The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This is a very interesting and unusual book in which two leading historians of leisure, one American, the other British, look at certain aspects of comparison between their respective countries. The first two-thirds of the book are perhaps the most successful. These compare the development of Blackpool with that of Coney Island. Both were the leading popular resorts of their day and the comparisons are not too difficult to make. Indeed, in many ways the two resorts had remarkably similar histories in the early twentieth century. The difference between them arose after the Second World War, when Blackpool proved capable of reinventing itself for a new generation in a way that Coney Island did not. This raises a number of interesting questions which the book does not really explore—notably the extent to which Blackpool and Coney Island were typical of the seaside resorts in their respective countries. Certainly in Britain, Blackpool was not typical in bucking the trend of British seaside resorts in general after the Second World War. For every one resort which, like Blackpool, managed to reinvent itself, there were probably at least two others, such as Southend and Southsea, which did not. Was the decline of Coney Island paralleled elsewhere in the United States or were there examples of American seaside resorts which emulated Blackpool? A greater degree of contextualisation would have helped the comparison between Blackpool and Coney Island, though the detailed comparison itself is exceptionally well done.