Billy Butlin’s first holiday camp at Skegness with its “huge open-air swimming pool, set in the middle of lawns and rose-trees,” “two immense dining halls capable of seating 800 people at once,” dance floors, club bars, an open-air gymnasium, and shops was a veritable village complete with “seven hundred one-room cottages in long rows,” a boating lake, and private beach. The Daily Express described the camp, opened in 1936, as a “great experiment in cutting completely adrift from the standardized seaside resort.” The Clacton camp was launched in 1938 with a “Festival of Health and Happiness,” prominently advertised in the Daily Mail (42, 103). These camps offered self-contained facilities, accommodation, and a full dining service, combined with a variety of entertainments and activities aimed at the entire family for an all-inclusive price of approximately a week’s pay.

Sandra Dawson’s immensely readable and attractively illustrated book posits holiday camps as a “revolution in leisure” that offers a lens to explore the relationship among politics, pleasure, and notions of citizenship in twentieth-century Britain (1). Butlin, the most successful and media savvy entrepreneur in the market, perfected this early form of a package holiday aimed at a working-class clientele. The concept was pioneered by his erstwhile associate Henry Warner, who opened the first so-called luxury family holiday camp on Hayling Island in 1931. Both men ran amusement facilities and fun fairs on the island in the 1920s and, inspired by Warner’s success, Butlin opened his much larger camps in the late 1930s. This early expansion was curtailed by the Second World War, and, with over 2.5 million campers, the holiday camps reached their peak in 1960.

The luxury holiday camps with their chalets, indoor plumbing, cooked meals, entertainments, and child care provided a major break from the Spartan, self-reliant camping culture pioneered by youth groups and religious or socialist organizations. The new camps not only provided unknown luxury, they also embraced a different ethos. In place of sex segregation, rational recreation, and abstinence, the camps built on the traditions of working-class seaside holidays with regard to entertainments and drinking culture, albeit in moderation. With its common wake-up call and bedtimes, Butlin promoted the camp as wholesome family recreation with mass physical culture classes, swimming galas, sports, and tennis tournaments. He countered critics of Sunday amusements with the introduction of regular Sunday services conducted by local ministers. Butlin, thus, “created a balance between Victorian Puritanism and twentieth-century libertinism” (61).

Dawson places her analysis of holiday camps in the context of the tourism industry generally, and she highlights recurrent conflicts with owners of hotels and boardinghouses, who condemned the camps as unfair competition and as lowering the tone in more exclusive resorts. This was counterbalanced by other voices that welcomed the camps whose national advertising helped to put a resort on the map. Dawson further frames her discussion within the wider constraints of lack of time and money, which made it impossible for many British families to enjoy a holiday away from home. The 1938 Holidays with Pay Act provided an important turning point, and holiday camps were represented as an answer to the challenge of providing affordable holidays in the new era of mass tourism. Camps were marketed as classless sites promoting social harmony, but there was relatively little social diversity among campers, who were mostly lower middle class before the war.

Dawson emphasizes the innovative approach of the camps’ appeal to women by offering full catering and child care. The campaign for holidays with pay was not confined to male workers’ need to recuperate but also stressed the beneficial effect of a break from their exhausting routines on wives and mothers. Butlin’s marketing strategy addressed this issue, and the camps were advertised as the “perfect holiday for mother,” allowing her the “chance to feel a bride again” (171). Another strategy was to appeal to children as consumers, and the camps offered activities for children at different age groups as well as club memberships and free magazines to promote loyalty throughout the year.

The Labour Party and the trades’ union movement saw holidays as an integral aspect of social citizenship, and the right to leisure became part of the ethos of the postwar welfare state. While the war halted the expansion of mass tourism, it also provided opportunities, and indeed further camps were established by the government to accommodate troops or evacuees. These were converted to general use after 1945, and holiday camps expanded rapidly in the 1950s. Their postwar revival built on the myth of the war as a time when everyone pulled together, and, as emblems of the “people’s peace,” the camps became a quintessentially British institution. Thus, the collapse of the collectivist ethos in the wake of the economic crises in the 1970s also marked the demise of the holiday camp. Other challenges were 1960s youth culture, demands for different forms of leisure, and the rise of foreign holidays. Nevertheless, the camps modernized and survived. In the early twenty-first century, Butlin’s three remaining camps accommodate 1.3 million guests each season.

Dawson’s analysis of the holiday camps is compelling. The camps’ advertising and other sources are highly evocative, but given the small numbers of campers, especially before the war, it is important not to exaggerate the significance of this form of holiday. Whatever the appeal of the camps, the overwhelming majority of holiday makers, including working-class families, chose to go elsewhere. I would have liked a fuller discussion situating the camps within the wider context of interwar fitness culture exemplified by the construction of lidos and the growing popularity of sunbathing, physical culture classes, and outdoor recreation. Regardless, these caveats are not intended to undermine the overall achievement of Holiday Camps in Twentieth-Century Britain, which provides a welcome addition to Manchester University Press’s Studies in Popular Culture series. The book should be essential reading for anybody interested in leisure, tourism, and popular culture in modern Britain.