Leisure in Britain expanded greatly between 1930 and 1965. This dissertation examines holiday camps as one form of pleasure that emerged in the interwar years at the same time as a political campaign for paid vacations. This study focuses on two chains of mass camps built by Harry Warner and Billy Butlin. These men successfully marketed their camp vacations as inexpensive sites for worker vacations at the same moment that politicians looked for appropriate forms of pleasure for newly leisured workers and their families. The industry did, however, meet local and national opposition. Hotel and boardinghouse proprietors, residents and social critics, saw the camps as a form mindless mass pleasure and unfair competition. Nevertheless, holiday camps were both shaped by and shaped the politics of pleasure in the interwar years and helped to construct the working-class family as a legitimate market of leisure consumers.

Wartime production and civilian evacuation policies also aided holiday camps. The interwar camps served blueprints for civilian evacuation and military camps, as well as industrial villages during the war years. The number of holiday camps expanded as Warner and Butlin worked with the government to find and build appropriate military training sites and worker accommodation. These sites were transformed at the end of the war for worker pleasure. The holiday camp industry also benefited from the policies of austerity and the vision for postwar reconstruction. Elected on a platform of socialism and consumer restraint, the Labour government's vision for society was validated and supported by the social ethos of the holiday camps that treated all guests equally in terms of accommodation, service and entertainment. Holiday camps faced local opposition but the industry expanded in the immediate postwar years. The entertainment fostered in the camps permeated mainstream culture in a variety of ways so that the camp experience was known to a vastly greater population than simply the number of guests taking vacations at the camps each year. This dissertation argues that holiday camps are important to an understanding of twentieth century British history because they illustrate the complex relationship between leisure and the state.