ABSTRACT
We have stressed in the Preface that tourism is not in any normal sense an ‘industry’. It is in essence a powerful and growing market force comprising multiple strands of interest and activity at destinations. In other words, it can only be understood by measuring what people do when they travel away from home (see also Appendix III). There have, of course, been massive changes in the last fifty years, not only in what people do but what sort of people the British are. To highlight the remarkable contrast between demand in 1945 and modern times, especially for younger readers born after the 1980s, this chapter is divided into two parts. The first part illustrates the nature of tourism demand as it was understood and experienced by the British population in the immediate post-war era of 1945 to 1955. The second part reviews the nature of tourism demand 50 years on from the mid-1990s to 2005. Of course, any such review in a few pages requires some sweeping generalizations and it cannot include the finer details. We justify this because we feel the contrasts are truly striking and because it makes it easier to understand the way in which tourism has developed and grown over the last half-century.
