11
The Environment of Leisure

These be thy wonders, O Steam! And so let the shades' of Fuller, and Watt, and the genius of Stephenson and his competitors, be properly revered and appreciated, for thus, as 'twere, so far annihilating time and space, and promoting social intercourse, civilization, and a speedy retreat from the plodding cares and cankering toils of commerce, trade, and labour!
J. S. , A Guide to Southport, 1849

Genuinely rural places all but disappeared from most Victorian cities; Yet they remained close at hand and available to visitors from the cities they surrounded. Elizabeth Gaskell begins Mary Barton —her close observation of Manchester working-class life in the early 1840s—by taking us outside the city along a public footpath to Green Heys Fields, an easy half-hour walk. We are joined by a group of "merry and sometimes loud-talking" factory girls and "numbers of boys, or rather young men," out for a ramble and ready to treat the girls to their "noisy wit or obstreperous compliments." It is toward evening in early May. Perhaps the masters have granted a half-holiday, or perhaps these young people have seized a holiday "in right of nature," the day being so mild and the "young green leaves" fluttering into life. It is too early in the year and late in the day for "the country business of hay-making, ploughing," but towns-men know that at other times they will be able to stand and watch "such pleasant mysteries."^[1] (See Figure 8.)

Gaskell does not tell us how the villagers received these visitors from an alien world or how they felt when boisterous shouts shattered "the delicious sounds of rural life." No doubt the tensions were considerably

greater outside the realm of fiction, even before the advent of day trippers and excursion trains. When that time did arrive, the demands of leisure began to make a larger claim on the countryside. Therefore it is remarkable that from the beginning to the end of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, a constantly readjusting compromise could be maintained between the demands of sustenance, amenity, and recreation.

Steam boats and trains made formerly remote beaches, heaths, moorlands, mountainsides, and valleys easily available to urban populations. Believing recreation in natural surroundings to be the best antidote to city-induced moral and physical malaise, reformers organized themselves to bring urban workers and their families into contact with bracing salt air, green nature, and rural tranquillity. Rising real incomes and a modest relaxation of work discipline permitted a popular tourist industry to develop. Tourism taught a widening circle of people to appreciate the beauties of the countryside for its own sake.

While popular tourism was developing, so too was apprehension about its effect on the rural environment. The urban multitudes might need nature's sweet lore, but what would become of fresh valleys and mountain solitudes if tourists in great numbers were given easy access to them?

Doubts about finding a solution to that dilemma surfaced even before factories and societies began organizing steamboat and railway excursions. In the 1830s Dr. Kay-Shuttleworth testified that "the whole population of Manchester is without any season of recreation and is ignorant of all amusements, excepting that small portion which frequents the theatre."^[2] This was an exaggeration. Decades before railways reached the coastline in the 1840s, textile workers from Lancashire towns walked or came by the cartload to Blackpool, Lytham, and Southport on warm Sundays and "darkened" the beaches.^[3] As early as the 1820s, weekend excursionists were leaving London by sailing vessel and paddle steamer for Margate, the Thanet resorts, Gravesend, and Richmond. Steam packets brought 650,000 clerks and artisan families to Gravesend in 1835.^[4] Four years before the railway reached Brighton, Thomas Creevey was complaining that "the crowd of unknown human beings" pouring down from London by coach was becoming unendurable.^[5] But if the era of popular excursions began in the 1820s, it is certainly true that the railway system, developed in spurts of energy during the early Victorian years, made the family, works, church, chapel, or club excursion part of urban working-class and lower-middle-class cultures.

Nevertheless, until the last quarter of the century, it was the patron-

age of middle- and upper-class vacationers that had the main transforming effect on the leisure environment.^[6] Rapid though the change was from elite travel to popular tourism, it was not until the interwar years of the twentieth century that mass recreation and the modern leisure industry fully developed. Long working hours, low wages, the slowness of the paid holiday to become common practice, still tied a great many Victorians and Edwardians to home, workplace, and neighborhood streets.^[7]

There were, however, enough city dwellers with leisure time and the means to enjoy it by the 1860s to distress nature lovers and cause them to issue warnings about the threat popular tourism posed for the land and landscape. By then middle- and upper-class anxiety about a possible Chartist revolution had died away. The sigh of relief from London's West End had been almost palpable when workingmen and their families, arriving by the trainload in London to visit the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, had proved to be good-humored and orderly. But evidence that a mobile populace was unlikely to promote riot and revolution failed to reassure those who feared for their tranquil refuges. In the Lake District, one Ambleside resident remarked: "[A] great steam monster ploughs up our lake and disgorges multitudes upon the pier. . . . our hills are darkened by swarms of tourists; our lawns are picnicked upon twenty at a time, and our trees branded with initial letters."^[8] Excursion trains, recalled an upper-class woman about her once-serene Derbyshire valley,

used to vomit forth at Easter and in Whitsun week, throngs of mill hands of the period, cads and their flames, tawdry, blowsy, noisy, drunken . . . tearing through the fields like swarms of devastating locusts, and dragging the fern and hawthorn boughs they had torn down in the dust, ending the lovely spring day in pot houses, drinking gin and bitters, or heavy ales by the quart, and tumbling pell-mell into the night train, roaring music hall choruses; sodden, tipsy, yelling, loathsome creatures, such as make the monkey look a king, and the newt seem an angel beside humanity—exact semblance and emblem of the vulgarity of the age.^[9]

So dim a view was not, of course, shared by all. Hugh Shimmin, a mid-Victorian journalist who wrote a number of books about Liverpool life, made a distinction between the Lumpen element of "Cottonopolis" with its preference for the Saturday night spree down at the local pub and the "Sunday guzzle," and the respectables, those "swarthy and hard-handed labourers, decently clad, with their wives, children, or sweethearts," who were gradually expanding their recreational orbits with trips to places like the Isle of Man, intent on enjoying its creeks and romantic glens. He expressed regret that "our rulers" seemed content to abuse the "drinker"

and ignore the "thinker" when they should be searching for ways to promote a taste for "enjoyment without vice" among the new consumers of recreational facilities.^[10]

But what might be the erosive effects of feet, hoofs, or wheels on moorland vegetation, rural footpaths, coastal dunes, forest tracks, or mountain trails if the urban populace did develop that taste? Since every user left a trace, the wearing effect of large numbers on the most attractive or archaeologically or historically interesting sites threatened eventually to degrade such places, thus lessening their appeal and weakening some of the incentives to maintain or protect, especially in a climate friendly to private enterprise.^[11] Here was a dilemma that no amount of education in how to enjoy nature was likely to solve.

That large numbers of tourists could be major morphological agents would have been obvious to anyone who troubled to look. A particularly conspicuous example of their capacity to alter details of local landscapes would have been apparent, for example, on Snowdon, Britain's highest mountain, once called Eryi because of its eagles' nests. Snowdonia, the region around this glacier-sculpted peak in Caernarvonshire, North Wales, is a rugged expanse of rough grasslands, kept free of underbrush by grazing cattle and sheep and crossed by stone walls, sharp-edged ridges, and steep-sided valleys. Travelers have been drawn to the beauty of this place since at least the time of John Leland's journeys in the 1530s.^[12] Most who came, especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, felt obliged to climb to the mountain's 3,560 foot main summit or be hauled up by ponies. When Dr. Johnson passed through in 1774, he recognized no such duty. "Above is inaccessible altitude, below is horrible profundity," he observed.^[13] "Fag End of Creation; the very rubbish of Noah's Flood!" snorted an equally unimpressed contemporary.^[14]

However, by 1831, a year after a steam packet service brought tourists within close range, the top of Snowdon had become almost too accessible, especially for those who had come with hopes of experiencing the sublime. The Rev. John Parker noted in that year, "there is no place more public than the higher ground of Eryi during the summer." When George Barrow paid a visit a decade after railway connections were established in the 1850s, he remarked that, as far as his eyes could see, other walkers, in groups or individually, were passing up and down the paths in steady streams. At mountain top, a small walled area called Wyddja, he recited a poem in Welsh and was rewarded with a glass by the keeper of a crude refreshment building. It should also be noted that while descending, his young female companion so admired what turned

out to be a rare species of plant that the young guide who had accompanied them from Llanberis clambered over a crag to pick it for her.^[15]

A special attraction for hikers and rock climbers, then and now, is the ease of access provided by generations of slate quarry workers and copper ore miners who made stone surfaces for paths over which they wheeled and carried their heavy burdens or led their pack animals.^[16] Commented J. G. Kohl, a German tourist, after a visit in the early 1840s: "In all direction, in this part of the country, the mountains may be seen to have been bitten into by the slate quarries." He also noted that the ponds near several copper mines next to his path of ascent "had been dyed green by the metal." An army engineer who was in charge of a survey team at the top told him that the last of the eagles who had nested on the mountain had recently been wiped out. Gone, too, were the vestiges of woods that once covered the steep slopes. Herds of goats had in the distant past carried out deforestation with great efficiency. That animal, Kohl wrote, had proved to be "not only a bad gardener, but also a bad farmer." Therefore he thought it fortunate that the less destructive sheep had taken over.^[17]

But such an interest in the effects of direct and indirect human intervention was rare. It is doubtful that many, drawn to a place where, as Barrow remarked, "nature shows herself in her most grand and beautiful form,"^[18] paused, as Kohl did, to reflect that the surface texture of the landscape they were moving through owed perhaps almost as much to artifice as to the hand of nature.

Railway connections brought in tourists of a less hardy and adventurous sort than steamboats had done. Seeing an opportunity, the owner of the Llanberis slate industry built a rack-and-pinion railway in 1896, reaching from the valley floor to the summit, a distance of just under five miles. Canon Rownsley roused the forces of resistance. Why must "one of the chief glories of our country," he asked, be degraded to "the level of a tea garden"?^[19] But this time the forceful Rownsley did not prevail. Soon a café next to the station at the top ensured that no tourist need endure hardship while enjoying "scenes inexpressibly grand."^[20] Over the next century the number of visitors grew steadily. During one year in the early 1980s, 80,000 riders joined with 110,000 walkers, many of whom had queued near the valley parking lots to wait their turn on the trails. A decade later, nearly a half million were making the ascent each year by foot or train. One expert on park management thought the summit was in danger of becoming an "environmental disaster area," while another called it "a mass of unvegetated boulder scree."^[21]

Experience had shown Victorians how the compacting effect of treading feet and the puddling effect of hoofs, especially on wet clay, could cause steep hillsides to erode along the lines of transverse or steeply ascending paths. But it was not until countryside rambling began to be popular near the turn of the century that the typical nature lover became anxious about the wear and tear recreational use inflicted on the land.^[22] Before the advent of off-road vehicles of various kinds after the Second World War, it is more than likely that the outpouring of urban bicyclists and ramblers onto the hills and dales from the 1880s on did more to strengthen support for conservation of the countryside than it did to damage moorland and mountainside. As in the case of Snowdon, it was the buildings and transportation facilities constructed to serve or exploit the outdoor movement, rather than hikers and bicyclists themselves, that had the greatest impact on the visible features of the Victorian and Edwardian inland landscape.

Fears about the effects of steamboat and railway tourism proved to be exaggerated; the same might be said about the hopeful expectations. These were neatly summarized in 1861 by Thomas Cook, the pioneer of popular tourism. In promotion material for package tours to Scotland, he noted:

Railways have not only revolutionised the ordinary modes of travelling, but have also affected most powerfully the ideas, habits and pursuits of social life. A quarter of a century ago, travelling for health and pleasure was a luxury enjoyed by only the wealthy and the privileged class; and places . . . but distant a hundred miles or more, were known only in history.^[23]

Cook rejoiced at the prospect of this transformation and invested in it. Nevertheless, if examined soberly from the perspective of an era in which people use automobiles for local errands, visiting, and sight-seeing, this assessment seems overblown. Radical variation in pace was a peculiarity of the Victorian and Edwardian journey. Travelers were carried from home station to a distant destination at railway speed but, on alighting, walked or drove slowly along streets and country lanes. In the experience of most, the new way of traveling was occasional; the older ways were everyday. Railway time forced the pace of life, collapsed time and space, but did so episodically. It is true that travel for health and pleasure expanded and established itself in the culture of almost every social group and, in doing so, produced significant changes in the landscape. Nevertheless, so long as steam drove the wheels of long-distance transport, there were limits to the ability of individuals and families to go wherever they chose and limits to their impact on the countryside.

Qualifications need also to be made about the effect of railway tourism on habits and social attitudes. Obviously, steam technology had profound effects—a widening of horizons being one of them. Local cultures had no choice but to react to the new technology and the influx of strangers it introduced, but these receiving communities usually discovered ways to exercise control over the pace or direction of change. In 1850 Carlyle perceived that "railways have set all of the Towns of Britain a-dancing," but, as Jack Simmons has noted, each town managed to pick its own tune and dance steps.^[24] The reciprocal relationship between a local culture's capacity to define itself and the imperatives of technological change are particularly clear in the case of destinations that depended on tourism and the provision of holiday attractions.

The arrival of steam packets and then steam railways caused many older inland spas to languish and coastal or scenic upland communities to flourish. Thanks to cheap fares and steam transport's comfort and speed, urbanites of moderate means began spending days, weekends, or longer holidays on ocean beaches. Those whose means were abundant could expand their leisure repertoire with train trips to some northern grouse moor or inland or coastal golf club. Steam did offer the rich and a growing number of not-so-rich travelers "speedy retreat" from "plodding cares and cankering toils." In that sense improvements in communication did spread the "habit of enjoyment" through the ranks; but, paradoxically, these improvements also furthered the segregation of leisure activities according to social class.

F. M. L. Thompson, whose research has ranged so widely over Britain's rural, suburban, and urban landscape, develops this theme. He points out how misdirected, for the time at least, were Wordsworth's fears about railways turning loose hordes of day trippers upon defenseless "Mountains, and Vales, and Floods." "The millowners of Yorkshire and Lancashire," Thompson writes,

did indeed launch their masses by the trainload, but the trains headed for Blackpool or Scarborough; by the 1890s Bass, the Burton brewers, were sending twelve special trains, marshalled with military precision, on the annual works' outing, but the destination was Skegness. Railways, in fact, protected the Lakes by funnelling the masses to the seaside, which from his argument about working-class tastes and preferences is what Wordsworth should have expected. He was, perhaps, premature by a century in his forebodings, shooting at a target he could not have foreseen.^[25]

The new technology forced diversification and expansion of services on resort communities. It also was a factor in shaping the physical ar-

rangements of resorts. In many cases, steamboats set the pattern several decades before railways arrived. To receive the excursion boats, towns would need to construct a pier; a promenade along the beach would follow and serve as the focus for development. Rail connections expanded this development rather than directed it. Train passengers were likely to disembark from a terminus, positioned at the top of a main shopping street, leading directly to the promenade and pier.^[26] Because visitors continued to arrive by sea in considerable numbers all through the century, the pier retained its original function, but added restaurants, kiosks, concert facilities, and other entertainments. It would seem, then, that steam transport tended to conserve what it did not invade. The steamboat picked up passengers at one point and deposited them at another, leaving no permanent trace of its passage. Railways further increased the mobility of holiday travelers but channeled that mobility through narrow corridors.

Seekers of gaiety and respectability alike were restrained in their mobility by the fact that nearly all of them had arrived by some form of steam-driven public transport. Having arrived, they had little choice but to make further explorations on foot. Restless souls might arrange excursions to nearby beaches, piers, promenades, and pavilions, but only rarely would they spill over to places outside the territories prescribed by walkways or special boat, train, or carriage services. For that reason, accommodations and seaside pleasures needed to be concentrated. Closely ranked hotels and boardinghouses, arranged in a thin line along the town beach or cliff, intruded only here and there into the hinterland.^[27] Beyond the ends of the promenade, there might be clusters of shacks or cabins, but private "villas" tended to be placed within the resort's orbit, strung out along cliff or beach foreshore. These larger houses would be inhabited, for the most part, by wealthy families, many of whom treated the seaside town more like a long-range exurb than a resort. Since most Victorian income earners worked as close to the end of their lives as possible, it was not until the late 1920s that elderly people in large numbers began building permanent residences along the "natural and secluded buffer" zones between resorts.^[28] The advent of the private motorcar, was, of course, another prerequisite, which also explains why caravans and beachside bungalows and chalets did not appear in large numbers until well after the First World War.^[29]

The development of Herne Bay on the north coast of Kent shows how steam locomotion could alter an environment, but it also shows how ef-

fectively residents could exercise choice in how to respond. One would think Herne Bay's geography might have been its destiny. Within easy reach of London, it had come into being in the 1830s, when Thames steam packets began bringing passengers to that part of the coast. Growth was steady but moderate. By the end of the decade, Herne Bay's facilities included a mile-long parade, an assembly room, a pier, swimming baths, and two libraries, as well as a plentiful assortment of churches and chapels.^[30] Two decades later, railways connected London and the north Kentish coast, making day trips feasible. But Herne Bay refused that option. City officials and businessmen, instead of adjusting their facilities to appeal to low-income visitors from the city, successfully fought off proposals to put on cheap excursion trains. Their object was to create a quiet atmosphere calculated to attract young middle-class families. Accordingly, when the number of visitors began to increase, they deliberately fashioned additional buildings and amenities to that end and succeeded to such an extent that the town came to be known as "Baby Bay."^[31]

Entertainments on offer remained eminently quiet and respectable. Families making extended visits to this and similar white-collar seaside watering places were encouraged to spend their entire holidays in or around the grand hotels or modest boardinghouses and to use the tepid comforts they offered. A few visitors, having come unprepared for such an atmosphere, complained about the "aggressive piety" that closed down the pier on Sunday. But town spokesmen were unmoved. If tourists want "bands, gaiety, itinerant Christy Minstrelsy, and such like, they must go elsewhere," the Herne Bay Argus was still advising the resort's critics in 1880.^[32] It was clear that in Herne Bay and most other seaside resorts the amusements on offer would only partly depend on the tastes of the clientele the railway was capable of bringing in. What social tone those in charge of development decided to promote was another, often more important, determinant.

The evolution of Southport illustrates this point particularly well. It was a ready-made destination resort, fashioned out of a vast, flat stretch of sand just south of where the Ribble estuary opens out to the Lancashire coast. Speculating on profits to be made out of the fast-growing popularity of ocean-bathing therapy in the late eighteenth century, an enterprising landlord, William "The Duke" Sutton, built a hotel, nestled among the sand dunes. Residents of Meales (later called Churchtown), a tiny hamlet nearby, referred to the project as "The Duke's Folly," and so it seemed to a number of early visitors. For years, it stood alone near

the top of a wide stretch of pure sand, some twenty-three square miles in extent, reaching twenty miles south to the Crosby Channel and the mouth of the Mersey at Liverpool.

In prehistoric times a once-forested inland coastline had given way to deep layers of peat. Strong westerlies had blown sand inland, covering the peat floor. During the seventeenth century, descriptions of the region spoke of a wilderness of shifting sand dunes and undrained "moss."^[33] Planting of marram or star grass along with a few pines and willows in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did manage to check the sand's invasion, so that the region itself was fairly stable, even though the dune area was, of course, fragile. In front of the town of Southport, which grew up around the hotel, undulating sand banks spread so far out between high- and low-water marks that it was difficult to tell where the land ended and the sea began. Between the shoreline and an older beach farther inland a line of salt marshes made a hollow or valley. At first, South-port grew in conformity to this natural configuration. But not for long.

What Sutton and especially the intertwined Hesketh and Scarisbrick families (the heads of which were the local lords of the manor) sensed was that close proximity to Liverpool and Merseyside made this seeming waste a convenient destination for jaded urbanites in search of the supposed restorative powers of sea bathing, seawater drinking, and sea air breathing. However, the family compact was not particularly keen to cater to the fluctuating holiday trade; its members were far more interested in making profits from leasing land to "cotton princes" in search of exclusive secondary residences. Therefore they laid out their sandy wastes in large plots and attracted prospective tenants by offering generous terms and guarantees that leasehold controls would be strict enough to guarantee future exclusivity. In turn, wealthy speculators, most of them nonconformists concerned with establishing a high moral tone, recognized that money could be made out of developing a holiday trade based on the resort's reputation for respectability and good taste—as people like themselves understood those terms.^[34]

This correlation, not of strategies or values but of mutual interest between aristocratic landlords and the middle-class elites, brought about the rapid and purposeful development of a planned gardenlike resort. In 1814 a visitor, Richard Ayton, came across the Royal Inn and its cluster of eccentric "villas" and expressed surprise at seeing "art and taste" in such a "scene of desolation."^[35] A few years later a new canal between Wigan and Manchester drew visitors and a few more settlers. Stimu-

lated by a reputation for promiscuous mingling of bathing machines for both sexes, this town—which subsequently worked hard at becoming a "bastion of select respectability"^[36] —grew and acquired, in the 1820s, its famous eighty-eight-yard-wide, straight, mile-long, tree-lined Lord Street, placed just behind, and parallel to, the shallow, marshy declivity that marked the line of the old beach. In this hollow between the new street and the new beach, which had formed farther out, builders put up a line of detached houses.

Since the natural process of sand dune formation was still at work, this site turned out to be highly volatile. Sir George Head, who included Southport in the peregrinations he undertook in the 1830s, reported that gale-driven sand was threatening to bury the gardens and lower the floors of some of these structures.^[37] The resort's promoters reacted by constructing a protective wall on the strip between the hollow and the offshore dunes and then adding, as an afterthought, a wide promenade on top. Shortly afterward, in 1839, they included, among other improvements to the hollow, the Victoria Baths. Permanent and semipermanent residents along with boardinghouse and hotel proprietors were encouraged by large-scale plotting to build substantial structures over what had been marshland.

An unusual feature of this development, after railway connections with Liverpool and Manchester were made between 1848 and 1855, was the degree of control the property-owning interest managed to exercise. In 1842 Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood, having got into financial difficulties as a result of a project to build a new port called Fleetwood on a point of land north of Blackpool, sold his Southport holdings to his brother, the Rev. Charles Hesketh, and to Charles Scarisbrick, a wealthy landowner and entrepreneur who had been involved in an ambitious land-reclamation project at Martin Mere along the banks of the Ribble estuary. They agreed about the direction of future development and in 1846 received Parliament's permission to set up an improvements commission, controlled, of course, by themselves.

These tight reins were loosened gradually after Southport was incorporated in 1866, but, despite intense rivalry between estate trustees and town corporation, a measure of continuity, based on a determination not to become another Blackpool, was maintained. From the middle of the century to its end, a firmly organized group of developers created a garden city: a tree-lined shopping boulevard, two main residential areas plotted for villas, detached houses surrounded by flower beds and trim

lawns, and a promenade that sheltered the planted spaces from the blowing sand.^[38]

The American writer and diplomat Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose wife had been prescribed a lengthy dose of saltwater bathing and sea air, chose to move, with his family, into a Southport boardinghouse for ten months in 1856-57. On weekdays he commuted to his consular office in Liverpool by train ("through a most uninteresting tract of country"—"a wide monotony of level plain").^[39] Southport, he wrote, was "as stupid a place as ever I lived in," adding, "it was a place where everybody seems to be a transitory guest, nobody at home." From his vantage point along the promenade, the shore "stretched out interminably seaward, a wide waste of glistening sands." But he did approve of the neat way the town was laid out and the "well-paved streets, the principal of which are enlivened with bazaars, markets, shops, hotels of various degrees, and a showy vivacity of aspect." "Except where cultivation has done its utmost," he concluded, "there is very little difference between winter and summer . . . there being nothing but a waste of sand, intermixed with plashy pools, to seaward, and a desert of sand-hillocks on the land-side."^[40]

Before the Hawthornes arrived and for many decades after they departed, artifice, incrementally but radically, replaced nature. By the 1840s Southport had ceased to be a place where developers accommodated their projects to the existing conditions and topography. Promoters, planners, engineers, gardeners, and architects labored instead to refashion the site so that it would conform to the pattern of resort geography established elsewhere.^[41] Shifting sand dunes became lawns and gardens; tropical plants bloomed under glass in wintertime; man-made lakes and heated baths allowed oarsmen, swimmers, and amateur sailors to ignore the weather or the condition of the sea.

The shoreline retained some of its attractions. A photograph taken in the 1930s shows the beach at Ainsdale, just to the south of Birkdale, blackened almost to the sea's edge with lines of motorcars;^[42] but, of course, Victorian beaches had only human feet, donkey hoofs, and carriage and bathing-machine wheels to contend with, although in Hawthorne's day a large boat on wheels and equipped with sails, called "The Flying Dutchman," rolled up and down the beach in front of Southport whenever the wind was brisk and thrill seekers had pennies to spend. Heavy use of this kind could flatten the marram grass that fixed the dunes, but erosion did not become a matter of much concern until well into the twentieth century. As for the site of the growing city, the transformation

brought about by the promenade barrier, the filling in and planting of the hollow, as well as the laying out of garden city housing developments, failed to provoke reprisals from nature, particularly since the long fore-shore broke much of the force of the Irish Sea's relatively gentle waves.

Southport citizens did become concerned about a possible environmental, hence a potential economic, disaster in the 1880s when the Ribble Navigation Bill seemed to threaten the stability of the estuary and, consequently, the security of the resort's waterfront. Tidal waters reached five miles above Preston and brought cargo, off-loaded onto barges, to that cotton mill town. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the south channel through the estuary and into the Ribble shifted closer to the middle of the tidal basin, leaving a blind channel in front of the site on which Southport grew. The resort's pier therefore ended not at the open sea but at the Bog Hole, a long narrow arm in the midst of sand banks that, except at high tide, reached about eight miles across to the north side of the estuary mouth.^[43] The Bog Hole was not a conspicuous landscape feature; indeed, depending on tides, Southport had more of a sandscape than a seascape. Paul Theroux, who paid a visit in the early 1980s, thought the beach resembled "a long ludicrous desert," only flatter—a "seaside resort without much sea."^[44] Yet Southport really was a port in the Victorian era, and its pier received steam packets from Liverpool well into the twentieth century.

At various times in the first half of the nineteenth century, navigation companies had carried out extensive improvements: dredging, building retaining walls, and reclaiming marshland along the river just below Preston. In 1882 the Preston City Corporation, unimpressed by the results of these attempts to straighten and deepen their town's sea approaches, decided to purchase the Ribble Navigation Company. They obtained permission from Parliament to extend and deepen the channel sufficiently to bring large steamers to the Preston docks at high tide. They were also permitted to stabilize the channel banks by building an additional three and a half miles of retaining walls.

Over the next decade these works were carried out in spite of vigorous hostile lobbying by Southport landowners and developers who feared the possible consequences for the Bog Hole and the resort's sea connection.^[45] A three-way tug-of-war followed between the corporation who saw the necessity for refurbishing the town's threatened seaside attractions, the Hesketh/Scarisbrick trustees who claimed ownership of the foreshore, and a group of wealthy opponents of the Ribble Naviga-

tion Bill, who were concerned about the possible effects on their investments that changes in the estuary might bring about. This last group, believing that trustee ownership would strengthen their hand in the political contest with Preston, eventually sided with the landed interest in their successful effort to buy clear title to the land from the Duchy of Lancaster, a victory that radical land reformers everywhere greeted with angry protest.^[46]

As it turned out, these maneuvers failed to halt the rechanneling project. The consequences were not to be as dire as opponents predicted, although the refashioning of the estuary did cause some narrowing of the blind channel leading to the pier. Dredging operations at Liverpool had the same effect. Nevertheless, steamboats found they could still reach the Bog Hole and unload passengers at the Southport pier.

Continued sea access did not compensate for the fact that the sea was steadily retreating from what was supposed to be a seaside resort. The corporation responded energetically to that challenge in 1887 by building the first of two extensive lakes and gardens just to the south of the pier and on the inland side of the promenade. In the 1890s they added another lake and garden north of the pier.^[47] These were to make sure that holiday makers would have places to row, sail, and bathe even if the sea moved beyond convenient reach.

So by the century's end, well-off visitors and residents of this former sandy waste could spend a brisk afternoon in a winter garden, stroll through the geometry of the botanic garden or the picturesque rockery of Paxton-designed Hesketh Park, enjoy the amenities of ornamental inland lakes, plunge into one of the six large, steam-heated seawater pools at the Victoria Baths, immerse themselves in warm mud and afterward be hosed down at high pressure, view a collection of ferns in the conservatory of Churchtown Botanical Gardens, attend an annual flower show almost on a par with Chelsea's, and enjoy all of this improving culture without needing to go near or even managing to see the ocean.

Most other holiday towns had been able to exploit naturally attractive settings. Not so Southport. As a late nineteenth century guidebook pointed out, "Nature had done for [rival resorts] what Art has had to do for Southport."^[48] Yet just to the south of this man-made bourgeois paradise much of the duneland remained during the century in something approaching a natural state almost as far as Seaforth on the outer edges of Liverpool's turn-of-the-century outreach. Along the whole stretch of this part of the Lancashire coast, no seawalls or groynes were needed.^[49] Here, at any rate, a reasonably long-lasting truce seemed to

have been worked out between the contending forces of land and sea and a kind of modus vivendi established between nature and artifice.

Eventually, a compromise was also worked out between the holiday tastes of the various social orders. Once railways offered excursions, total middle-class exclusivity became impossible to maintain. During one week in 1855, 41,000 day trippers from Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Preston, Wigan, and other Lancashire manufacturing towns poured into Southport. Until late in the century, planners adopted Herne Bay's tactics and did what they could to discourage this influx. But difficult economic times in the 1880s cut into revenues from the trade in holiday exclusivity and respectability, and city authorities and the interest they represented decided to remove some of the impediments they had placed in the way of the popular recreation industry and concentrate on shielding the long-term vacationers and residents from its effects. On the pier side of the central shopping and hotel district, sandwiched between the two main middle-class residential areas, they constructed a fun fair. In this smallish area could be found the entertainments in which, according to a promotional guide published in 1897, "the not too exacting holiday maker delighteth":^[50] merry-go-rounds, swings, a switchback railway, a camera obscura, minstrel shows, photographic studios, donkey rides, a water chute, an aerial ride over a lake (the Maxim Flying Machine), and an Aunt Sally.^[51]

On the north and south flank of villadom, city fathers eventually constructed two golf links as cordons sanitaires between affluent residents and the noisy day trippers and, as early as the 1890s, the especially noisy automobile racers.^[52] The pier, which opened in 1860, acted as a social neutral zone. It was a cast-iron structure 1,460 yards long, the longest in the country until Southend extended its pier later in the century. In 1872 Southport's pier replaced its manually operated railway with a steam cable railway. Its waiting and refreshment rooms were patronized by everyone. Although the class recreational divide was not wide in a geographic sense, it was broad enough to allow for a fair degree of mutual tolerance (rare for seaside resorts).^[53]

By the 1890s nearby Blackpool, "a very pandemonium of amusements,"^[54] had gone well beyond tolerance to extend an exuberant welcome to Lancashire mill workers and their families, leaving Southport to embellish its reputation as a desirable destination mainly, although not exclusively, for the well off. For residents and visitors who had no great interest in sea bathing, sketching, or poking about in rock pools and who were easily bored by a routine of promenade and band concert,

the golf course, the practice green, or perhaps a round of tennis followed by a drink at the golf club among "one's own sort" became all but indispensable.

A rush of interest on the part of the Victorian and Edwardian middle class for competitive games of skill opened up new markets for resort developers. Especially favored were those sports that promised a cluster of advantages: a degree of social exclusiveness, opportunity for social advancement and individual expression, reasonably easy access for amateurs possessing no unusual amount of skill and strength, and the capacity for being rationalized by all but the most puritanical as healthy, fresh air exercise for office-bound people with only a limited amount of "disposable time."^[55] Tennis offered these attractions. But golf, as Horatio Hutchinson, an early enthusiast, pointed out, had an additional one: it was a game that an individual could enjoy alone, with only "Colonel Bogey" for an opponent.^[56]

Southport was one of the first to react to the golfing boom of the later 1880s and 1890s. Its businessmen recognized that off-season golfing weekends might help the larger hotels to survive the winter doldrums.^[57] The resort's first golf club opened in 1885 and another, one of the country's most prestigious, in nearby Birkdale in 1889. Two more links were laid out on land reclaimed from the foreshore of the estuary in the years just preceding the outbreak of war. One of these was owned by the municipality and open to short-term visitors; but, beyond that small concession, the rapid promotion of golf created social and physical barriers in Southport as well as in every other place where private courses and clubs were established.

Before the 1860s golf had been largely confined to "real," not "virtual," places: the river estuaries and sandy foreshores of eastern Lowland Scotland and a few rough commons in England, Ireland, and Wales. A historian of the St. Andrews Golf Club noted that a meeting was called in January 1803 to discuss what to do about a Mr. Dempster who had imported rabbits and was turning the links into a warren.^[58] Eventually the players prevailed over the rabbits, but until the mid-Victorian years most golfers maneuvered their feather-stuffed leather balls around dunes, hummocks, patches of bracken or heather, and what other hazards nature happened to have provided.

The introduction of a much cheaper and more durable gutta-percha ball in the late 1840s made the game more attractive to suburbanites with ordinary skills. At the same time, railways began to offer special fares for weekend golfers and carried spectators to professional exhibitions at

such famous courses as St. Andrews or Musselburgh. Again, railways acted to widen participation in what Thomas Cook called the pursuits of social life and also reacted to a trend already under way. Clubs slowly began to multiply and to construct new courses on dunes, heaths, farmland, and woods, placed near rail connections with the major cities, within range of businessmen who were looking for ways to combine "moderate exertion with social exclusiveness."^[59]

When growth in the sport's popularity radically accelerated in the 1890s, the construction of new courses increased accordingly. (See Figure 11.) Hutchinson estimated that by 1906 there were some 1,800 golf clubs, using some 1,000 courses. Those with nine holes needed a minimum of thirty to forty acres and eighteen-hole courses needed at least seventy-five.^[60] Most were considerably larger. The introduction of the livelier "gutties" called for wider and longer fairways. When the even more spirited Haskell ball, made by winding rubber thread tightly around a rubber core, arrived in Britain from America in 1902, many clubs found it necessary to widen and lengthen once again, so that some courses came to occupy two or three hundred acres. Before 1914, only provisions for game shooting covered more of the recreational land surface in England and Scotland.^[61]

Until the early years of the twentieth century, professional golfers or club greens keepers planned most of this construction and extension. Only a few of them did so with aesthetic considerations in mind. Being experts at the game, they tended to position hazards to punish players for making clumsy drives and approaches rather than using them to induce players to plot out a strategy.^[62] The result, according to H. S. Colt, who had by the 1920s established himself as the Capability Brown of golf landscaping, was that most Victorian links were rectangular. Sod bunkers all faced the same way and were fronted with traps filled with a "dark, red sticky substance." Greens tended to be flat and squared-off; bunkers were arranged to be approached at right angles. These links, Colt thought, were unimaginative and boring: blots on the landscape, insensitive to their environments and to the social aspirations of the game's new, suburbanite recruits.^[63]

Colt and such other professional designers as Willie Park Jr., J. F. Abercromby, and W. H. Fowler set out to correct this. Their dicta were: return to the notion that nature should be the guide; make an effort to disguise artifice; contrast patches of regular, green turf with a background of heather or other rough and darker vegetation and make the edges of sandy areas look as though swept by the wind; reshape harsh natural

Figure 11.
Ladies' golf championship at Portrush, Ireland (1895). Enthusiasm for outdoor
 sport in the 1890s, shared by both sexes, added many golf courses to the landscape.
 Lady Margaret Scott won this and two other championships in 1895, then
 chose to retire as the first woman golf champion. (Illustrated London News 106, 1895)

features but strive to avoid the "horrible symmetrical"; and try to give the course and the clubhouse the visual values of a traditional landed estate.

When the site chosen happened to be timber, arable, or grazing land or when the desire for expensive exclusiveness clashed with popular recreational uses, protest, even sabotage, could be expected. Once land that had grown crops or supported grazing animals had been reshaped, top soil hauled in, and irrigation and drainage systems installed, its value would have risen far beyond the point where conversion back to food production could ever be feasible. Country people and residents of fishing villages understood this. Many of them were suspicious that a new course and club might be a Trojan horse containing cohorts of housing and resort developers. These premonitions were well-founded. Experience has shown that the loss of agricultural land to golf courses has tended everywhere to be permanent and that the opportunity golf offers city dwellers to enjoy exercise in a controlled, exclusive, idealized countryside must be measured against their contribution to the erosion of agricultural or fishing communities.^[64] Hutchinson noted in 1911 that "many a fishing village has risen into a moderate watering-place by virtue of no other attractions than those which are offered by its golf course."^[65]

Not everyone could have been expected to share the obvious pleasure he took in making that observation. Colt wrote that the two most formidable obstacles to his course constructions were "the commoners and the commonable beasts."^[66] He was referring to villagers who retaliated by turning animals loose on fairways or by digging holes in awkward places. Thus at the end of the nineteenth century, a new enclosure movement again provoked clashes between traditional forms of land management and traditional "rights," only this time the expropriators came from a different social and geographic position. In the earlier period, defenders of the public right to use open spaces had evoked the ideal of consensus achieved through shared participation in outdoor activities and had attacked the landowners who they believed selfishly stood in the way of achieving this renewed sense of commonality. The rhetoric that served the cause of the Commons Preservation Society still applied in the 1890s, except that the parvenu, rather than the established group, had become the enemy.

When omnibuses, trams, suburban railways, and retail traders penetrated exclusive enclaves like Birmingham's Edgbaston and Liverpool's Everton, the local elites resisted, then decamped for greener pastures: "segregation and co-operation were replaced by conflict and depar-

ture."^[67] As the older group identity conferred by place weakened and as the ranks of the middle class swelled and became more differentiated, sports clubs tended to become important social centers around which suburbanites could organize their social activities, make friends, meet eligible marriage partners, be recognized, and have their status reinforced. Attempts to make golf courses and clubhouses into replicas of country estates were responses to this widening of function. John Lower-son, who has done more than any other to place the history of golf in a social context, thought that the shift in golf course architecture from the utilitarian to the picturesque had as its object the provision of "a pseudo-gentry life-style" for socially mobile urbanites. Businessmen, professionals, their sons, and, with increasing frequency, their wives and daughters, had at their disposal (for a stiff fee) "a country house and park controlled by a committee of pseudo-yeomen who lived in the surroundings but whose use of the land was recreational rather than productive."^[68]

Because this particular land use was unproductive and low intensity, golf courses could sometimes act as a refuge for wildlife. The fairways and putting greens would be grass monocultures and, from an ecological point of view, sterile. But the rough and wooded areas included in the newer kind of design protected and encouraged species diversity, especially when a course incorporated some existing countryside features and when greens keepers were not overzealous.^[69] Not surprisingly, this kind of pro-exclusivity argument was seldom, perhaps never, made at the time and would not have softened antagonisms had it been.

Resentment against colonization of the countryside by suburbanites was not confined to those who used the land productively or locals who resented having their rights over common lands ignored. Organized cyclists and country ramblers frequently objected to the placement of golf courses in their paths and expressed distaste for this kind of intrusion into marshes, heathlands, and sandy stretches. At the same time that some members of the middle class were discovering the pleasures of golf and lawn tennis at seaside resorts like Southport and going home to form and join clubs, others were becoming members of the Cyclists' Touring Club, setting out for a Sunday tramp, subscribing to the Rambler , and taking part in one or another of the Footpath Preservation Society's campaigns to reopen blocked trails.

Late Victorian and Edwardian golfers, cyclists, and ramblers may have been alike in their enthusiasms for exercise in the fresh air of the country, but they differed radically in their conception of what the countryside should represent. According to David Rubinstein, in an article called

"Cycling in the 1890s," it was the opportunity cycle touring offered for personal mobility and freedom from convention that attracted "advanced spirits," male and female, particularly among the "fin de 'cycle'" lower-middle and upper working classes. He includes a passage from H. G. Wells's The Wheels of Chance where the young shop assistant hero speaks about the joys of the open road and the forests, "heathery moorland and grassy down, lush meadows," and "shining rivers" he passes through on his way to the sea.^[70] Not for him or those like him the contrived landscape of the links or the elaborate rules, dress, and code of etiquette prescribed for the golfer and tennis player. Young men and women who pedaled out together from town were looking for flower-dappled meadows, quiet villages, nature clothed in innocence, release from artifice of every kind.

Even stronger was this "yearning for the rural" among ramblers, the term most often used from the 1880s for those who joined clubs to explore the countryside on foot.^[71] Not everyone who joined in this tramping fellowship was moved to do so by ideology—socialist, humanist, or otherwise. Nevertheless, an interest in folk culture and local history, admiration for the arts and crafts of preindustrial times, longing for the pastoral simplicities of village life, desire for contact with natural textures, foods, sounds, and smells were strong elements in this less self-conscious British version of the German Wandervogel movement and its preoccupation with comradeship and close contact with folk and fatherland. Thus ramblers could become militant when golf club managers as well as proprietors of deer forests and grouse and pheasant shooting grounds, with their appetites for exclusive space, carved out picturesque settings from rough pastures or restricted access to heaths, mountains, commons, and wastes.

An instance of this tension can be found at Weybridge, in the heart of the Berkshire golf course belt. When a local club placed a chained gate across a public footpath in 1909, a thousand people gathered and forced the gate open.^[72] Defenders of the game replied to this kind of protest by claiming to be model countryside conservators. They made, and still make, the point that golf courses served to protect green spaces from developers or mineral exploiters; they also claimed that the game encouraged an appreciation of landscape quality and therefore enlisted its players in the cause of landscape preservation.^[73] But few conservation-minded people were convinced. It was the cyclist and the rambler, only some of whom were Clarion readers or had heard of News from Nowhere , who became the constituency for late Victorian and Edwardian conservation

and preservation causes and not, as a general rule, the weekend or seaside holiday golfer.

Rivalry between different leisure groups for the use of the countryside became as intense as the rivalry between leisure interests and those of agriculture, forestry, or urban development. Nevertheless, so long as the age of steam lasted, there was still room enough for compromise and accommodation. Because the bulk of passenger and freight traffic between cities and the larger towns moved on rails rather than on paved surfaces, cyclists had the open road largely to themselves. Walkers, carried to attractive parts of the countryside by rail, could discover the authentic rural scenery they had set out from the city to find.^[74] Cheap excursion fares and, by the 1890s, low-cost hiking and cycling clubs gave both male and female factory, shop, and office workers access to beaches, mountains, and heaths and, at the same time, placed some limits on the numbers who would visit those places and wear them down.

Hardly of the countryside had been developed with recreation in mind. Contrived show places, "counterfeits of real objects," filled with "pseudo-events,"^[75] were mainly confined to seaside resorts. Having decided on a seaside holiday, the first-class traveler could put himself in the hands of travel specialists and decamp with his large family and mountain of trunks and cases, confident that all would be taken care of by an army of porters and by expert staff in hotels that looked and performed, to use Peter Bailey's term, like "social fortresses."^[76] Golfers, who needed to plan and schedule their leisure as well as their work, could, with the help of Bradshaws, fit a day of outdoor exercise into their busy weeks. At their clubs they would be certain to meet people like themselves and be secure against contact with the less-affluent leisure-consuming populace.

Whatever the defects might have been with respect to social justice and cultural hegemony, a balance of forces did tend to protect the physical environment. The equilibrium was, however, an unstable one, having been achieved when the age of steam was nearing its end and before rising real wages, a further expansion of leisure time, the diversification of leisure services and forms, changes in the social climate, the widening of democracy, the advent of the motor bus, and, after that, the triumph of the private automobile—all of these interacting—released the full force of mass leisure upon the land and the seashore.