Forget the Colosseum: here’s why Georgian Britons preferred to holiday at home

Forget the Colosseum: here’s why Georgian Britons preferred to holiday at home Forget Paris and Rome. Across the 18th century, Bath, Stonehenge and the Peak District became must-visit destinations for British tourists. James Watt and Alison O’Byrne reveal why, for the Georgians, there was no place like home In her journal of her travels around England on horseback between 1685 and c1712, Celia Fiennes complained that too many of her contemporaries had succumbed to “the evil itch of over-valuing foreign parts”. The “foreign parts” that Fiennes had in mind were the destinations favoured by those on the so-called Grand Tour, a label probably first used by Richard Lassels in his 1670 guidebook The Voyage of Italy. Until it was drastically curtailed by the French Revolution of 1789, the Grand Tour was an established rite of passage for predominantly young elite men who travelled to France, Italy and elsewhere on the continent to complete their education. These fashionable tourists – in theory at least – sought to improve themselves through their encounter with the legacy of Classical antiquity and their experience of cosmopolitan European cities. As an antidote to the pull of Paris and Rome, Celia Fiennes talked up the attractions of home – such as Bath, Stonehenge and the various “wonders” of the Peak District – and she claimed that “Journeys to visit their native land” would give people a more patriotic appreciation of their own country. Yet not everyone was convinced. In his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26), Daniel Defoe dismissed the “Wonderless Wonders” of Derbyshire and the “barren and frightful” appearance of the Lake District. And, while James Brome in 1700 claimed that Stonehenge rivalled the pyramids, it was still for others difficult to conceive of the British landscape without thinking of it in relation to idealised foreign models derived from prestigious works of painting and poetry. Inferiority complex Thomas Gainsborough declared in 1764 that where the painting of “real views from nature in this country” was concerned, he had “never seen any place that affords a subject equal to the poorest imitation of Gaspard or Claude”. Gainsborough here demonstrates the ‘cultural cringe’ by which many British artists deferred to continental Europeans – in this case the French artists Gaspard Dughet and Claude Lorrain – and regarded the subject matter of native scenes as of comparatively low status. This reflex extended beyond landscape painting and sometimes generated a sense that Britain was deficient across the arts more generally. The architect John Gwynn in 1766 lamented the “confused… irregular, [and] slovenly appearance” of the cityscape of London, which was “thought by some… in many respects inferior in point of grandeur and affect” to Paris and Rome, and not “answerable to the character of the richest and most powerful people in the world”. Mid-18th-century Britons were confident in their nation’s commercial and military strength, but conscious of the gap between their achievements in trade and war and their cultural prowess. By the end of the century, however, this ‘cultural cringe’ had begun to evaporate – to be replaced by pride in what British art, landscapes and urban spaces had to offer. The question is: why? Middle on the move One byproduct of the nation’s prosperity was that middle-class Britons increasingly gained the opportunity to travel for leisure, an experience that afforded them a better understanding of Britain’s distinctiveness. While the natural wonders of Derbyshire were already enumerated by the mid-17th century, improvements in tourist infrastructure – most notably the development of turnpike roads – helped to establish new itineraries in other parts of the nation. Thomas West published A Guide to the Lakes in 1778, presenting as a relatively recent phenomenon that “persons of genius, taste and observation [now] … make the tour of their own country”. The Welshman Thomas Pennant knowingly introduced his 1769 Tour in Scotland as a “petit tour”, as if to contrast his expedition with the larger-scale Grand Tour, but he likewise presented the “matchless” spectacle of the river Tay as favourably comparing with sights that might be encountered beyond Britain’s shores. Tobias Smollett’s otherwise irascible fictional traveller Matt Bramble did something similar, stating in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) that “I have seen the Lago di Garda, Albano, De Vico, Bolsena, and Geneva, and, upon my honour, I prefer Lough-Lomond to them all.” Tourism in Scotland was made possible by the military roads constructed under the direction of General Wade after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, and then by the brutal ‘pacification’ of the Highlands following the Hanoverian defeat of Jacobite forces at Culloden in 1746. If travel within Britain in the 18th century may for many have helped to instil a forward-looking sense of a Unionist British identity, it also meant confronting reminders of the violence of the past, whether this was the product of civil conflict or – beginning with the Romans – foreign invasion. “I have seen Lago di Garda, Albano, De Vico and Bolsena and, upon my honour, I prefer Lough Lomond to them all” The experience of the tourist in this period could also be more straightforwardly pleasurable, however. The modern seaside holiday may be traced back to the second half of the 18th century, as coastal spas such as Margate and Scarborough increasingly attracted the middle classes as well as the aristocracy, lured by the health benefits of sea-bathing and the resort facilities that developed around this activity. Southampton was hailed by one boosterish guidebook as “the Montpelier of England”, and when Thomas Gray visited in 1764, he noted that it was “full of bathers”. George III was a keen sea-bather, and Weymouth, which he first visited in 1789 as he recovered from mental illness, was reputedly his favourite holiday destination. A metropolis of empire By the final third of the 18th century, London was increasingly emerging from Paris’s shadow. As the metropolis of a growing empire, London, as so many said, was a world by itself, beyond comparison. The nature of London’s growth – driven by commerce – generated forms of culture that attracted visitors from overseas, through new urban institutions such as coffee houses, art galleries, museums, theatres and pleasure gardens. Britain’s position relative to France or Italy could now be understood in terms of the distinctiveness, and no longer the inferiority, of its cultural production. The ‘Shakespeare Jubilee’ at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769 confirmed Shakespeare’s status as a national poet whose strength resided partly in his rejection of neoclassical taste. Later, the visiting of sites associated with celebrated authors such as Burns, Scott and Austen would develop into an important strand of home tourism. One guidebook hailed Southampton as “the Montpelier of England”, and the city was noted for being “full of bathers” The Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu described Shakespeare as “our Gothic Bard”, and the revaluing of the Gothic in the final third of the century provides another index of how Britons reimagined themselves in relation to others in this period. ‘Gothic’ could still be synonymous with barbarism (because the Goths had brought down the Roman empire) and Catholic superstition. Yet it was increasingly regarded as a native heritage that had to be understood on its own idiosyncratic terms rather than as a deviation from the Classical rules. Castles and abbeys, whether intact or in ruin, were exemplary of this heritage, gaining renewed attention through the convergence of home tourism with the archaeological discovery of the distant past and the currency of ideas of the sublime and the picturesque. Fortress Britain Victory over France in the global Seven Years’ War (1756–63) at once broadened Britons’ horizons and prompted some to claim that this success owed to the unique character of a self-styled ‘island race’. Defeat in America two decades later then generated a defensive introspection, where the consolation of a deep-rooted Gothic inheritance – powerful because it exceeded any straightforward definition – enabled Britons to think of themselves as unaffected by the humiliating loss of their former colonies. During the war with revolutionary France, “the proud Keep of Windsor”, long established as a sight for day-trippers from London, was for Edmund Burke an emblem of a defiant Fortress Britain. The Gothic tourism that flourished in Britain from the second half of the 18th century onwards was open to anyone with access to historic monuments, and experiences of it were diverse. Visiting a castle or abbey could generate serious reflection on its history and symbolism but also involve nothing more elevated than taking a picnic in a pleasant spot. Writing of Netley Abbey, a former Cistercian monastery near Southampton, John Bullar in 1799 disparagingly referred to the numbers of those “who never think seriously on any subject; and who visit this place, as they do another, merely to ‘stare about them, and to eat’”. The idea of Gothic architecture as part of everyday life is captured by Paul Sandby’s watercolour West Gate at Canterbury from c1780. The medieval gate sits next to residential and commercial buildings, and the figures depicted include polite tourists, but also others who appear just to be going about their daily business. As well as situating monuments of the past in a wider context, Sandby composed new kinds of urban and rural scenes that offered ‘views’ of a stable, prosperous and modernising nation. He depicted the landscapes of Scotland, Wales and Ireland in such a way as to create a four-nations picturesque, which generated an inclusive sense of British landscape identity and further underscored the scenic possibilities of home ground. In his compendium of travel-writing The British Tourists; or Traveller’s Pocket Companion (1798–1800), William Mavor celebrated how “some of our most enlightened countrymen” had in recent decades been “as eager to explore the remotest parts of Britain, as they formerly were to cross the Channel”. Mavor stated that these travellers had shown how “we shall find no equal extent of territory, on the face of the globe, of more importance, or containing more attractions” than Britain and Ireland. If home tours had come to supersede the Grand Tour by the time that Mavor wrote, however, this was partly out of necessity, because continental Europe was off-limits to travellers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Mavor’s remarks here may, again, articulate a Unionist ideal rather than reflect a reality of travellers strengthening connections through tourist activity. Ireland was formally incorporated into the union in 1801, but this was only after the brutal suppression of the United Irish rebellion against British authority. As is true today, Britain could be elided with England, with a green and pleasant ‘country’, offering an appealing detachment from the slavery and empire that underpinned its unevenly distributed wealth and power. However, as is the case with the Welsh-speaking Edward Pugh – whose Cambria Depicta (1816) offers an illustrated record of his tour of north Wales – non-metropolitan artists and writers could demonstrate a confident sense of a cultural identity that was not subordinated to an overarching Britishness. Tourism for the masses These are all important caveats that qualify any account of the unifying impact of home tourism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is still fair to say, nonetheless, that the once elite pursuit of leisure travel was substantially democratised in the decades before the coming of the railways, heralded by the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, which in turn helped to give rise to a new age of mass tourism. The travel agent Thomas Cook organised the first rail excursion in 1841, a trip from Leicester to Loughborough, on behalf of the Leicester Temperance Society. The travel agent Thomas Cook organised the first rail excursion in 1841, a trip from Leicester to Loughborough Decades earlier, the “curious traveller” Thomas Pennant could play up the adventurousness of his journey – accompanied by an expert in Gaelic to translate for him – to “the remotest part of north Britain”, claiming that northern Scotland was to those from elsewhere “almost as little known…as Kamtschatka” in farthest east Asia. By the 19th century such claims about a foreignness within Britain became less common. Where they were made, they often related to the urban working classes and their environs, sensationally presented as ‘Darkest London’, a label deriving from the racist idea of ‘Darkest Africa’. To Victorian social reformers, such nests of degeneracy and squalor were all but off the map, approachable only by the most intrepid of explorers. And certainly not by tourists. Sun, sea and trusty knick-knacks A beginner’s guide to holidaying in Georgian Britain James Watt and Alison O’Byrne teach English at the University of York. They are co-editors of Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours (Cambridge, 2025) This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine