Changing pleasures of leisure

Maggie and Henry are a fictional northern couple whose day at the seaside is charted on a 1930s record by the now-forgotten "Bert Tackler and Company". In six minutes ("with Effects"), the crackly 78 – which I bought by chance in Sowerby Bridge a couple of weeks ago – whizzes them round Blackpool, from the zoo to the Pleasure Beach, from Punch and Judy to pierrots on the pier.

The record, worth every penny of 25p, was clearly aimed at the hundreds of thousands of Northerners who did exactly what Maggie and Henry did every year – the sort of people documented in a fascinating photographic archive that has inspired a forthcoming conference on the changing face of holidays.

It's the third in an annual series and will range far and wide over 20th century holidays and tourism: coach travel, holiday camps, railway heritage, working-class gambling, outdoor holidays, and a few stereotypes of Yorkshire.

Like any good academic conference, it will put all these issues in a social and cultural context, analysing what exactly, in a consumer society, is being "consumed" by holidaymakers and tourists. And as well as Blackpool, it will take in the Lake District, the Isle of Man, Saltburn by the Sea and the Pennine moors, as seen by Alfred Wainwright, patron saint of grumpy pipe-smoking ramblers.

At which, we take a fast train to Leeds and sit down in Dr Karl Spracklen's office at the city's Metropolitan University. Dr Spracklen, a lecturer with a penchant for Heavy Metal, will be giving a paper based on Wainwright's 1938 account of a long walk in the Pennines, a good 20 years before he started turning out his immaculate guidebooks to the Lakes and beyond. "A Pennine Journey is a very different book from the guidebooks," says Dr Spracklen, chair of the Leisure Studies Association (which does what its name suggests). "In the guidebooks, Wainwright is in love with the landscape. You get the feeling that the places are joyous and spacious. In A Pennine Journey, the mood is grimmer. There are moments when he's really happy, but he finds some of the walks dreary and goes to villages where the people aren't friendly. For him the Pennine Way is just one long trudge. It might be part of his upbringing in Lancashire, an anti-Yorkshire prejudice."

In the Thirties, long-distance walking had yet to become the familiar pastime it is today. "When Wainwright was doing it, it was completely new. Perhaps that's why he had a hard time, as a stranger coming out of the mist expecting to be fed and watered. Now there's a huge tourist industry set up to cater for the interest."

And then he broadens the discussion: "It's a strange place, the North of England. People down south associate it with stereotypes – truculence, primitivism, bleakness, lack of intelligence, being mean and miserly, rain."

Having been born in Leeds, he can probably quote such stereotypes without much fear of being lynched – and can also criticise the cult of the Professional Yorkshireman. Is it a question of Yorkshire people living up to their image, he wonders, playing the role non-Yorkshire people expect them to play?

Some of the writings of Alan Bennett, he thinks, offer "a stereotype version of the North that people in the South like to imagine exists. To some extent it does, but the North is far more diverse than you would imagine from his works."

Back to holidays and tourism: "For most people work is just work and it's in their leisure time that they can express choice and define themselves and try to be individual. Sport and leisure can be how we find meaning in an increasingly globalised, commercialised world." Even if, as he concedes, many people's leisure time may be devoted solely to "shopping and going on the internet".

And his own holidays? "Walking holidays in Scotland, North Wales and

the Lake District and travelling around distilleries.

"If I go to the seaside it will be Whitby – the perfect balance between landscape, buildings and sea."

Which is not a description many people would apply to Blackpool, that great gaudy monument to loud, synthetic pleasure. "Blackpool has declined tremendously from its heyday," says Dr Bob Snape, organiser of the Bolton conference. "Though most seaside towns have suffered since the Second World War from the growth of the Mediterranean resorts and air travel." Rather late in the day, perhaps, Blackpool is trying to attract a new, more middle-class market, highlighting its fine Victorian and Edwardian architecture – just as 20th century travel posters put out by railway companies glamorised resorts to "attract the right class of traveller".

Look at the way Scarborough was marketed in the Thirties as a sophisticated resort full of sleek Noel Cowardish visitors who might have felt more at home on the French Riviera.

Those were certainly not the sort of holidaymakers photographed by Humphrey Spender in the Thirties. Later a Picture Post photographer, he was working on the Mass Observation project, which explored the lives of "ordinary people" in the belief that politicians and the media were misrepresenting what most of them thought, deliberately playing down radical, Left-wing views.

Dr Snape, Reader in Leisure and Sport at the University of Bolton, sums up the core half-dozen Mass Observers as "generally public school-educated chaps who wanted a typical northern town to do an anthropological study on. The whole idea was to observe people rather than interact with them. If Humphrey Spender went to a football match, he would photograph the crowd rather than the game."

Spender took about 900 photographs in Bolton, code-named Worktown, and Blackpool, where most Worktowners spent their holidays. Selections from the pictures are on permanent display at Bolton Museum, where the conference will be held and have been a direct inspiration for the Recording Leisure Lives conference. Mass Observation has been hugely influential, though its "watch and listen" approach prompted press accusations of snooping and "mass-eavesdropping".

Some of its chosen research areas also raised a few eyebrows – understandably, perhaps, when researchers turned out one night to Blackpool's eight theatre and variety shows, painstakingly totted up 427 jokes and analysed them by subject. There were 40 jokes about ill-health, 22 about art and 18 about religion. The Central Pier was the place to go for jokes about war, politics and royalty (15 jokes), but the South Pier was best for jokes about sex (16). The North Pier was a bit short of jokes about anything.

Spender's Blackpool pictures, taken largely without their subjects' knowledge, show men in caps and trilbies and women with no-nonsense hats and hairnets. They pack the beach (deckchairs as far as the eye can see), sweep graciously down on the Big Dipper, play roll-a-penny in the amusement arcades and sleep off hangovers in seafront shelters. They have their palms read, pay good money to see "The Cow With Five Legs... The Sight of a Lifetime" and gawp at the gaily-lit gondolas trundling up the prom during the Illuminations. Maggie and Henry, on that crackly 1930s record, may well be in there somewhere. By gum.

Recording Leisure Lives: Holidays & Tourism in 20th Century Britain: March 30 at Bolton Museum. Info: 01204 903609; www.bolton.ac.uk/conferences/leisurelives.