In pictures: Fun for all the family at Butlin's

  • Published
A man falls in the swimming poolImage source, Barry Lewis

With the nation currently in lockdown, many people are looking back at pictures of past holidays both in the UK and abroad. A new book by photographer Barry Lewis captures the atmosphere at Butlin's Skegness in 1982.

It wasn't Lewis's first time at the holiday camp - he had worked there after leaving school, in the 1960s.

Image source, Barry Lewis

Billy Butlin created his holiday attraction in the 1930s, when British workers were granted paid holidays for the first time and families were drawn by the promise of individual chalets, a theatre and a swimming pool.

But by the 1980s, Butlin's was facing ever growing competition from cheap foreign holidays.

And 1982, when these pictures were taken, was particularly rainy, perhaps pushing more to head to warmer climes the following year.

"My photographs from over 35 years ago seem to be looking even further back, to a vanished age - the hair and clothing styles, the attitudes, the activities, the War-time buildings - with a certain innocence, in a world before mobile phones and the internet, where a holiday was annual and special, making everyone determined to enjoy themselves to the full, whatever the weather," Lewis says.

Image source, Barry Lewis
Image source, Barry Lewis
Image source, Barry Lewis
Image source, Barry Lewis
Image source, Barry Lewis
Image source, Barry Lewis
Image source, Barry Lewis
Image source, Barry Lewis

Butlin's Holiday Camp 1982, by Barry Lewis, is published by Hoxton Mini Press.