This book is the only in-depth ethnographic study of British charter tourists. It is based on several months of participant observation of British charter tourists on holiday in Palmanova and Magaluf on the Mediterranean Island of Mallorca. With a focus on space, the body, and food and drink practices, the book explores the experiential nature of touristic practice which provides insight into constructions, understandings and knowledge of the self in relation to national, regional, class, and gender identities. These issues in turn highlight elements of power and control which are mainly articulated through the attempts to manipulate tourists' consumption practices by the mediators of tourists' experiences.

This is the story of rise of the summer holiday as Britain's most popular leisure activity. From pre-war through to the 1950s were the boom years for the British seaside resorts, but by the mid 1960s jet airliners were in widespread service, leading to package holidays and the mass invasion of the Rivieras and Costas.

This timely and much-needed book focuses on the phenomenon often referred to as "holiday hunger" in the United Kingdom. The book begins by outlining the history and scope of holiday hunger – the condition that occurs when a child’s household is, or will become, food insecure during the summer holidays. The decline of the UK welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism have created a situation where up to three million children in the UK face food insecurity during the summer months when there are extra financial pressures on the working poor and when free school meals are not available. This book details the level of childhood and household food insecurity in the UK and describes one of the main responses to holiday hunger – holiday clubs. These clubs are locally organised and funded and provide a place for children to go to eat nutritious meals for free during the school holidays. Highlighting the benefits of holiday clubs that often extend beyond food provision, this book also discusses the challenges that they face now and in the future. The book concludes with recommendations for food insecurity policy and the role of government in fighting holiday hunger. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and nutrition security, social policy and public health.

A book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.

This book represents the first attempt to step inside the holiday experience of young British tourists in San Antonio, Ibiza. Briggs' ethnographic study reveals the ugly truth about how and why they get involved in deviance and risk-taking when they go abroad, driven by self validation and a commodified social context.

Old fashioned seaside holidays inspire a great deal of nostalgic affection among British people. Quintessential elements such as seaside donkeys and sickly sticks of rock are easily identifiable and memorable ingredients of a tradition that most people in this country have experienced. Focusing on the one-hundred-year period from 1870 to 1970, this book taps into collective nostalgia for an inside look at how ordinary people spent their seaside holidays. It examines what it actually meant to go to the seaside and what one could expect upon arrival, as well as various places to stay and how to spend one's days. Each chapter explores a different theme in order to build up a picture of holiday life and how it changed over time.

British Summer Time Begins is about summer holidays of the mid-twentieth century and how they were spent, as recounted to Ysenda Maxtone-Graham in vividly remembered detail by people who were there. Through this prism, it paints a revealing portrait of twentieth-century Britain in summertime: how we were, how families functioned, what houses and gardens and streets were like, what journeys were like, and what people did all day in their free time. It explores their expectations, hopes, fears and habits, the rules or lack of rules under which they lived, their happiness and sadness, their sense of being treasured or neglected - all within living memory, from pre-war summers to the late 1970s. Ysenda takes us back to the long stretch of time from the last days of June till the early days of September - those months when the term-time self was cast off and you could become the person you really were, and you had (if you were lucky) enough hours in the endless succession of days to become good at the things that would later define your adulthood. The 'showpiece' part of the summer holidays was 'the summer holiday', when families took off to the seaside, or to grandparents' houses teeming with cousins, or on early package holidays to France or Spain, siblings wedged into the back of small cars, roof-racks clattering, mothers preparing picnics. British Summer Time Begins is as much about the long weeks either side of that holiday as the trip itself: the weeks when nothing much officially happened, boredom often lurked nearby, and you vanished for hours on end, nobody much knowing or even caring where you were. Could it be that those unscheduled days were actually the most important and formative of your life? From the author of the beloved Terms & Conditions, British Summer Time Begins is a delightful, nostalgic and joyous celebration of summers.