"I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside": The British Vacation Tradition

Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside!
I do like to be beside the sea!
Oh I do like to stroll along the Prom, Prom, Prom!
Where the brass bands play, “Tiddely-om-pom-pom!”
John A. Glover-Kind, 1907. See more.

As the old music-hall song says, Brits do like to be beside the sea and have been delighting in the pleasures to be had there for over two hundred years.

It all started, more or less, when a Dr. Russell of Brighton came up with the theory that sea bathing (and drinking) cured just about everything, in the middle of the 18th century. Georgian upper-class society, who already knew the advantages of combining pleasure and cures (in spa towns like Bath, for instance), took to it like, well, ducks to water.