I read with a little nostalgia the radical reduction in size and trading of United Kingdom vacation-park holiday company Pontins.
Pontins, in my mind, was always the smaller sibling of peer Butlins, which I am sure is not as wildly successful as it was once either.
“Wildly successful” as these two companies revolutionized vacation travel in the 1950s and 1960s for a newly affluent Britain.
The country emerged from post-World War II rationing in 1951, and wages and lifestyles saw a notable upswing by the end of the decade.
Going on a vacation internationally by air remained a treat out of reach for most British people until perhaps the mid-1970s, so it was to these huge holiday parks that millions of Brits descended for a week or the traditional two-week summer vacation.
Pontins and Butlins looked like huge scout camps, with rows and rows of bungalow-style accommodations offerings and centralized F&B and entertainment.
This was also the time in which TV came into the fore, and there are numerous clips of rows of holidaymakers sitting at long trestle tables at these places all having a wonderful time.
At its heyday, Pontins had 30 camps around the U.K., and business was good. Each week there would be approximately 5,000 people staying there, and never leaving for the duration.
This month, it closed two camps, in Prestatyn, Wales, and Camber Sands, Sussex, England. Now, it only has four in operation.
I stayed once in the one in Camber Sands, which was only a 90-minute drive from where I grew up, in Kent on the outskirts of London.
For my father to have booked a week there seems still improbable.
We were hikers, countryside-goers, those who enjoyed being in wilder spots with fewer people, but there we were. It was a long time ago, but I remember thinking at the time how strange it was we were there and how apt it was that we had been given the very last bungalow, the very closest one to the exit.
My father won the table tennis competition. That was no surprise, as he was a particularly good local player. It was such competitions that drove a big part of these vacation parks, and he returned to one of the parks (I did not) for the champion-of-champions event, which I assume he did not win as he has never talked about it since.
There were strange “knobbly knees” contests, where older men wearing numbers on their fronts paraded up and down a stage “showing off” their patellae.
Bonny baby contests were held no doubt, as were swimsuit contests, largely and rightly so confined now to the waste bin of history.
These vacation destinations did bring the country together, I am sure, a collective desire to seek enjoyment after the devastation and weariness of the 1930s and 1940s.
At Camber Sands, the entertainment hosts, I succinctly recollect, were called Dazzling Dickie and Razzling Rickie.
It was their role to stir the assembled into a vacation frenzy.
Pontins was run by Fred Pontin between 1946 and 1978, when he sold it, and in 2011 it was saved from going bankrupt by Britannia Hotel Group.
He was knighted for services to tourism.
The Brits who would have frequented such places now largely travel to guaranteed sunshine in southern Europe or farther afield.
Pontins, Butlins and the like still hold on, and some additional guests are attracted by themed weekends, such as Butlins’ Weekender series of live music, mostly with rock and pop bands beyond their peaks of popularity but still loved.
Trends change.
Maybe one day people will be talking about an old vacation idea called “staying at a boutique hotel”?
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