The Teesside seaside between the wars: Redcar and its neighbours, 1919-1939

Huggins, Mike ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2789-4756 and Walton, John K. (2003) The Teesside seaside between the wars: Redcar and its neighbours, 1919-1939. North East England History Institute.

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Abstract

Between the wars was a boom period for the British seaside resorts. According to one regularly quoted source, in the mid-1930s Blackpool had seven million visitors a year, Southend 5.5 million, Hastings three million, and Rhyl 2.5 million. But the leading Teesside resort, Redcar, claimed a surprising fifth place alongside Bournemouth and Southport with two million visitors, well ahead of resorts such as Eastbourne, Morecambe or Torquay. Such figures may well be no more than rough guesses, but they do indicate how, at least for those in work by this period, increased purchasing power meant that more money could be spent on leisure, and how resorts benefited from increased national leisure spending between 1918 and 1939. The working week was falling slightly, while the number of workers who were getting holiday pay was slowly rising, although still less than half the employed population in early 1939. As early as 1911 the specialised resort towns housed 4.5 per cent of the total population of England and Wales, and by 1951 this had risen to 5.7 per cent. Millions of visitors came each year. Thousands of workers migrated there for the season. So there were far wider social and economic implications in their development, and the seaside holiday is a cultural form well worthy of our interest. There is an extensive literature on the rise of the seaside resort as a very distinctive kind of town, and the varying nature of select and popular resorts. Yet although the nineteenth-century fortunes of the Teesside resorts of Redcar, Saltburn, Marske and Seaton Carew have been explored in some detail, their inter-war history has been comparatively neglected.

Item Type:	Book
Publisher:	North East England History Institute
ISBN:	9780954506407
Related URL(s):	Publisher
Departments:	Academic Departments > Institute of Arts (IOA) > Humanities
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	26 Jan 2017 11:52
Last Modified:	11 Jan 2024 18:30
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/2633

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