BUTLIN’S IN BENIDORM

Butlin’s in Benidorm combines designing and writing to trace the material geographies, associations, and legacies of the appropriated architectural styles and infrastructure that comprised the holiday camp impresario Billy Butlin’s brand from 1931 to his retirement in 1968. Less well known is the fact that Butlin built three of his camps in collaboration with the British military, who requisitioned them during the Second World War and temporarily converted them into Royal Navy shore establishments and training facilities for 'hostiles only' conscripts.¹ It was in these moments, when the camps' function vacillated between leisure and militarism, that Butlin formed his signature style: unremarkable buildings with remarkable interiors simulating foreign environments. Curiously, the Butlin’s empire reached its territorial peak as the British empire was at its nadir. The interior landscapes of Butlin’s built projects offered sanitized and nostalgic renditions of the Commonwealth nations, through which he inverted, then supplanted, the maxim of existing state-sponsored leisure regimes by demonstrating that “culture is no longer rooted in place.”² For the first time, drawings and 3D models will materialize and bring together the enduring social and spatial consequences of Butlin’s bombastic designs and their facility for. What roles did the camps play in simulating empire internally and establishing a sense of ethnonationalism? While there is some literature around holiday camps’ contributions to nation-building, this research focuses on their architectural apparatus to examine the business of leisure, simulation of imperial bonds, and creation of citizenship in inter- and post-war reconstructions in Britain.

The historiography of leisure and tourism in England largely centers on the rational recreation policies, outdoor cults, and socialist ideologies that sought to edify and reform the benighted working and lower classes through programs organized by the elites. Underscoring these efforts was the fear that degeneracy would cause the “imminent eclipse of the British Empire,”³ and it was a matter of global importance to provide imperial tutelage and eradicate lower forms of leisure. Yet, paradoxically, exposure to the disorderly passions and cheap excitements of the laboring class brought vicarious pleasures to the middle- and upper-class social missionaries.⁴ From 1931 to 1968, Sir Billy Butlin revolutionized leisure and tourism in the United Kingdom - and, for a brief moment, Western Europe - by upending this practice and making class tourism the preserve of the commoner. Butlin was born in Cape Colony, South Africa, on the eve of the Second Boer War, into an itinerant, lower-middle-class, colonial family, from whom he learned how to pervert existing orders and bring in others. In his thirty-seven years as the Butlin’s company paterfamilias, he designed and built nine eponymous holiday camps in the UK, partially constructed another in the Bahamas, and operated several amusement parks, restaurants, and hotels in England that, once again, made leisure a subject of national importance. His maxim and business model, “a week’s holiday for a week’s pay,” gave working people the chance to roleplay the lives of the rich and famous in the miniature world of the camp.⁵ Butlin created the illusion of luxury and wealth by importing and manufacturing facsimiles of moneyed environments portrayed in Hollywood films - scenes he knew his patrons had seen, given that over half of Britain’s population visited the cinema at least once a week by 1939.⁶ On a modest budget, he blended the exoticized images and technologies of 'elsewhere' with an Anglocentric aesthetic, thus forming a series of enclosed commercial worlds that trained the holiday-goer in middle-class white sociality and becoming a tourist at home.

At its zenith in 1963, the Butlin's portfolio comprised camps that entertained over one million visitors per season, with 65 percent of those customers representing return business keen to experience his latest architectural innovations.⁷ Butlin made frequent trips abroad to scout, then co-opt, innovations in exhibition methods and transportation technologies: the former resensationalized the camps’ myriad pseudo-countries, and the latter propelled guests between them in extraordinary ways. His ability to abstract architecture from its harsh material reality and repackage it as a system for nationalist mythmaking led to his appointment as Director General of Hostels at the tail end of WWII - a position for which he received a Most Excellent Order of the British Empire award in 1944. During his tenure, Butlin outsourced local men across England to stimulate and desensitize over 50,000 female munitions workers in the country’s army factories; they facilitated jingoistic dances and performances in overwhelmingly English spaces, boosting wartime efforts. At the request of General Bernard Montgomery - one of the most prominent and successful British commanders of the Second World War - Butlin transferred this scheme to Brussels and founded the “21 Club” leave centers for British servicepeople, where patriotic decor and salacious temptation temporarily recast military environments as hedonistic resorts. In both cases, through Butlin’s architectural imagination, everyday life for working people was colonized by fantasy.

1. Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy, Goodnight Campers!: The History of the British Holiday Camp (London: Mansell Publishing, 1986), 108.

2. Naomi Leite and Nelson Graburn, “Anthropological Interventions in Tourism Studies,” in The Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2015), 35.

3. Brian Lonsway, Making Leisure Work: Architecture and the Experience Economy (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013), 476.

4. Lonsway, Making Leisure Work: Architecture and the Experience Economy, 481.

5. Barry Lewis, Butlin’s Holiday Camp 1982 (London: Hoxton Mini Press, 2020), 2.

6. Kathryn Ferry, The Nation’s Host: Butlin’s and the Story of the British Seaside (London: Portfolio Penguin, 2017), 63.

7. Ferry, The Nation’s Host: Butlin’s and the Story of the British Seaside, 113.

Facilitators:
Barbara Penner, Ben Nicholson, Shiben Banerji

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︎ ︎ SARAH AZIZ