The history of seaside resorts is by now a well-established field of research, offering valuable accounts of how the seaside has turned into a mass attraction and tourist industry and investigating the development of specific locations in terms of economic growth, infrastructural change, and environmental impact. However, much research in the field has focused on English resorts, thereby establishing a pattern of expectations concerning the trajectory usually followed by fishing villages turned into successful holiday towns. One of the merits of Andy Croll's Barry Island is that it complicates—at times disrupts—such received knowledge, investigating the history of a Welsh resort whose history significantly diverges from the familiar path followed by other places, such as Brighton or Blackpool.

Indeed, Welsh seaside tourism has been remarkably neglected, in comparison with its English counterpart. Moreover, as this book demonstrates, even those historians who discussed the making of Barry Island into a tourist destination tended to be influenced by received expectations, thus failing to take into account important sections of its history. Croll's book sets the record straight, and does so in the first place by extending the usual chronology back in time: instead of starting with the 1890s, it goes back to the late eighteenth century, when the first visitors—mostly wealthy tourists who enjoyed its seclusion and natural beauty—arrived at Whitmore Bay. This kind of tourism continued until the Victorian period, when visitors still chose Barry Island for its uncontaminated beauty, seeking a different experience from that offered by more fashionable places. This was probably a reason why historians neglected this part of its history: Barry Island did not witness the high rate of change that characterized other seaside towns. Even when plans to develop it as an elegant seaside resort started to be made in the second half of the nineteenth century, they could not be fulfilled, and when the island was purchased by the Windsor-Clives in 1878, all hopes of development came to a halt. The Windsor family had spent huge sums in the development of Penarth, a town a few miles east and—for a while, at least—successfully prevented any kind of development in Whitmore Bay in order to stall possible competition. Later on, Lord Windsor even managed to close the island—an unprecedented move (even if private, beaches were traditionally considered as “public spaces”) that testifies to the remarkable power of landlords and conveys a strikingly different image of the “good Earl” from the one usually recorded.

Yet, in another surprising turn, it was the construction of the coal port (supported by Lord Windsor himself) that reboosted tourism. In fact, while industrial docks are usually seen as colliding with touristic appeal, this case proved different: Barry Dock was a marvel of technology, and industrial tourists flocked to see it. Some of them also reached the beach, and from then a steady flow of visitors reached Barry Island, by now connected to the mainland. With the growth of the population in the area and the possibility to reach Barry by rail (built to supply the dock with coal from the mines but eventually extended to serve tourists), Lord Windsor's ban became impossible to enforce, and visitors from the coalfield began to make Barry Island a favorite destination. Other plans were made to develop Barry Island, this time by the new middle class of the now-booming town but, again, without material results. Another misunderstanding is here set right: blame for failing to develop was attributed to the incompetence of local politicians, but Croll's account explains how, by this time, economic conditions had changed, and the town had no money to spend.

Yet, notwithstanding the lack of infrastructure, day-trippers kept coming, attracted by the island's natural beauty. Ironically, improvements were eventually financed by the council in the 1920s, in an attempt to stall economic crisis and tackle raising unemployment. By then, however, the kind of tourism characterizing Barry Island was already established, and continued to rise through its golden age during the 1940s to the 1960s. Thus, although by looking at twentieth-century pictures of crowds on the beach it may seem that Barry Island was always meant to be a working-class resort, Croll's book disproves such a deterministic view: in previous moments of its long history visitors belonged to the middle and upper classes, and plans by Victorian developers (which, for various reasons, were never implemented) focused on attracting affluent tourists.

The most relevant aspect of this story, and a major contribution of Croll's book, is exactly this: unlike many histories of the seaside, that depict holidaymakers as passive users, Barry Island recovers the very active role visitors played in shaping the fate of the island. Even when transport was slow and uncomfortable, when Lord Windsor did everything in his power to make tourists feel unwelcomed (for instance by banning vendors on the beach), and when facing the discomfort due to the lack of even the most basic infrastructures (such as shelter from the rain or public toilets), visitors still made the journey to Barry Island, bringing along everything they needed and enjoying the beauty of the landscape together with a much-needed respite from hard work. The conclusion, in which Croll compares and contrasts the history of Barry Island with the scheme developed by geographer Richard Butler, helps frame the research, balancing common elements and uncommon ones. Thus, Croll's analysis offers a valuable corrective to traditional understandings of the development of seaside resorts. Most importantly, it recovers a more complete view of the history of Barry Island, not only from a chronological point of view: it encompasses and vividly describes the experience of tourists themselves, their needs, and their agency. Barry Island is a well-researched and well-written account that might provide valuable insights to historians but might also become a compelling read for the nonacademic reader.