ALL ABOARD
Caroline Wheater takes a look at how the advent of the UK railways in the 1800s made a seaside holiday possible for ordinary people
We first took seaside holidays in the 18th century, seeking health cures at Blackpool, Scarborough, Margate and Brighton, where the Prince Regent built his Marine Pavilion in 1787. By the early 19th century, Eastbourne, Weymouth, Lyme Regis, Bognor Regis, Southport and Weston-super-Mare had joined the throng, but you needed wealth and time to travel by coach.
The railways of the Victorian era opened up the coast to mass tourism. From the 1840s, ‘Railway Mania’ took hold as 200-plus rail companies spent £3bn on expanding the network over the next 60 years. Arterial lines such as Paddington to Penzance (completed by Great Western Railway in 1867) carried tourists directly to the coast, while numerous tiny branch lines allowed access to almost any seaside town, from Llandudno in North Wales (LNWR, 1858), to Broadstairs in Kent (LCDR, 1863), to St Ives in Cornwall (GWR, 1877).
BANK HOLIDAY BOOM
By the 1890s anyone with enough money to buy a return ticket could hop on a steam train and be whisked to the coast in a matter of hours. The introduction of Bank Holidays in 1871 encouraged day trips to enjoy the new pleasure gardens, promenades, piers and theatres, as well as Punch & Judy, deckchairs, donkey rides and ice creams on the beach.
Come the 1920s and ’30s, open-air lidos and bandstands had been added to the amenities, and tans were seen as healthy. Trains still played a vital
role in transporting visitors and the many railway companies of the previous century had amalgamated into the ‘Big Four’: Great Western Railway (GWR), London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), Southern Rail (SR), and London Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS). These used the latest marketing tool – posters – to encourage travel, with leading artists commissioned to portray seaside resorts as glamorous, modern, healthy and family-friendly (find posters at auction or from dealers Antikbar and Kiki Werth).
It was all change after World War II, with public finances under extreme pressure. Stations began to close in the 1950s. Then the 1963 Beeching Report advised closing 2,363 railway stations, including Aldeburgh, Sheringham, Alnwick and Musselburgh. Although the network lost a third of its stations, some coastal gems avoided the cull – Exmouth in Devon, Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumberland, and Brora on the east coast of Scotland to name just a few. With their flower tubs and decorative Victorian canopies, they remind us that the railways and the seaside still go hand in hand.