ABSTRACT
Few aspects of place selling have been quite so evocative of time, place and experience as that developed for seaside resorts. For generations who now have little or no direct knowledge of the traditional seaside holiday, resort posters and publicity conjure up vivid, if vicarious, experience. The images of strapping young women playing leapfrog in the latest, daringly abbreviated, swimming costumes of the 1930s, children in innocent seaside play or ancient pipe-smoking fishermen populate not so much a reality as an ideal. A key promotional word like bracing, absolutely central to the British concept of the seaside holiday, was expressive of far more than a climatic reality. It embodied a particularly British ideology of personal and social renewal through holiday-making. The growing interwar promotional emphasis on sunshine, originally a symbol of the enlightening effects of travel, heralded a shift in that ideology, faithfully reflected in the promotional message but not the reality of the British weather.
