ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts a largely historical-geographic perspective with the objectives of exploring the spatial, social and structural development of domestic tourism within one country, using the case of Britain as an extended example. Britain is a particularly good case study of the development of a tourist area since it was one of the first nations to develop the practice of tourism, and it clearly exemplifies most of the factors that shape the geography of tourism. Countries that have developed tourist industries more recently than Britain will naturally reveal a more rapid and temporally compressed pattern of development, but it is contended that much of the development sequence will still be broadly comparable.
