Scouring maps of southern Europe like a Napoleonic general, the Brit Abroad plots his summer holidays. He seeks abandon, hot sun, cold beer and cheap 20-packs of Camel Blue. Territory selected, he readies his armoury: Dior Sauvage, Stone Island tee, Gucci belt. A stealth vape in the plane loos, a blast of Balearic heat when the doors slide back. The mission begins, the battlefield beckons: sunburnt bodies totter down tourist strips; big blobs of pork sizzle in the sun of a concrete Spanish resort; stumbling brigades of bloodshot-eyed boys spill plastic pints.

Such is the mythos of our favourite summer bogeyman. The past 20 years has seen the figure of the largely working-class, largely male, largely large holidaymaker conquer the middle-class imagination — a yardstick against which to define oneself.

Contrast this with the other spiritual half of British summertime, the yin to Mallorca’s yang: Wimbledon. Here, we breathlessly spot “who’s who” in the Royal Box; ladies in frilly dresses grimace through the rain; there are strawberries and cream, Pimms and “new balls please”. Hordes of neon-lit bodies in coastal Spain make way, each June, for the great and the good of “SW19” — and by the end of summer, all presuppositions about the great British class system are tidily confirmed, tucked away for the following year.

How does the Wimbledon “set” do a holiday? For many, it will involve a restless and self-conscious consumption of culture: betterment is one of the things that sets us apart from the drunken hedonists over there. In practice, this means peering around fusty-smelling churches, picking through broken tat at worthy-of-their-name flea markets and getting annoyed when waiters disregard your International Baccalaureate Italian, handing you English menus instead. Capisci, I speak from experience.

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Being a “good tourist”, with hefty disdain for your vacational inferiors, means jumping through a million performative hoops to constantly prove your politeness, patience and sophistication. A memorable holiday with four of my friends descended into farce as we tried to do just that through the most Sicilian of trials, including freewheeling a clapped-out hire car down a mountain and getting stuck in a lift, only to have a furious Palermitan engineer yell at us down the phone for interrupting his lunch break. (“I come back… a domani.”) The funniest thing about middle-class tourists is the die-hard instinct to insist that everything local — broken, infuriating and a bit rubbish — is simply part of the rhythm of life here. Hyacinth Bucket tutting is reserved solely for when things go wrong at the airport (“this is why I don’t fly easyJet!”).

Yes, British tourists do sometimes behave badly — and cities have taken action accordingly. Stag-do hotspots such as Amsterdam and Dubrovnik have introduced hefty fines for public drunkenness, limitations on party boats and pub crawls, and crackdowns on lewdness and nudity. In May, party towns in the Balearics banned the sale of alcohol in shops from 9.30pm to 8am.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, a full-on tourists vs locals war has ensued, with 3,000 protesters using hazard tape to cordon off dining holidaymakers, spraying them with water pistols. The row is based on tourist rentals driving up housing costs — which seems to me like beef with multinational bedsit-peddler AirBnB, not Gary and Sue on their summer holidays. There is similar discontent among locals in our own beauty spots, from Whitby to Weymouth, facing exactly the same problem because of Londoners’ second homes. But only one has become a cultural obsession: the one steeped in delicious snobbery about how other people holiday.

Sneering at other people’s leisure time has become an aspirational sport. This may be because, on holiday, we are encouraged to relax into our true forms, to act on our desires. Every stage of planning a trip involves a thousand moments of self-fashioning: party city or shambling slice of life? Carbon-belching Ryanair or socially conscious train travel? Resort food or chancing the local cuisine? The fork in the road seems often to fall on hedonism versus sophistication. But for some commentators, certain tourist behaviour amounts to political aggression: one, from the i, unironically ascribed the national shame of our holidaymakers to Brexit, arguing that “we don’t want to contribute to the EU, we just want to trash it, thanks”. We love to look down on our compatriots for loutishness — as though a foreign setting gives us licence to vocalise our most toxic prejudices. This is not to say that I would throw myself headlong into an all-inclusive, living off Fanta lemon and cardboard chips for a week in a Shein bikini. But haughty narratives of social degeneration are not the answer.

Once, the working classes (yes, that’s who the disdain is aimed at) could not spend their summer holidays abroad. Your big yearly trip might have involved a caravan in drizzly Wales, or knobbly-knees contests at Butlins. But firms such as Thomas Cook changed the game, offering affordable package holidays. In 1961, 1.75 million Brits went abroad; three years later, four million of us flew off. The proportion of British tourists in some Spanish resorts reached a third by the end of the decade. At a time when olive oil was something you bought from a pharmacist, European travel suddenly became available to the masses.

Before then it was the preserve of the upper classes who, springing from the pages of an E.M. Forster novel, sauntered about on the Grand Tour, sighing at suitors, clicking at waiters and mixing with none but their own aristocratic circles. The most daring antics would still be contained to the same swaggering elites, typified by the original lad on holiday — Lord Byron — who romped about in Albanian dress, shagging his way through Venice, swimming the Hellespont and barging into the issue of Greek independence.

Would some prefer the old way? To send our brightest young things to frown at Roman ruins while the poor relations “embarrass themselves” behind the closed gates of a regional Centre Parcs? It seems that though travel can broaden the mind, it can also narrow it — feeding off the stratified snottiness of rainy England. If there is a Brexit comparison to make, it is of that same self-defeating snobbery — us, respectful, cultured, cosmopolitan; them, brutish, provincial, rude. Surely, surely it’s time to pack that all in.

Sunday was the epitome of this divide. At half nine in the morning, England fans piled into pubs, swarming around Clapton’s Crooked Billet like wasps around a rotting plum. In the early afternoon, the Princess of Wales walked on to Wimbledon’s Centre Court in a magenta dress to heartfelt applause. There were polite ripples of laughter when Annabel Croft called the victorious Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz “hot”. Both finalists gave sportsmanlike speeches. A few hours later, our Euros finalists lost 2-1 to Spain; at one point before the equaliser, the camera trained on two men in crusader costumes — a common sight at any England match. There they were, leaning anxiously over the railing, decked out in the splendour of Christian knights, a shell of national fantasy. This may be the image that best crystallises the irony of the Brit Abroad: a bygone valour, a hubris, that clashes with the damp reality of our global standing.

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The atmosphere around Sunday’s football had the brash sincerity of a lads’ holiday, Wimbledon the genteel and self-conscious restraint of middle-class trips to continental cathedrals. One is heavily male-coded, booze-centred, charged with a mythic optimism, the other a measured, picnic-y affair. That only one could be said to be “quintessentially English” — the latter — tells us all we need to know about who we hope to project ourselves as internationally. The sensibilities of the Grand Tour are more difficult to scrub than we think: the cringing irony around big football tournaments is, I suspect, grounded partly in disdain for the envoys sent to represent us.

On holiday, everything is political. It’s time we stopped pretending that going abroad is an act of escapism or authentic self-discovery: travel is as shot through with the anxieties of class as anything taking place on the British high street. Wimbledon and Benidorm are simply part of the circus of these social signifiers. None of us is immune: these trips are an opportunity to rehearse who we want to be, and the way we behave in our leisure time has come to represent our essential moral status. Yes, tourists shouldn’t behave like tyrants; but we should be a little more clear-headed about a fascination with a certain type of traveller. For this reason, I’m calling time on the spectre of the Brit Abroad — the most threadbare of national myths.

Smith’s most celebrated panorama relived his ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851 — which had been an astonishing physical feat for a clubbable bon viveur (though he had to be dragged to the summit barely conscious, he claimed to have celebrated by drinking a bottle of champagne and smoking a cigar). He pulled out all the stops to recreate Mont Blanc on the stage of the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1852, importing woodcarvers from Chamonix to recreate a Swiss chalet. St Bernards roamed the aisles and during the interval hot baked potatoes were dispensed for those in the audience feeling a glacial chill from the buckets of cold water placed around the hall. The stage was decked with alpine plants; there was a waterfall with real water, a mill wheel and a lily pond; the walls of the theatre were hung with chamois skins. “The Ascent of Mont Blanc” ran for six years and 2,000 performances, and on top of the fortune he made in ticket sales, Smith cannily expanded his repertoire by selling colouring books, fans, board games and miniature models of Mont Blanc.

Smith, an unrepentant populist (he liked to shock Thackeray by saying that Shakespeare was “all rot”), knocked the high culture out of the touristic experience. He made the adventure of foreign parts bite-sized and accessible — if not in reality, at least in dreams. He called it “the Alps in a box”. Figuratively speaking, Smith’s panoramas boxed up the great sights of the classical Grand Tour and sold them in miniature form, building them up with a dramatic flourish then cutting them down to size with a knowing dig in the ribs. Smith’s success runs parallel with the emergence of photography, the industrial manufacture of souvenirs, and the “I was here” frame of the postcard. After Smith, it became possible to think of “buying” the travel experience without actually going very far, framing it, and taking it home with you. Antiquarian high-culturists looked for quiddity and oddity when abroad but Smith encouraged a joyful appetite for mass-produced kitsch. His own apartment off Tottenham Court was a riot of knick-knackery from his travels. There was a figure of a Swiss peasant with a clock-face in his waistcoat, Venetian glasses, miniature Swiss chalets, soap from Vienna in the shape of fruit and a working model of a guillotine.

The tourist boom in Chamonix inspired by Smith was viewed with horror by those who thought the mountain were theirs to command. Ruskin found the “white leprosy of hotels” and souvenir shops that followed the visitors into the Alps was a blasphemy against “all the deep and sacred sensations of nature”. Everywhere the new tourists went, reported a journalist in 1856, they brought with them “Cockneyism, Albert Smithery, fun, frolic and vulgarity”. The rise in popular tourism to Europe, sparked most importantly by Thomas Cook, had highlighted a divide which has characterised British travelling ever since. In this paradigm, the tourist is the new bug and the traveller is the old soul. And even when they are gazing at the same view, the latter thinks the former is spoiling the view. The distaste is notable in how often crowds of tourists were, and still are, described in terms of mindless cattle or insects — they come in “herds” and “swarms” and “flocks”.

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Naturally as most people like to think they are an old soul, the tourist, as Evelyn Waugh put it, “is the other fellow”. Wherever the crowd goes, it is sure to be perceived by those in another crowd to debase the special spirit of place. Quite what the original spirit of place is often hard to define, but traditionally the British tourist thinks that their fellow countrymen are trampling on it. Newlywed Emily Birchall in 1870 found her visit to St Peter’s ruined by the sight of a British tourist reading his guidebook under the high altar and one feels her pain. The more expensive and bespoke the tourist experience, the more it will sell itself as being particular and unconventional, off the beaten track, away from the throng; until the throng reaches Easter Island or Lapland or Everest. Which of course it almost always does.

Thomas Cook, progenitor of the modern package tour, was a much more serious character than Smith, a former printer and temperance campaigner whose package tour business started as an effort to keep working men away from the pub on the holidays (more properly known as holy days) that constituted their only days off. By the time Smith had conquered Mont Blanc, Cook had been running tours to the Continent for several years. He had become used to the jibes about “Cooks’ Tourists” with their aspirational itineraries and their guidebooks, with points of interest rated by stars or exclamation marks. But Cook was proud of his groups and of what he was introducing to people unaccustomed to travel. “Practical people from the provinces and representatives of the better style of the London mercantile community” is how he described his tourists and he loved them. And they loved him too — a Thomas Cook tour became a byword for trustworthiness and paternal consideration. What Cook offered was something new: the holiday as a collective as well as an individual experience. And it brought with it all the expansions and limitations of the group itself.

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From Lawrence Sterne’s fastidiously risk-averse Dr Smelfungus to a coach tour of larky cockneys in Carry on Abroad, the humour that can be squeezed out of the comical figure of the Brit abroad still seems inexhaustible. One of Albert Smith’s many insights was that tourists like laughing at their fellow countrymen. The ingénue, the know-nothing, the stuck-up type, the travel bore, the vulgarian and the gullible lady traveller all make appearances. They were a satirical speciality of comic novelists like Thomas Moore (The Fudge Family in Paris) and Thackeray (The Kickleburys on the Rhine). The one defining feature is that the reader does not recognise herself in these hopeless embarrassments: they are other ones, the noisy passengers in the overcrowded night train or the ones (snigger) demanding a cup of tea in bad French. Those for whom maintaining social distinctions was important have found plenty to criticise in their fellow tourists but increasingly, others were delighted by the general flattening of class signifiers. By the Thirties, a passenger on a cruise noted: “The thing about cruising is that everyone is dressed in the same kind of light and bright clothing, and so you cannot tell the dukes from the dustmen.”

In the end most people, it appears to me, are after the same thing. British tourists of all types are surely at heart seeking a slice of pastoral, however mass-produced it might be in reality. It doesn’t seem to matter how inauthentic the peasant culture or the artisanal breakfast may be, for tourism simultaneously kills and preserves the thing it seeks. Even the hermetically-sealed world of the beach resort offers its own version of a lost arcadia. So what if the price of arcadia is other people?