Tow your own holiday bubble
Love them or loathe them, caravans are part of our national psyche – and, in the pandemic, sales are booming. Jonathan Glancey reveals why it’s time to make a plan with a ’van
In June 1885, The Wanderer headed north from Twyford in Berkshire to the Scottish Highlands. On board were its skipper, Dr William Gordon Stables, a former Royal Navy surgeon and veteran of Arctic and round-theworld voyages, his wife and six children, their large Newfoundland dog – and a cockatoo. But unlike Stables’s Navy ships, The Wanderer was powered not by sails, steam and the elements but by Captain Corn-flower and Polly PeaBlossom, a pair of heavy horses groomed by John the dutiful coachman.
With Foley, the valet, riding ahead on a tricycle to clear the roads, people along the way stopped to gawp at the two-ton mahogany wagon. A year later, tens of thousands of them bought copies of The Cruise of the Land-Yacht “Wanderer”: Thirteen Hundred Miles in my Caravan, one of more than a hundred books for late Victorian boys and girls of all ages written by Stables to promote life on the high seas and the open road.
His 18ft “land-yacht”, built by the Bristol Wagon & Carriage Company, was by common consent the world’s, and certainly Britain’s, first leisure caravan, setting the tone and pace of the world-away-from-work of the “gentleman gipsy”. Caravanning was born and boomed. Although inspired by traditional gypsy caravans, a familiar sight on rural roads, those that followed in The Wanderer’s wake were for the well heeled with leisure time on their hands.
Stables would have been thrilled by the surge in demand for caravans today, right across the social spectrum. The pandemic, repeated lockdowns and pent-up demand for “staycations” have led, in the past year, to long waiting lists for caravans, camper vans and motorhomes. It is hard for anyone to get their hands on one. According to Robinson’s Caravans of Chesterfield and Worksop, caravan orders in the second half of 2020 were up 32 per cent over the same period in the previous year. Two and a half million people went on caravan or motorhome holidays in Britain in 2020, more than a third of them for the first time, proof that caravanning is appealing to a new demographic.
You can almost see them, those serried squadrons of white, fridge lookalikes queueing for motorway exits in high summer or bumbling along at a legal maximum of 50mph, tailgated by livid road users, their hatred for caravans expressed by Jeremy Clarkson