A history of Tourism
Ist session 5th February 2026
Travelling for leisure in some comfort developed as a status symbol stating that the traveller could afford both the time and the cost. The best known example of this is the Grand Tour of which Dr Johnson remarked in 1776 …’Sir, a man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what a man is expected to see’ (Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson pub 1791). Did this attitude towards the Grand Tour with its quickly defined route contribute to the modern issue of ‘honey pots’ where tourists want to go because they are famous rather than explore more widely?
Sessions 1 and 2. We will start with looking at why the Grand Tour became so fashionable that it eventually became an aspiration of the rapidly emerging middling classes as the Georgians called them. Then compare the leisure traveller with people who felt that it was so much part of the aspirations of their prospective clients that they should also go. Architects such as Robert Adam, funded by his family of architects because they could not afford to pay for all to go. Painters including Wright of Derby as well as the peripatetic JMW Turner, who sold engravings from sketches done on his travels.
What did the families who sent members on a grand tour hope for? Were their hopes met? Some of the letters and diaries suggest that not all the adventures were cultural.
And did the travellers who went because they saw a commercial value in doing so gain? Robert Adam and his brothers did but what about others such as Turner. Was John Constable at a disadvantage because he did not? Or was his interest well served by not? A thought for discussion.
Session 3 The discovery of our Islands and the cult of the Picturesque
Jane Austen was not the only person to satirise the cult of the picturesque and its impact on travel, especially on how travellers saw landscapes. The term through a glass darkly probably came from the Claude glass which helped artists to compress images on to a sheet of paper. It usually had a dark tinted glass. Their use was popular with amateur artists who travelled in upland areas made fashionable by the Picturesque movement. We will explore the development of the movement, its influence on tourism in the British Isles and abroad such as a fashion for mountains and lakes. The South Downs went out of fashion because they were too rounded and therefore uninteresting. They did not come back into fashion until the later 1800s.
Session 4 The impact of innovations in travel on the development of tourism - railways and liners
By the 1840s the railways were influencing tourism, both here and abroad. From day trips planned by shrewd operators like Thomas Cook, to the rapid expansion of existing seaside resorts and the development of new ones to carefully costed group tours for the middling classes abroad, its impact was considerable.
The elegant liners from the later nineteenth century onwards developed as a result lf a range of influences of which the need to fill the large passenger vessels used to transport emigrants to the USA was one. This happened when the States dramatically reduced the numbers of people that were allowed in. Some very elegant Liners were developed with fine communal areas for the very wealthy but the social stratification on board ship excluded large numbers of passengers from these areas. We will explore why. The way the liner business was affected by air travel will be another theme we will explore, and why air travel forced the shipping sector to change.
Session 5. From spas to the interwar period - The development of spa and seaside resorts
The development of the airborne package industry had a huge impact on seaside resorts from the 1960s when the heavily war damaged economy began to pick up.
Before then, resorts slowly accommodated a wider range of social classes. Until the age of the railway, most of their visitors were quite wealthy, the resorts small and designed to impress visitors as much as possible. Day trips by rail to resorts such as Brighton caused conflict between some resorts and the railway companies because resorts thought that they needed to keep their social exclusivity to keep the higher spending visitors to stay longer. Some resorts specialised in working class visitors (Blackpool), others such as Eastbourne tried to exclude them.
A combination of access to major cities, the ability of local people in the resorts working to keep the quality of the environment attractive, and innovations helped resorts to adjust to the demands of seaside tourism.
We will round this off with a very brief look at the rise of the package tour - both in England (Butlins for example) and abroad, where for a while Thomas Cook was a leader.