The Co‐operative Holidays Association and the cultural formation of countryside leisure practice

Abstract

The Co‐operative Holidays Association was founded in 1893 by the Rev. T. A. Leonard, a Congregationalist Minster in Colne, Lancashire. Its aim was to provide organized holidays in the countryside for working‐class people as a moral and cultural alternative to the commercial seaside resorts. The Association was not simply a holiday club but a voluntary leisure organization committed to the promotion of specific cultural values. Adopting the work of a number of nineteenth‐century cultural critics, notably Arnold, Ruskin and Morris, the Co‐operative Holidays Association was grounded upon the concept of the countryside as not only a physical but also a cultural and spiritual alternative to the city and industrial materialism. Its holidays thus sought to recreate the primitive communal lifestyle idealized in Romantic interpretations of pre‐industrial pastoral society and to educate participants in the cultural interpretation of the countryside and landscape. Its antithetical approach to conspicuous consumption and material comfort became a focus of conflict as the proportion of middle‐class members increased after the turn of the century and led to the formation of a schism in 1912. This paper assesses the significance of the Co‐operative Holidays Association to the development and consolidation of a dominant cultural mode of countryside leisure practice and also explores the extent to which its self‐identity was formed by taste and cultural values rather than social class.

Notes

Correspondence Address: Robert Snape, Department of Sport, Leisure and Tourism Management, Bolton Institute, Deane Rd., Bolton BL3 5AB, UK. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Notes on contributors

ROBERT SNAPE

Correspondence Address: Robert Snape, Department of Sport, Leisure and Tourism Management, Bolton Institute, Deane Rd., Bolton BL3 5AB, UK. Email: [email protected]