Gary Cross publishes the findings of this largely forgotten study by the Mass-Observers who followed the annual pilgrimage of labourers to Blackpool, hoping to discover what attracted workers to this centre of Victorian culture.

First published in 1995. This book provides the only feminist overview of the development of both the mainstream and the feminist variant of the survey as a means of investigating sexual attitude and behaviour. Illuminating reading for the general reader, essential for students on Sexuality, Methodology, Women’s Studies a d British Modern Social History courses and key text for all Sociologists.

This detailed academic cultural study looks at the rise and fall of the seaside holiday in Britain. John K. Walton offers a broad interpretation of the holidays and resorts, looking at who went, where they went, what they did, and how they were entertained.

These lively and intelligent essays examine artistic responses to the British seaside from the 1930s onwards, including writers and artists such as Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and John Piper.

Gary Cross publishes the findings of this largely forgotten study by the Mass-Observers who followed the annual pilgrimage of labourers to Blackpool, hoping to discover what attracted workers to this centre of Victorian culture.

Manchester and Salford have a special place in the history of the British working class. They lay at the heart of the cotton industry, the spark of the industrial revolution, and as a consequence were among the first places to experience the application of steam power and the factory system to production. As a result, the Manchester-Salford conurbation was the first to see a fully-formed industrial working class. Whilst industrialization went through its heroic phase, the two cities seemed to be blazing a trail, not only for the rest of the country, but for the world. During the first half of the 19th century, social observers came from across Europe to see what they supposed to be their future. Manchester was, in Asa Briggs's influential phrase, the shock city of the age. The city demonstrated the ability of science to control nature: this was why, in 1843, Benjamin Disraeli described Manchester as the modern Athens. However, as Alexis de Tocqueville had noted eight years earlier, there was another side to increasing productivity -

From 'Sodoms by the sea' at Coney Island & Blackpool to carefully orchestrated corporate entertainment, this new history compares the pursuit of pleasure on both sides of the Atlantic.