ABSTRACT
The history of modern leisure is about 400 years long and we do not have the space in the confines of this chapter to discuss this in any depth. For those readers whose interest in investigating modern leisure is purely a historical one, I recommend that they consult Peter Borsay’s (2006) A History of Leisure: The British Experience since 1500. Borsay’s book is important since, as Rojek (1985: 24) points out, most other general histories of modern leisure have a tendency to adopt the period of industrialization as ‘the central time-unit for study’ (Malcolmson, 1973; Bailey, 1978; Cunningham, 1980; Walton and Walvin, 1983). However, this endeavour to locate a source for modern leisure in industrialization should not surprise us since as Clarke and Critcher assert, ‘looking at trends evident by the 1840s, the clearest impression is of the wholesale changes in the rhythms and sites of work and leisure enforced by the industrial revolution (sic). It was during this period that what we come to see as a discrete area of human activity called “leisure” became recognisable’ (1985: 58).
