The complicated joy of vacationing in Britain
IN the 1860s, a consortium of businessmen commissioned a hotel for the flourishing spa town of Scarborough, on the North Yorkshire coast.
It was built above St. Nicholas Cliff and laid out in a gargantuan V, in honor of Queen Victoria. Six million bricks were used in its construction; four domed towers completed the imposing profile. When the Grand opened its doors, in 1867, a hydraulic ascending room – an early elevator – ferried well-heeled guests to the upper floors.
It was “a princely undertaking,” wrote a journalist at the Leeds Intelligencer, with customary Victorian floridity. For a time it was the largest hotel in Europe, a triumphal monument to a town on the make.
One and a half centuries later, I stood in a three-hour queue to check in to its modern incarnation, slowly losing the will to live.
From the Tripadvisor reviews, I should have known. “Hotel from hell,” read one. “Avoid Avoid Avoid!” warned another. Today, the Grand Scarborough is a gaudy shadow of its founders’ blueprint, its foyer festooned in pleather furnishings and garish carpet. Behind the reception desk, two harried men juggled room keys and sheaves of paper. Everyone in the queue was coping with the tedium Britishly by getting drunk. A woman pushed a small case of Budweiser in a stroller.
I sighed. This was pretty much what I’d expected.
In 2003, a curious little book appeared by the cash registers of London’s bookshops. I never bought “Crap Towns,” but I thumbed through it occasionally when waiting in line, and I found a condescending amusement in the premise, which was summarized in the opening line:
“Britain is crap.”
At one level it was harmless stuff, channeling a national talent for self-deprecation that still finds expression in Twitter accounts like @NoContextBrits, a mordant celebration of British mediocrity. But it was also of its moment. Though the book was careful to select towns from all parts of the country, most of its scorn landed on England, and the principal allegation was clear: The English provinces in the new millennium were risible and reactionary, stagnant backwaters in a country past its prime.
For a young person, born and raised in London and keen to experience the world, this was obvious and unarguable. At the time, I wanted nothing more than to travel overseas, at least partly because I deplored the gray familiarity of the country I called home.
But I have wondered, looking back, whether “Crap Towns” foreshadowed something more profound. Within its air of metropolitan disdain lurked an augury of England’s post-Brexit identity crisis, in which the country appears permanently torn between the deflating liberal dreams still harbored in the cities and the backlash fermenting in the provinces left behind.
Travel, it occurred to me over the course of these covid-stricken months, had in many ways become an engine of this schism. It was surely no coincidence that the country felt atomized when so much of our leisure time was spent overseas. If England was crap, it was, partly, because the people in it wanted to be somewhere else.
This acknowledgment led me to conclude that I owed some reparation for my abandonment of home. I had spent more than a decade working as a “travel writer,” one of the many jobs (albeit an inconsequential one) that the pandemic had rendered superfluous. But with foreign travel still curtailed, the U.K.’s politicians and travel industry, buoyed by the country’s successful vaccine rollout, were encouraging people to holiday within its borders.
I had come to the northeast primarily because it was the biggest blank on my own map of the country, and Scarborough had already proved itself to be the perfect trailhead. This was a place whose rise and fall said much about the state of England, and more particularly about the English holiday. It also provided a gateway to some fascinating places, which I hoped might challenge my pessimistic assumptions about England’s capacity to delight and surprise. I had always thought that the satisfactions of travel were contingent on distance, both physical and cultural. But was it possible to find that nourishment at home? I’d arrived earlier that day after a five-hour drive, the town announcing itself with a traffic jam and the smell of fish. I headed straight to the promenade, where expressionless people fed coins into arcade-hall slot machines and takeaways served food that was all brown and fried. It was a school holiday and sunny. The beach was full. Stooped men in high-visibility vests led giggling toddlers on donkey rides along the sand.
Away from the neon palisades, at the southern end of the bay, sat the old spa. A honeycombed limestone palace, it dated back to 1858, when the town was in its Victorian pomp. A small funicular trundled from the waterfront to the top of South Cliff, where rows of stucco-fronted terraces lined an esplanade. The parkland between had Italianate gardens and sweeping views – and an air of refinement that seemed a world away from the gaudy main beachfront.
These two chapters in the history of English holidaymaking looked askance at each other across the bay, one imperious if timeworn, the other newer yet somehow more dated. And it all collided at the Grand, where outside kittiwakes roosted on every sill and cornice, and inside holidays came to die.
Its dereliction told a story we all knew. With the advent of cheap charter flights to Europe in the 1960s, as Mediterranean destinations lured the British south with better weather and superior food, places like Scarborough were suddenly and starkly anachronized. By the late ‘70s, Britain was already mocking the sad vestiges of its seaside holiday culture. In “Fawlty Towers,” the era’s iconic sitcom, starring John Cleese as the hapless, high-strung proprietor of a dysfunctional south coast hotel, the humor rested on an implicit assumption: Holidaying in England could never be anything other than hilariously godforsaken.
Mrs. Richards: When I pay for a view, I expect something more interesting than that.
Basil Fawlty: That is Torquay, madam.
Mrs. Richards: Well, it’s not good enough.
Basil Fawlty: Well, may I ask what you were expecting to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?
At the base of the northern headland was the harbor. On that first afternoon, I walked to the end of its main jetty seeking respite from the frenetic promenade. Light glinted off the beachside Ferris wheel, and meditative crabbers lowered nets from the high quayside. All along a row of benches people faced the sun, eyes closed as if we were remembering how to be happy.
After a couple of days in Scarborough, I handed my key to the Grand’s beleaguered receptionist and walked down its steps feeling rejuvenated, as if a whole year’s worth of thwarted curiosity had finally found something to pique it. My plan from here was to travel up the coast. After months stuck in London, the prospect of shifting seascape vistas seemed to promise the spaciousness I craved. Worst case, it would alleviate any claustrophobia I might derive from the parochialism of the English countryside. On a bright Saturday morning in Whitby, I bought a kipper (a type of cured herring) from the centuryold Fortune’s smokehouse – served loose-wrapped in the puzzle pages of the Daily Star newspaper – and ate its oily flesh on a promontory beneath the town’s famous ruined abbey. In Whitby, and the smaller villages in its vicinity like Staithes and Robin Hood’s Bay, the shift to holiday-making came later than in Scarborough, after the whaling and herring industries declined. — The Washington Post