port’ is defined broadly, embracing commercial, military, manufacturing and transport activity associated with maritime business, whereas coastal ‘resorts’ include a range of health and leisure functions, including pleasure boating, as well as those directly related to bathing beaches. There remains an extensive middle ground of retailing, services and infrastructural provision and maintenance which might serve port, resort and (for example) retirement functions to varying and changing degrees, with definitions being complicated by the prevalence of multiple occupations, casual, part-time and ‘informal’ employment, and seasonal migration in both resort and port economies.¹²

The following introduction sets out an agenda for investigating the resort–port relationship. It begins by reviewing the current historiography before examining the extent to which resorts continued to function as working ports and industrial and service centres and how far this relationship was one of conflict or co-existence. There then follows an exploration of the critical role of imagery in shaping visitor perceptions of the compatibility, or otherwise, of resort and port. How this marriage has fared over the long term is then briefly reviewed before a conclusion introduces the detailed studies contained in this volume and outlines some of the common themes that emerge among them.

Historiography

Historical surveys of ports and resorts across countries or continents have not been common, and the overall balance of studies tilts strongly towards the ports. This is not surprising since coverage at this level of generalisation has understandably highlighted the major port cities for which resort functions, where they existed, remained peripheral in every sense. A recent collection of papers on ‘Western European port-cities’ between 1650 and 1939, for example, hardly mentions coastal resort activity, apart from a few brief and isolated comments on sea-bathing at Portsmouth and Southsea, while O'Flanagan's ambitious survey of the port cities of Atlantic Iberia over four centuries similarly neglects coastal resort developments in (for example) Santander and San Sebastián, which come towards the end of his period, in ‘second-tier’ seaports, and after the themes that most interest him begin to wane from the late eighteenth century.¹³ Studies of Liverpool as a city and seaport economy tend to ignore its own satellite resorts and ‘marine suburbs’, whether it was New Brighton on the opposite bank of the Mersey, Parkgate and its neighbours on the Wirral Peninsula or Crosby, Waterloo, and Southport to the north of Bootle's dockland.¹⁴ The kinds of smaller ports in which resort functions became more prominent have tended to be studied at the regional or local level, as case studies or for their perceived intrinsic interest; and even then, as in recent studies ‘in the round’ and over long periods of the neighbouring Yorkshire resorts of Scarborough and Bridlington, the resort aspects of the urban economy have tended to be subordinated (understandably at times) to more conventional themes.¹⁵ Substantial towns where coastal resort functions have been grafted on alongside commercial port, fishing and other economic activities, including Ostend, Boulogne, Dieppe, San Sebastián, Santander, Málaga and various Baltic ports as well as the British examples cited above, have attracted a scattered but cumulatively impressive set of historical analyses without the ‘port and resort’ theme developing into anything resembling a full-scale historiography.¹⁶ There were other patterns as well. At Rimini, different kinds of industrial activity, in symbiosis with coastal tourism, proved more important to regional development than maritime activities, whereas at Bilbao the sheer intensity of commercial and industrial development displaced seaside tourism far down the Nervión estuary, beyond the city boundary, to Getxo and beyond.¹⁷ We do, however, have a few introductory surveys of patterns of coastal resort development in its own right across broad areas of Europe, although their coverage is tilted towards the western half of the continent, and the absence of great cities among the resorts makes them less visible in national and international urban hierarchies.¹⁸ But the working out of relationships between port and resort has mainly been a matter for local study, particularly in smaller settings. It is particularly important to escape from a prevailing set of assumptions that regards seaside tourism as simply an escape route from the decline of fishing and maritime trade as competition from the bigger ports intensified and the railways made their impact; as the case studies in this book demonstrate, the realities were much more complicated.

Co-existence or Competition?

Coastal resorts were, then, often to be found in symbiosis with fishing and commercial ports, even with associated manufacturing and import processing industries, and each function could benefit from the presence of the other, although the more exclusive resort interests were sometimes reluctant to recognise this. Naval and international passenger ports might provide distinctive assets too: the Royal Navy offering a military spectacle to holidaymakers at Southsea or on the Isle of Wight, or majestic transatlantic passenger liners passing New Brighton on their way to and from the Liverpool docks.¹⁹ In other cases, the functions were also at arm's length: Grimsby's deep-sea fishing and commercial docks were a short train or tram ride from the popular resort of Cleethorpes in Victorian times and thereafter, and interested parties had to make a special effort to visit them, although they were certainly recognised as an additional attraction.²⁰ At Hastings, on the other hand, the fishing boats were drawn up on the eastern beach in front of the Old Town, and the business of fishing, with the distinctive architecture of the Net Stores, was an attraction for holidaymakers. This did not prevent twentieth-century local government from pushing it steadily further away from the ‘polite’ and controlled part of the resort and seeking to demolish large areas of the quaint and attractive fishing quarter, giving rise to a conflict which was reprised on many parts of the British coastline in the mid-twentieth century, with varying outcomes.²¹

The advent of holidaymakers also provided additional options for local fishermen, who could not only supply locally caught fish to new local markets but also make money out of fishing trips and what Sidmouth fishermen in the early twentieth century, as described by Stephen Reynolds, called ‘frights’: pleasure boating trips for individuals or parties.²² This offered new flexibility to complex but fragile family economies during the summer. It also brought holidaymakers into direct contact with these objects of the ‘tourist gaze’, while helping to generate a series of jocular allusions in cartoon and story, in the humorous magazine Punch and elsewhere, to the resultant possibilities for hilarious mutual misunderstanding.²³

Maritime trading and fishing were the most obvious roles that coexi...