This post is about how you might approach a social history of a place like Eastbourne.
To guide my thinking, I've been looking at a book by John K Walton, an academic who specialises in the history of tourism in the UK. It's called "The English Seaside Resort: a Social History 1750-1914", published in 1983. If I'm going to use it to structure my investigation, I'll need to accept Eastbourne's categorisation as a "seaside resort". But I think that's fair enough, given the original vision driving the town's early expansion.
So, following the book's organization, the first task is to understand the "demand" - the people who first visited Eastbourne and then in due course decided to settle here. We would need to understand their social background and economic status. We would want to consider how this demand broadened out to other social classes as the town grew and the transport links improved - fuelled by the increase in disposable income and leisure time following the industrial revolution. We would want to understand how the different types of visitor chose to spend their time in the town. The wealthy well-connected took walks along the promenade, to see and be seen, and attended concerts and exclusive parties. Middle class families perhaps focussed on the beach, and searched the rock pools and cliffs for marine life and fossils. And then there were working class day or weekend excursionists, wanting perhaps less adventurous, more immediate entertainment.
The next consideration is the "supply" - the place itself, its raw ingredients, topography and layout. We would want to understand what was there before the resort took shape. We know about the two large estates, the tenant farms, the fishing and the limited military presence. We would want to understand how the town's geography, the layout of the beach and cliffs, might have appealed to certain groups over others, with convalescents and young families wanting a more gentle terrain, with other visitors preferring something more challenging. Finally, we would need to be clear about the town's proximity to a population centre from which visitors might come, and the quality of transport links to and from.
We would then move on the social and economic activity in the town as it grew. We've already considered the wealthy visitors and residents. But we'd want to know more about the people who provided services for such people. This could be domestic staff or people looking after, say, their laundry and cleaning. It might also be professionals, say medics and lawyers. Then there would be teachers and tutors, particularly as the private schools set up in the town. There was no large scale manufacturing as such, but there would be craftsmen/artisans and builders - although this work was cyclical. So we would want to understand the problem of seasonal unemployment. Finally, the social zoning of the town, and how it was consolidated or changed over time, would need investigation.
We would then move to the original land ownership and the entrepreneurial activity behind the town's growth. We would want to understand the economics of the projects initiated and the degree to which those driving them worked to an overall, coherent plan. We would want to see whether they saw returns on their investments. Infrastructure would be a priority, including sea defences, water, sewerage, gas, electricity, road and rail. We would also look at investment in hotels, housing and entertainment facilities, including the Winter Garden, pier and baths.
Linked to this, we'd want to understand the town's local government, as the original landowners - the Duke of Devonshire, the Davies-Gilberts - transferred power to the democratically elected representatives of the newly incorporated borough. We would want to cover local government's bit by bit assumption of responsibility for public health, education, utilities and - in relation to Eastbourne as a resort - facilities which were not profitable in themselves but made the town an attractive and enjoyable place to visit.
We would then go back to entertainment. We've considered the larger scale investments in theatres and formal gardens. We would look at the orchestras, both visiting and resident. We would look at the golf courses and tennis courts built to appeal to middle-upper class visitors and residents. But we would also be looking at the beach entertainers, the pierrots, the minstrels, the bands - the more popular entertainments offered as visitor numbers took off.
We would then want to bring all this together and see where it had taken us. I suspect we'd note the tensions we had found throughout the investigation - the varying social classes both visiting and living in the town; the effort to maintain the social tone of the place as tourism rapidly expanded; hereditary land ownership and the maturing urban democratic institutions taking over; the interests of residents set against those of visitors (including those earning their living from the latter).
Of course, we'd need a further source of guidance to take us from this picture of Eastbourne - at the start of the First World War, at the height of its wealth and popularity - to the town and the community we would recognise today. More on that in due course.
