Search results for ""Author Andy Croll""
University of Wales Press Barry Island: The Making of a Seaside Playground, c.1790- c.1965
Barry Island was one of the most cherished leisure spaces in twentieth-century south Wales, a playground of generations of working-class day-trippers. This book considers its rise as a seaside resort and reveals a history that is much more complex, lengthy and important than has previously been recognised. As conventionally told, the story of the island as tourist resort begins in the 1890s, when the railway arrived in Barry - in fact, it was functioning as a watering hole by the 1790s - yet decades of tourism produced no sweeping changes. Barry remained a district of 'bathing villages' and hamlets, not a developed urban resort. As such, its history challenges us to rethink the category of 'seaside resort' and forces us re-evaluate Wales's contribution to British coastal tourism in the 'long nineteenth century'. It also underlines the importance of visitor agency. Powerful landowners shaped much of the island's development but, ultimately, it was the working-class visitors who turned it into south Wales's most beloved tripper resort.
£19.99
University of Wales Press The Gwent County History, Volume 5: The Twentieth Century
Two distinguished historians of twentieth-century Britain, especially Wales, marshal seventeen fellow historians to describe the momentous twentieth century in the history of south-east Wales. The book is the fifth and last volume in a magisterial survey of Gwent/Monmouthshire from prehistoric times to the present day. Two World Wars and deep depression tested the resilience of the county's people, while the decline of mining and heavy industry shifted the balance of the county's economy. Other chapters analyse the life and leisure of ordinary people, their cultural, intellectual and sporting interests, their religion which formerly bulked so large in their lives, and the changes in the landscape of town and country.
£45.00
