Democratising the sublime: Spectacular danger and the rise of mass leisure by the sea

Abstract

The seaside resort commands a unique place in British cultural memory, prompting a wealth of scholarly responses documenting its distinctive history: its early emergence as a place of romantic escape, where the sea’s enjoyment as a wild spectacle of nature contributed to the formation of the iconography of the sublime; and its later democratisation, as working class crowds found respite from the world of labour in the mild dissipation provided by fairgrounds and amusements. However, little has been done to connect these two distinct eras. The former resort town Whitley Bay, on the North-East coast of England provides a representative, if idiosyncratic instance of this narrative. Looking at accounts of the town from the early twentieth century, this article traces its development from a semi-rural idyll to a resort popular with the local working-class labour force. While the coast was typically described as other to visitors’ everyday lives – characterised as natural and leisured in contrast to the modernity and labour which distinguished their urbane existence – as time went on the town increasingly became the location of the overstimulation provided by the funfair and associated phantasmagorical spectacles. As leisure became democratised, however, the popular entertainment forms which filled Whitley Bay were continuously haunted by an excess which was doubled: both the sea and the holiday-maker as a mass were perceived as threatening forces of nature which needed to be controlled.