The annual holiday: its rise, transformations, expansion and fragmentation

This chapter examines the development of the ‘annual holiday’ in relation to custom, invented tradition, labour relations, social policy, transport and systems of provision, adopting a global perspective looking outwards and across from British and European origins, and charting continuities and changes from the rise of the ‘annual holiday’ as an institution, through its heyday in Western industrial society, to its post-industrial fragmentation and complication at the turn of the millennium. We begin with the pioneering British example.