Holiday Camp

A holiday camp is a type of holiday accommodation that encourages holidaymakers to stay within the site boundary and provides entertainment for them between meals. Today, the term has fallen out of favour with terms such as resort or holiday centre replacing it.

As distinct from camping, accommodation typically consisted of chalets, accommodation buildings arranged individually or in blocks. From the 1960s onward, many camps also added static caravan accommodation, and today, many static caravans are also termed holiday camps.

Cunningham's Young Men's Holiday Camp at Douglas on the Isle of Man is sometimes regarded as the first holiday camp. However, it differed from the definition above, especially as accommodation was still in tents. Cunningham's was still open by the time Billy Butlin opened his first camp in 1936 (and still averaged 60,000 campers on a good year).

By the start of the 20th century, camps were beginning to be built with hut-based accommodation. Opened in 1906 by John Fletcher Dodd, Caister Camp, in Caister-on-Sea, Norfolk was one of the first and later advertised itself as "The Oldest Established Camp". Inspired by visits to Caister Camp, 'Pa' Potter opened a similar camp in Hemsby, Norfolk called Potters Camp. It moved to Hopton-on-Sea in 1925 and to another site within that village in 1933.

In the 1930s, camps took on a larger scale with the establishment of large chains. The first of these was Warners, founded by Harry Warner who opened his first site on Hayling Island in 1931, with another three opening before the outbreak of World War II. During the early 1930s, Warner asked Funfair entrepreneur Billy Butlin to join the board of his company and in 1935 Butlin observed the construction of Warner's holiday camp in Seaton, Devon. Butlin learned from the experience of Warner, and employed the workers who had constructed the Seaton camp to come to Lincolnshire to build his first camp under the Butlins name at Skegness in 1936. By the outbreak of the war, Butlin had two camps and a third under construction. By 1939 there were around 200 Holiday Camps in the United Kingdom, at different seaside locations.

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