Book description
The seaside, like football and the railways, is a distinctly English
and largely nineteenth century invention. At the Festival of Britain in
1951, a replica of a seafront represented hope and modernity - once the
preserve of the sickly elite, the seaside had become one of the great
English egalitarian institutions. But when the advent of cheap flights
allowed us to go and see how the rest of the world did it - with better
weather and sandier beaches - our boarding houses and bandstands slowly
rotted away. As the economy forced a reassessment of our holidaying
habits, resorts from Morecambe to Bournemouth enjoyed a renaissance.
Capitalising on the uniquely English combination of irony and pride, the
English Riviera has been reborn. In many ways, our national character
has been defined by our relationship with the seaside - and in tracing
its development, we can see how our ideas about health, welath and
happiness evolved. Our aspirations and snobbery, our attitudes to sex,
our keen sense of fair play, our chequered relationship with national
pride and our ability to laugh at ourselves have all been played out
against a backdrop of stormy skies, pebbly beaches and sticks of rock.
The seaside is the place we go to get better, to let our hair down, to
downsize, to retire, to take drugs and to hide. Ranging from Agatha
Christie to the Prince Regent via Billy Butlin and Brighton Rock, Travis
Elborough explores how a coastline peppered with quasi-Oriental piers
makes us quintessentially English. Erudite, charming and surprising,
Wish You Were Here is a gloriously unorthodox social history of a nation
of islanders.
