A Week at the Seaside

Abstract

By the late nineteenth century, the British people enjoyed a range of leisure and recreational facilities which their forebears could scarcely have dreamed of. Indeed many of the mass enjoyments of the modern world were well-established features of British life by the 1890s. Modern soccer was played by thousands and watched by millions; cricket too was a popular, participatory and spectator sport. In fact there was a host of games and sports which were newly-codified, nationwide and immensely popular — in schools, in commercial stadiums and in more informal settings — on open spaces, in streets and parks. This was true of tennis, athletics, rowing and rugby (of both varieties). Moreover all of these sports — and more besides — were at the same time being rapidly adopted in a great number of different societies around the world. Black South Africans played football, the descendants of slaves swiftly took up cricket throughout the Caribbean and of course white settlements around the world turned to the leisures of their ‘Mother Country’ — Britain.¹