How we fell in love with nights camped out under the stars
But these rarely-excavated pictures from the archive help to trace the practice almost from when a travelling tailor named Thomas Hiram Holding invented it.
Holding, considered the father of British camping, had crossed the prairies of the United States with his parents in a wagon train and the spirit of adventure never left him. In July 1897, at the age of 52, he set off with his son on a three-day camping tour of south-west Ireland, carrying on his bike a lightweight tent he had made himself. Later, he wrote the first edition of the Camper’s Handbook and founded the Association of Cycle Campers, now the Camping and Caravanning Club.
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Hide AdThe banks of the Thames were where camping was popularised in Britain, and by the turn of the last century many families were experiencing the pleasure of holidaying for next to nothing, sometimes commandeering pleasure boats to transport their canvas or even cow hide tents.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the publication by clergyman William Henry Harrison Murray of Camp-Life in the Adirondacks set in train a mass migration of holidaymakers to the mountains of north-eastern New York state.
The world’s first commercial camping site is believed to have been Cunningham’s, behind the prom at Douglas on the Isle of Man, but it was a business model that spread rapidly and by the beginning of the First World War a vast community of campers had been established, with the boy scouts founder Sir Robert Baden-Powell as its president.
Today, some 4.5m camping and caravanning holidays a year are taken by British travellers, with an average duration of three nights.
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