Clacton is back in the news a few months after I visited it. Once again it’s politics are a matter of national debate.
When we think about deindustrialisation, we think about pit villages, silent steelworks and abandoned shipyards. We picture rusting blast furnaces, boarded-up factories and communities that lost the industries on which they had depended for generations.
We rarely think about Blackpool. Or Skegness.
Or Clacton. Or Great Yarmouth.
Yet Britain’s seaside resorts were every bit as much victims of deindustrialisation as the mines and mills that once sent them millions of customers every summer.
The story we usually tell is that cheap flights to Spain killed the British seaside. It is a comforting explanation because it sounds inevitable. Sunshine beat drizzle. Sangria beat fish and chips. The Costa del Sol beat Cleethorpes.
But the real story began much further inland.
The industrial holiday
Before the Industrial Revolution, holidays were local affairs. Agricultural workers might take time off around church festivals or fairs, but there was nothing resembling a national holiday season.
Factories changed everything. By the late nineteenth century, employers had discovered that it made sense to close entire works for a week or two every summer. Machinery needed servicing, boilers needed inspection and, if everyone took their holiday together, production was disrupted far less than if workers disappeared throughout the year.
What emerged was Works Week, Wakes Week or Factory Fortnight. It became one of the defining rituals of industrial Britain.
Cotton mills across Lancashire closed according to carefully staggered calendars. Engineering firms in the Midlands shut their gates. Coal mines paused production. Shipyards emptied.
Millions of workers packed suitcases, loaded prams, gathered children and headed for the railway station.
Britain’s annual migration
This was not tourism as we understand it today. It was a mass migration.
Oldham alone sent 23,000 holidaymakers to Blackpool by special excursion trains in 1860. By the middle of the twentieth century Blackpool was receiving around 17 million visitors every year, many arriving during the Lancashire Wakes Weeks.
Each industrial region had its own seaside destination.
Lancashire’s cotton towns went to Blackpool.
Yorkshire’s textile workers filled Scarborough and Bridlington.
Families from Nottinghamshire’s coalfields and engineering works descended on Skegness.
London’s dockers and factory workers escaped to Clacton, Southend and Great Yarmouth.
These weren’t random choices. The railways had built routes to serve them. Holiday camps, boarding houses and theatres organised themselves around them. Resort economies depended upon the rhythms of Britain’s factories.
The seaside was not separate from industrial Britain.
It was part of industrial Britain.
| Industrial region | Approx. industrial workforce (1950s–60s) | Principal holiday resort(s) | Typical holiday pattern | Evidence of connection |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lancashire cotton towns (Manchester, Oldham, Bolton, Blackburn, Burnley, Preston) | 700,000–900,000 | Blackpool, Morecambe, Southport | Staggered Wakes Weeks | Blackpool’s entire season revolved around Lancashire Wakes calendars; Oldham alone sent 23,000 people by excursion train in 1860. |
| West Yorkshire textile towns (Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield, Halifax) | 500,000–700,000 | Scarborough, Bridlington, Filey | Works fortnight | Heavy railway excursion traffic from Yorkshire mills. |
| Nottinghamshire & Derbyshire coalfields and engineering | 350,000–500,000 | Skegness | Factory holidays & Butlin’s | Skegness became the classic East Midlands resort; Butlin’s opened in 1936 specifically for this market. |
| East London docks & manufacturing | 600,000–800,000 | Clacton, Southend, Great Yarmouth | Fortnight holidays | Resorts marketed heavily to London’s working-class districts via direct rail services. |
| Birmingham & Black Country engineering | 600,000+ | Rhyl, Weston-super-Mare, Blackpool | Factory shutdowns | Coach operators and railways timed services to engineering holidays. |
| Glasgow & Clydeside shipbuilding | 250,000–350,000 | Ayr, Blackpool | Fair Fortnight | Glasgow Fair became Scotland’s equivalent of Wakes Week. |
A hidden piece of infrastructure
We often think of factories as producing steel, coal or textiles. In reality they also produced holidays.
The annual shutdowns created a predictable flow of millions of customers to Britain’s coastal towns. Boarding houses knew exactly when the visitors would arrive. Entertainers, amusement arcades and fish-and-chip shops organised their businesses around the industrial calendar.
Blackpool wasn’t simply a holiday resort. It was the leisure department of Lancashire. Skegness depended upon the East Midlands. Great Yarmouth depended upon London and the eastern counties.
The seaside resorts were woven into the same economic fabric as the industries that sustained them.
The North East’s annual escape
The North East followed a slightly different pattern from Lancashire or the East Midlands.
Instead of one dominant resort, its holidaymakers were spread across several destinations. Families from County Durham’s coalfield, Sunderland’s shipyards and Newcastle’s engineering works might spend a day at Whitley Bay, Tynemouth or Redcar, but many still took their annual Works Fortnight further afield, particularly to Scarborough and Blackpool.
The annual migration was woven into the culture of industrial communities. Miners’ welfare clubs organised trips, railway companies laid on excursion trains and whole streets often seemed to disappear to the coast at the same time. When the pits closed, the shipyards shrank and heavy engineering declined, the North East lost not only the industries themselves but also the spending power that had sustained so many seaside towns. Deindustrialisation didn’t just leave silent collieries and empty docks; it also left quieter promenades and fewer holidaymakers.
Then the factories disappeared
From the 1970s onwards that fabric began to unravel.
The coal industry was closed down. Steel contracted dramatically. Shipbuilding shrank to a fraction of its former size. Cotton manufacturing almost disappeared.
Engineering became smaller, more automated and less concentrated. The works holiday disappeared with them.
Flexible annual leave replaced Factory Fortnight. Instead of entire towns travelling together, families chose different weeks throughout the year. Cars replaced excursion trains. Weekend breaks replaced two-week holidays.
Only then did Spain arrive as the final competitor. Cheap package holidays undoubtedly accelerated the decline of Britain’s seaside resorts, but they did not create the problem.
By the time millions of Britons were flying to Málaga and Alicante, the industrial machine that had sustained Blackpool and its rivals for a century was already breaking apart.
The customer base had changed before the destination did.
The other casualties
We rightly mourned the closure of pits, mills and steelworks because we understood what they meant to local communities.
We were slower to notice another industry quietly losing its purpose.
The boarding houses.
The piers.
The amusement arcades.
The theatres.
The cafés.
The donkey rides.
The holiday camps.
Entire local economies had evolved to serve industrial Britain. When industrial Britain disappeared, they lost far more than customers. They lost the economic model on which they had been built. That helps explain why so many seaside towns have struggled ever since.
Their problems were never simply about tourism. They were about the collapse of an industrial ecosystem.
Incredibly the last organised factory trips to seaside resorts continued into the 1990s, when spending your 2 weeks holiday with your workmates felt weird.
| Resort | Peak period | Historic market | Visitors today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blackpool | 1950s–60s | Lancashire industry | 20–21 million annual visitors (mostly day trips and short breaks) |
| Skegness | 1930s–70s | East Midlands factories & coalfields | 1.4 million+ annual visitors |
| Butlin’s Skegness | Since 1936 | Factory families | ~400,000 visitors annually |
| Great Yarmouth | 1950s–70s | London & East Midlands | Still attracts millions annually, though with much shorter stays |
| Clacton | 1950s–70s | East London | Strong day-trip market rather than fortnight holidays |
Looking at today’s politics
Over the past few months I have written about towns such as Clacton, Skegness and Great Yarmouth because they have become symbols of modern Britain’s political discontent.
Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us.
These places experienced deindustrialisation without ever having blast furnaces or pitheads dominating the skyline. Their industries were boarding houses rather than coal mines, amusement arcades rather than steel mills.
But the underlying story is remarkably similar. Communities built around one economic model found that model disappearing within a generation.
When we talk about Britain’s forgotten towns, we tend to look inland towards abandoned factories.
We should also look out to sea.
The British seaside wasn’t defeated by better weather in Spain.
It was undermined by the same deindustrialisation that transformed the rest of Britain. The factories stopped sending their workers, and when the annual migration ended, an entire way of life quietly slipped away with it. The places left behind had too few workers, too many retired and sick to be economically vibrant. The best young people left, and the sense of community vanished. The seaside locations that gave them their purpose made them a long way from the places that were doing well.
Some seaside towns, close enough to prosperous cities have reinvented themselves, often with people moving down to the coast from big cities in the vanguard. But Clacton, Great Yarmout, Skegness, Blackpool don’t want that. They don’t want to change, they don’t want to make themselves more attractive to investment or to people moving their to reinvigorate the local economy. Which in the modern world dooms them to an endless half life.
The end of the line.
