Wish you were here
Professor Peter Anderson from the University of Leeds invited the Skippko Research Team to help gather stories about people’s first holidays to Spain from the 1950s. The team have thoroughly enjoyed gathering first hand stories, exploring archives and creating their own Spanish related artworks including a wonderful holiday photoshoot, a publication and a digital presentation.
Have you ever been at an airport in the UK or Spain and looked at the departure or arrivals board? It can be astonishing to see the number of flights to Spain or arrivals from the UK. The cities seem to flash up so quickly that the next one appears before you finish reading the last one. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. Most British people didn’t start to enjoy proper annual holidays until after the Second World War and most ordinary working people couldn’t afford to travel abroad until package holidays and charter flights became well established in the late 1950s and early 1960s. When Britons grabbed their suitcases for their first trip abroad they headed most of all to Spain. Spain was quicker to get to than other destinations like Greece, boasts seemingly endless miles of Mediterranean coastline and was far, far cheaper than other countries like Italy or France. Over the decades, the number of Britons jetting to Spain has soared from the hundreds of thousands to the millions and now the tens of millions. Many Spanish resorts have become a home from home and even if we haven’t visited them, we all know about Benidorm, Magaluf and Torremolinos.
Read through the scrapbook produced by the Research Team and the University of Leeds and you will find so many stories of first journeys, encounters with new ways of life and new experiences from dancing flamenco to watching bullfights. It is a history of transformation as opportunities developed and holidays became perhaps the main way ordinary people became more familiar with other cultures. These stories taken from interviews conducted by the research team and from interviews in the Mass Observation archive, are filled with emotions such as joy. I hope when you read them, and when you look at the artwork created, you find the stories as delightful and revealing as I did about what it meant to travel abroad.
Peter Anderson, University of Leeds
View ‘Wish you were here’ publication here
CompressedWish You Were Here Book
View ‘Wish you were here’ digital presentation here