With over 3,000 tons of water cascading down every single second, that’s a lot of lithium baths. No wonder 14 million jolly tourists cram here each year, together contributing $2 billion to the local economy. But pass a little time in Niagara, where Ontario meets New York, and you’ll realize this Canadian town is about more than river spray and mist. There are other reasons to be cheerful, too, from the ziplines to dinosaurs to the motels, 165 at the last count, together wallowing in a veritable lithium bath of kitschiness. It all speaks to an instinctive rejection of middle-class “curation”, in favor of good-old-fashioned garish dazzle — elitist snobs be damned.

The sheer power of Niagara panicked the first Europeans to see it. In 1678, an early Belgian visitor described the “surprising and astonishing manner” in which the water barrelled down. But, by the 19th century, the Falls became popular. In 1801, Vice President Aaron Burr’s daughter chose Niagara for her bridal tour. Three years later, Napoleon’s little brother Jérôme did the same. Those proto-influencers soon turned Niagara Falls into the honeymoon capital of North America, a title it’s retained ever since. Perhaps it’s that gigantic lithium bath, or else the easy drive from Toronto, but 50,000 happy couples still flock here each year.

The Falls are surely part of the romantic allure. Bob Fitzgerald, who runs the Falls Wedding Chapel on the New York side of the border with his wife Sally, has wedded everyone from popstars to WWE wrestlers. Regular punters from as far away as Singapore arrive to tie the knot here too, as well as one Australian in her 20s, who came to Niagara to wed her beloved before passing away from a terminal disease. “The Falls,” says Strand, “are a giant magnet that attracts human impulses.”

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Spend time gazing at the torrent — “At last, fortissimo!” quipped Mahler when he first laid eyes on it — and it’s hard not to be impressed. Yet chat to the Fitzgeralds and it’s clear Niagara is about more than nature unleashed. Consider, if nothing else, the helicopter ceremonies the couple offer above the Falls, with newlyweds exchanging vows in the cabin. And if that hints at a town comfortable with showiness, there’s plenty more where that came from.

A great example here is the Zipline to the Falls, carrying daredevils 2,200 feet down over the abyss. Rebecca and Elizabeth, who work at the attraction, giggle as they recall the 98-year-old woman who took her own high-flying lithium shower. It’s unlikely even she could have managed other Niagara pastimes. Since 1850, 11 stunters have tightroped across the gorge, while 15 have barrelled over and survived.

Such kookiness is clear away from the Falls themselves. On the Canadian side of the border, you can golf with a Brontosaurus at Dinosaur Adventure Golf, or encounter Vlad the Impaler at the Castle Dracula Wax Museum, or take aim at moonshine jugs at the Hillbilly Shooting Gallery. Until 2002, the local museum even boasted the mummified remains of Pharaoh Rameses I, which somehow turned up in the mid-19th century.

But the true apotheosis of Niagara kitsch is in the accommodation. Visit the Cadillac Motel and you’ll see what I mean. Pinch-your-cheek cute, the tidy retro property features 23 themed rooms, ranging from “Ghostbusters” to “Marilyn Monroe” — who, according to local lore, once stayed the night. Ray and Lisa Brock, the owners, regularly rent half the place out to hockey teams and stag dos, who happily gorge themselves on home-cooked barbecue and what Lisa calls a “pig trough” full of beer.

“A fascinating accretion of human culture and goofiness that piles up around the Falls,” is how Strand summarizes the town. “It is a fun place that illustrates a side of human absurdity.” But if that explains the what, we’re still left with the how — how is it that, amid the unending march of neoliberal drabness, places like Dinosaur Adventure Golf and the Ghostbusters room survive? The price is probably a good place to start, even with the Falls themselves. There are crowds, sure, but the torrent is visible a half a mile down the Niagara Parkway, making for a cheap day out. “You don’t have to stand in line,” Bob Fitzgerald says. “It isn’t Disneyland. You don’t have to pay or elbow people aside.”

Yet if the accommodation is similarly light on the pockets — a night at the Cadillac will set you back just $85 Canadian dollars a night in the off-season — Niagara is about more than fun on a budget. “People like the unique,” Lisa Brock says. “The big hotel chains don’t care.” Certainly, it’s hard to imagine the Hilton putting out pig troughs full of LaBatt Blue pilsner for thirsty hockey bros.

And I wonder, too, if Niagara thrives on something else: nostalgia. Fast capitalism delivers boutique “experiences”. But even us globalist anywheres are ultimately from somewhere, and Niagara’s kitsch taps into that nostalgic impulse that pines for the authenticity of yesterday. A “Zombie Attack” interactive theatre is not your grandmother’s country fried steak — or, as we’re in Canada, a classic poutine. But retro connects us to our history. A round of mini-golf with vinyl dinosaurs evokes memories of vacations past. In Niagara, vacationers have that rare thing: fun. Rewilding or yoga retreats may offer a “bespoke wellness experience”, but they’re ultimately just contrived excuses to clamber back on the hamster wheel of self-improvement. Nostalgia, meanwhile, answers that simple yearning for gentler times.

Not that Niagara is stuck entirely in the past. A mile from what the Brocks affectionately call the “Caddy” is Basell’s Restaurant and Tavern. Like other spots in town, it’s dripping in Sixties atmosphere, all neon signs and checkerboard floors. In other ways, however, Basell’s feels strikingly modern. Founded by two Greek brothers, the spot is now run by Fang. Indian-born and of Chinese descent, the recent Canadian immigrant has kept the booths, the steel-stainless counter, and the “evil eye” keeping watch.

At this point, Strand once more returns to the power of the Falls, bestowing the spray with almost mystical power. “It is a pilgrimage that helps define you as an American and Canadian,” she says. “Like the 19th-century Grand Tour, when elites went to the Falls to embrace their new nation. Bathing in the spray of the Falls it naturalizes you. It is almost like a baptism.”

A case in point is Fred Fakouri. Tall and affable, the 27-year-old owns and runs the Persepolis Inn with his father. Typical of old-school Niagara, the 52-room motel is small and intimate, with heart-shaped baths aplenty. As the property’s name suggests, the Fakouri clan hail from Iran, fleeing the Islamic Republic to gentle Ontario. “The hotel is a healing process for us,” he explains. “The family is pouring everything into the hotel and Niagara Falls.” A town settled by the British, Niagara beckoned as a path to freedom for enslaved African Americans. This welcoming tradition continued into the 20th century, when the Falls powered industry that attracted migrants from Eastern Europe.

Yet if nearly 20% of Niagara’s population come from an immigrant background, and many, like the Fakouris, are integrated and happy, it’s wrong to see the town as a haven from all the world’s woes. Niagara Falls is the temporary home to more than 5,000 asylum seekers, the highest per capita rate of any Canadian city. Mayor Jim Diodati warns it’s at “breaking point” — telling reporters that the shelters are full, the transitional housing is full, and the drug problem is “like it’s never been before”.

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There are other challenges too. Before Covid, the Fitzgeralds once averaged 701 weddings a year. These days, they hope these numbers will return, so they can pass the business to their daughter. Fakhori tells a similar tale. Since the pandemic, he says, business is down 50%, and refusing to fully rebound. Last year, overall tourist numbers were still down 7% from their 2019 peak, a shortfall of 1.5 million visitors and tens of millions in spending.

Of course, Niagara Falls isn’t alone in feeling the legacy of lockdowns. But the town is arguably at particular risk thanks to the very nostalgia that lends it strength. Those mom-and-pop joints may bring in customers, Lisa Brock says, but they’re also vulnerable to being snatched up by big Toronto investors — who strip their new assets for upscale customers unenthusiastic about heart-shaped baths.

These days, indeed, the bulk of accommodations at Niagara are now classified as “high-end”. A local newspaper editorial even bragged that the town is “positioning itself to become a more substantial player in the upscale hotel market”. These high-end chains replace a series of iconic establishments that were utterly unique to the town. Among these were the Foxhead Motor Inn, made famous by the Jim Crow-era Green Book travel guide, and the Inn on the Niagara Parkway, a late-Fifties gem that styled itself a “modern resort motel”. Nor is this just a Niagara phenomenon. In 1964, more than 61,000 motels, largely of the mom-and-pop variety, dotted the North American roadside. A generation later, that number is 16,000 and dropping.

The forces of globalization and gentrification, then, are at the gate. But at least the Falls remain. Inspired, perhaps, by their unending roar, the Fitzgeralds still have ambitions to make Niagara Falls the “wedding capital of the world”. And, at places like the Cadillac, the old charm endures for at least a while longer. “See how old fashioned we are,” the receptionist tells me proudly. “We still use a key.” I can’t think of a better lithium bath.

And then something I had been saving up to say: “Let’s break the silly rules!”

The rules, until that day, had been strict. All manner of behaviour, from the growing of Begonias in front gardens to the stressing of the second syllable in the word controversy, were unacceptable in our little, class-obsessed lives. But very close to the top of the list — second only perhaps to the use of the word toilet — was eating in public. On building sites, one could make an exception, or in the trenches in wars — but not in normal life, not even on holiday.

But Mum was on a journey of her own. A child to look after, a new world of social disruption to cope with, a husband who had gone mad. And in Teignmouth that afternoon she cracked, and the happiest day of my young life was complete. We bought the Mars Bar and divided it and ate it — not entirely in the open air (we used a bus shelter to protect our dignity) — but defying the Gods who policed the division between upper- and lower-middle class, we scoffed the lot.

It was only a day trip. But it was the greatest holiday of my life. It was a harbinger of happier times ahead, of freedom from self-imposed distress. We could look across the flat grey sea and imagine blue skies, sunny days, the sound of laughter. We were laughing ourselves as we got back on the coach.

A few years ago, while driving one of my daughters home from school, I was making what I thought were some trenchant observations about the joys of their modern childhoods and the depredations of my youth.

“When daddy was young,” I said as we wove our way through traffic, “we didn’t even have a car!”

“Oh, when were they invented?”

The Seventies is ancient history. Black-and-white times, as my kids still call it. Phones with dials in draughty halls. Coal smoke, cigarette smoke, everyone coughing, expiring.  Heart attacks taking men who unwisely ran for a bus. Whispers about “the big C”. IRA bombs. Our little house: my step-father suicidal, Mum taking tablets called Quiet Life. But the quiet, when it came, not making anything better.

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One thing, though, made everything better. I was in love with coaches. The company was called Roman City and the day their summer brochure was published we would queue outside the shop and ask solemnly for two, please: they were free and Mum and I enjoyed the reckless abandon of possessing our own separate copies.

There was not much else of the devil-may-care or even the vaguely hedonistic in our small world. But on four or five summer Saturdays, courtesy of Roman City coaches, we would escape it — Mum and me — and head for Plymouth via Dartmoor, or Brighton and Hove, or Swansea and the Mumbles, or London for the Ideal Home Exhibition. A drive from our little box in an unfashionable outer suburb of Bath to a better world. In which I would feast not on the destination but on the journey. My memories are not of buckets and spades or the smell of the sea or the sound of the gulls. They are of the open road, where the diesel could spew into fields as we dipped down into villages or pulled into pub carparks.

Coach trips in the Seventies were exercises in grounding. Connection to the person you were with, devoid of any distractions. Too noisy to read and too uncomfortable to snooze. No phones, of course. Connection as well to the land, to place and to places. The vehicles themselves were heaving wrecks, stifling in summer heat. They often broke down but never in the modern way, with software issues that can only be solved in a lab. It was all hardware: a spanner could resolve matters. The drivers sometimes returned to base with smears of grease on their faces.

And when the beasts were coaxed up some country lane in Devon or Somerset or Warwickshire or Wye Valley, you were close to the hedges. You moved slowly and noisily and stared out — and people in these places stared back. I can still picture the aftermath of an accident somewhere near Ilminster in deepest Somerset: squeezing our vehicle past a small group of people in tears, luggage strewn by the side of a road. Grittier than any train view.  Uncomfortably close to the action.

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For those of us in the downwardly mobile, upper-middle class, the coach trip also provided a community mixing that modern travel, modern holidays, would never match. I am not pretending this was necessarily to my mother’s liking. If you abhor those you regard as lower-middle class, a day trip to Minehead is an unwise holiday choice. But she did it for me and the result was a bonding between us that grew ever stronger as we giggled and raised our eyes at our fellow passengers in their crimplene suits, with their concern about “toilet breaks” and willingness to eat sandwiches in full view of each other as if they were farm animals or scaffolders.

Nobody on the coach — least of all the two of us, social snobs but educational illiterates — would have been familiar with arguments about rationalism and its sometimes baleful discontent-inducing influence on human existence. But years later, at the LSE, I would spend many hours in the company of disciples of the recently retired philosopher Michael Oakeshott, and I remember thinking then how my life, and the lives of many others in the Seventies, matched his intellectual preference — conservative with a small c — for what works over what might be.

True: nothing much did work back then. But the absence of grand intellectual plans in the pre-Thatcher age gave our lives a kind of messy satisfaction we miss today — and opportunities, in the grimmest of seaside towns, for small moments of real joy.  As Oakeshott put it, we preferred “present laughter to Utopian bliss”. Never mind dreams of frolicking in the sun if you can have a Mars Bar in Teignmouth and enjoy it.

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Don’t overthink life: that for me was the lesson of those holiday trips. You can dream of course of better times, sunnier holidays, changes in circumstance.   But live in the moment, savour the fumes, the small intense pleasures that can make life meaningful.

My kids have swanky holidays. We go abroad. They know (too much) about room service. During one American trip, I asked one of them what she wanted to be when she grew up; she thought for a few moments before answering, “a guest!” They take photos of sunsets, of meals, of themselves.

And, frankly, I am glad. I would not visit my early life on anyone, and certainly not my own children. But still, they miss out — we all miss out in the modern holiday world — on the small pleasures we enjoyed in the days before Instagram, before colour, before choice. If you have been on a British Seventies coach holiday, you have learned how to cope, how to make do, how to stay cheerful. You have no need of the sun. You carry it in you.

Paul did not progress in this talent contest, but went back to Liverpool and joined John Lennon in his skiffle group, The Quarrymen. But Butlin’s provided a stage for another future Beatle: Ringo Starr also played several times at its camps with his band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.

Butlin’s holidays are imprinted on the memories of thousands. People flocked to the camps, attracted by the offer of a week’s holiday with family entertainment and myriad activities for the equivalent of a week’s pay. I went to Filey, aged five, in 1960, and to Pwllheli in north Wales (also frequented by the young Paul McCartney) in 1964, aged nine. My abiding memory of the latter holiday is mistakenly opening the door of the wrong chalet to discover a female holidaymaker in the steamy embrace of a male Butlin’s redcoat. Well, it was the Sixties.

“Our true intent is all for your delight,” said an early Butlin’s slogan — a quotation from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later, Billy Butlin confessed he had learned it from the side of a fairground organ. William Heygate Edmund Colborne “Billy” Butlin was a remarkable showman. Born in South Africa in 1899, he had a turbulent childhood. After his parents separated, he came to England with his mother and spent years with his grandmother’s travelling fair. He followed his mother to Canada and served as a stretcher bearer in the Canadian army on the Western Front, after which he returned to England with £5 in his pocket.

Butlin spent some of it to acquire a hoopla stall in his uncle’s fair, where he discovered that sawing off the corners of hoopla blocks gave patrons a better chance of winning; while his profit margins were smaller than those of rivals, this was outweighed by extra custom. His success led him to create his own fairground empire, including an amusement park at Skegness, where he had an exclusive licence to import Dodgem cars to the UK for the first time.

All the while, he nurtured the idea of giving the UK a holiday camp like ones he had attended in Canada. He had visited Barry Island, in Wales, and felt sorry for families staying in drab guest houses with little to do. Butlin was not the first to create holiday camps in Britain, but he did it on a scale and with a panache that outshone all others. Ten camps were built in the three decades up to 1966, including one in Ireland and one in the Bahamas. In the Seventies and Eighties, Butlin’s also operated hotels, including one in Spain, and smaller holiday parks in England and France. It even ran a revolving restaurant in London’s Post Office Tower.

But it all started in Skegness. There, the first camp opened on 11 April 1936 and within a year it had doubled in size. It was officially opened by Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. Butlin designed the camp himself and later said: “My plans were for 1,000 people in 600 chalets with electricity, running water, 250 bathrooms, dining and recreational halls. A theatre, a gymnasium, a rhododendron bordered swimming pool with cascades at both ends and a boating lake.”

The famous redcoats were soon invented. During the first week, Butlin became concerned that families were not mixing. He got Norman Bradford, senior engineer, to stand up on stage, tell jokes and explain the facilities. Realising that more easily identifiable staff would help to encourage the guests, Butlin asked Bradford to buy a distinctive blazer. Bradford came back with a choice of blue, yellow and white, but Butlin decided on bright red, inspired by the Canadian Mounties.

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A second camp at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, opened in 1938 and work on Filey began in 1939. All the camps had bars, large dining rooms and ballrooms and aimed to give people a taste of the glamour they saw on cinema screens. Stars such as Gracie Fields performed on stage. The routine of campers saying “Hi-De-Hi, Ho-De-Ho” to one another also started in the 1930s: Butlin borrowed the idea from US bandleader Cab Calloway.

In 1937, Butlin turned his business into a limited company and offered shares to the public; they sold out within five minutes. The government passed legislation in 1938 giving industrial workers a week’s paid holiday, something Butlin had campaigned for. Despite this, most early campers were from the lower-middle classes rather than the working class. It was rising prosperity in the Fifties that drew in more working-class customers. The popularity of Butlin’s made a holiday there aspirational.

The Second World War came as a shock to Butlin, who had thought the crisis would blow over. However, he turned it to his advantage through a deal with the Ministry of War, which took over Clacton and Skegness: Clacton became an army camp, while Skegness became HMS Royal Arthur, a base used to train men and women in the basics of military life before they joined ships or other training establishments. As part of the agreement, he completed Filey, built two other camps at Ayr and Pwllheli, and negotiated a scheme giving him the right to buy the camps back at the end of the war. When peace was at last declared, there was a rush to the coast by holiday-starved workers. Many new camps were started, including a chain of smaller ones by Fred Pontin, with whom Butlin had a friendly rivalry. But Butlin remained the most successful.

That’s not to say reviews were universally positive. From the start, some commentators criticised what they saw as the regimented nature of life at Butlin’s, where campers were awakened with “Wakey wakey! Rise and shine, campers!” over the Tannoy, and urged to take part in collective activities such as Knobbly Knees and Glamorous Granny contests. Future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford) paid his first visit to the camp at Filey during the party’s Scarborough conference in 1948, as a guest of the National Union of Mineworkers. He noted: “Very efficient, organised, pleasure holiday making. Everybody agreed they would not go there!”

To the thousands who enjoyed the camps, such attitudes smacked of snobbery. Paradoxically, the range of activities that they could take or leave, at an all-in price, gave them a sense of freedom. However, the charge of being akin to concentration camps for the proletariat never quite left Butlin’s. One camp, in 1959, felt the need to advertise itself as having, “No loudspeakers, no regimentation”. Later, when holiday camps were going out of fashion, the structure was a factor held against them.

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But in the Fifties and Sixties, Butlin’s was in its heyday. Camps embraced modern features such as glass-sided swimming pools, revolving bars, monorails, chairlifts and dry ski slopes. New resorts opened in Bognor Regis, Minehead and Barry Island. Billy Butlin was knighted in 1964.

“What great times we had there. The Butlin’s Beaver club (I was a member) with all your redcoat aunties and uncles who would take you off to be pirates for the day, or whatever activity was going on. Our parents would only see us at mealtimes,” said a woman who visited Minehead as a child in the Seventies. Redcoats patrolled the chalets at night to listen for children waking up, so parents could go out in the evening.

Not everything remained so rosy. Butlin’s tried to attract the lucrative teenage market in the early Sixties and gained a reputation for vandalism, gang violence and sexual immorality. It responded by segregating teenagers from families and deployed security staff to curb misbehaviour, but family bookings were affected. In 1968, the camps banned single teenagers, but its image was already tarnished.

Billy Butlin retired in 1968 and moved to Jersey for tax reasons, while his son Bobby became chairman and managing director. In 1972, the company was sold to the Rank Organisation, although Bobby remained in charge. Like other companies, Butlin’s started to see bookings decline as more Brits took to holidaying abroad. The company’s forays into overseas markets never seemed as sure-footed as those at home had been. By the time Billy was laid to rest in 1980, his funeral procession lined by redcoats, his camps were in decline.

Paul Theroux visited Minehead in 1982 and saw the deadened unhappiness of a “sleazy paradise, in which people were treated more or less like animals in a zoo”. A redcoat told him that half the male guests were unemployed: “That’s the beauty of Butlin’s — you can pay for it with your dole money.” Butlin’s fortunes had a habit of reflecting the ups and downs of working-class life.

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Some camps were sold. Others rebranded under the “Holiday World” franchise in the late Eighties: Skegness became Funcoast World and Bognor Regis became Southcoast World. There was investment in sub-tropical pools and improved accommodation. A decade later, the Butlin’s name returned. There was a new round of investment and all three remaining camps got a Skyline Pavilion, an undercover area with shops, bars, restaurants and entertainment. The Miss Lovely Legs contest ended in 1989 and the Glamorous Grandmother and Holiday Princess contests in 1997.

In 2000, Rank sold its entire holiday business, including Butlin’s, Warner, Haven and Oasis, to Bourne Leisure, which has invested in spas, hotels, premium restaurants and activities such as horse riding, coasteering, scuba diving and mountain bike rides. After a volatile time in the pandemic, it has benefited from the boom in staycations. Nevertheless, its current owner, Bourne Leisure, is trying to sell the chain — seen as not fitting the objectives of its parent company, private equity giant Blackstone. (Recent turmoil in financing markets makes a sale difficult.)

The rise, fall and reinvention of Butlin’s mirrors Britain’s changing society, culture and neuroses about class. The popular BBC sitcom Hi-de-Hi!, which started in 1980, was a reminder of a more optimistic age of 20 years earlier. Butlin’s, where the show was set, was in its prime. Brits could take for granted collective holidays, family entertainment and full employment. The early Eighties, though, were a low point for the country and the brand. Butlin’s today lacks the vividness of Billy Butlin’s original creation. But it reflects Britain’s improved, albeit patchy, prosperity.

Butlin’s has reinvented itself as a rival to upmarket family holiday group Center Parcs; the brand lives on in three remaining locations: Skegness in Lincolnshire, the original site, plus Bognor Regis and Minehead. “From the moment you arrive, you can expect nothing but full-on fun,” says its marketing literature. There is no hint of regimentation, and no mention of a Knobbly Knees competition.

We’re off camping again, among millions who will take advantage of our non-ability to go anywhere hot without hassle by sitting under a canvas, wearing two jumpers at night and trying to find a comfortable position to read with a head torch.

Like many fellow metropolitan ponces, my destination of choice would be the south of France, one of the push factors being that England is so expensive to holiday in. With just 250,000 second homes compared to France’s 3 million, our summer housing market manages to be more acute than our normal kind.

And so we go back to nature.

Britain, and England in particular, is very urban. It is the most cultivated, and most artificial of countries, with a population almost uniquely disconnected from nature. This explains our extreme sentimentality towards animals — at the time of writing the alpaca is still alive — and our romantic ideas about the countryside, which co-exist with a callous indifference to its destruction, both of native species and river life from pollution.

It also explains why we are such a nation of campers, despite having a climate almost comically unsuited towards the pastime. Camping has proved a strangely resilient form of holiday, despite people having more disposable income in general, and more distant trips becoming affordable. Our family never went camping as children, and I don’t even remember friends who ever tried it, yet almost every parent I know now does it, often quite regularly.

It’s a particular social scene very popular among certain London types, the people who bring hummus to Clissold Park picnics, who buy their daughters those illustrated books about empowering women, who might actually drink Brewdog’s Barnard Castle Eye Test beer, who have great taste in food and culture and terrible taste in politics. At some of the bigger campsites, such as Eweleaze in Dorset, huge swathes of Haringey, Islington and Hackney can be found. It’s like a seasonal migration of north Londoners, watched by anthropologists who are so impressed that they all manage to find their way to Weymouth each year, in search of fresh-baked artisan bread and yoga.

Yet camping in itself is one of the most classless of past times. Unlike foreign holidays, where some people go to Andalusia or the Canary Islands and others to Tuscany or Provence, campsites will contain all multitudes. Probably uniquely, it’s where you meet all the English, all together, in their natural habitat, which explains the special atmosphere, a shy friendliness. This has been the case since the craze started at the start of the 20^th century, when after the first British camping club was formed its president noted how “almost every division into which society in England is split has contributed to the ranks of the Camping fraternity of today”.

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But is it actually fun? I’m not sure. The first time we went camping was with a young baby, which I highly recommend. There’s nothing like being woken up by a piercing scream at 4am, a scream that also wakes up your neighbours who will spend the whole day resenting you. You’re still drunk, because it’s impossible to sleep on the ground otherwise, and you’re also wearing all the dry clothes you brought because it is so cold. And the ground is all wet and dewy when you step outside. And the toilet is… well, the toilets.

That first camping experience was on “eco” site, which means having the inner glow of saintliness while visiting a toilet which is literally just a medieval-style mound of excrement covered with sawdust. The perversity of paying money to live as our ancestors did, in an age of rampant fecal-oral diseases and sheer squalor, is a mystery.

It’s a hugely popular British pastime despite everything being completely at the mercy of the elements. On one of our earlier trips, I spent the entire first night holding up the tent as the rain and wind crushed its feeble structure, water coming in. In my other hand a beer, doing that British thing of pretending the rain doesn’t make everything completely shit. That this is, technically, a holiday. Not for the first time, I wondered, I could literally be at home on my sofa, warm and completely confident in centuries of advancing plumbing technology.

Clearly it has its challenges, yet for the children it is a small taste of the freedom that my generation of neurotic parents has largely denied them, a real-life Famous Five/Hardy Boys adventure. As for parents, I’m not convinced anyone actually enjoys it. Once while at a Eurocamp I remember a Belgian family opposite us, with three young blond children, and a bedraggled blond dad who spent the entire time lumbering up and down, carrying things, looking after children, applying sunscreen, chopping. He didn’t smile once the entire week, and inside was probably muttering “living the dream” sarcastically in Flemish.

But then the rain clears, and the children quieten down, and you get to stare at the fire. If I were going to come up with some cod-evo psych explanation, then I suppose it most mirrors the environment our species grew up in, with large groups sitting around a flame with only the stars above — always the most hypnotically beautiful moment of the holiday. It’s a completely fake, ersatz form of traditional living, which is of course the best kind.

In his landmark television series Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski made the point that “the largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture”, something he ascribed to “an act of will” by mankind. So why on earth are we desperate to go back? Well, like most ancient traditions, it’s an invention of the Victorians.

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There were long ago enthusiasts for getting back to nature, including Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, or Life in the Woods in 1854. A keen camper, he once built a campfire that was so successful it ended up burning down 300 acres of wood. There was also John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club and once camped with Theodore Roosevelt, an event which inspired the president to build America’s system of conservation.

But by far the most important figure, and the man called the inventor of modern camping, was Thomas Hiram Holding, whose 1908 work The Camper’s Handbook was the founding text of the movement.

Holding had been born in Shropshire in 1844. His parents were Mormons, which at the time was a very recent movement and considered a dangerous cult, one that practised polygamy. The Mormons had originated in upstate New York but after repeated attacks from neighbours trekked en masse to the safety of Utah. Popular with the then largely Anglo-American population in the northeast US, it also attracted converts from the UK and even today Mormons are overwhelmingly of English ancestry.

Yet the trek across America was brutally tough, and for the Holdings it would be heart-breaking; they lost two of their four children on the journey and the devastated family returned to England. But the unfathomable awfulness of the American trip perversely gave Thomas a great love of the outdoors. He had first experienced camping on a plateau overlooking the Mississippi river and sought to recreate the sheer natural beauty of this experience back home.

In Britain, the new interest in the outdoors was specifically linked to urbanisation. In the 1870s and 1880s the cost of food plummeted, mostly due to the opening up of huge areas of North America to farming, as well as improved storage and transportation; the countryside in England, long in decline, further emptied. “As fewer people lived in the countryside, memories of rural life became hazy and romanticised,” Matthew de Abaitua wrote in his history of the craze, The Art of Camping. A population that had become alienated from the countryside was now keen to create an idealised version.

In 1886 Holding went to the west of Ireland with three friends: two of the men were “fairly much married” and the other two were to “study the characters of the settled and sensible men who had become sobered and broken to the most earnest duties of life”, as he put it. A late Victorians lads’ holiday, it was arguably the first modern camping trip, and they travelled by bike, since “cycle camping” was also tied up with the new popularity of cycling.

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The cycling scene in late 19^th century Britain often had a progressive and proto-feminist edge to it, and many female cyclists also took part in the Victorian women’s football movement. Unsurprisingly, then, Holding was very keen on encouraging women to camp and remarked on “How quickly they pick up the making and mounting of a tent and its appliances, the cooking and the tidying up, and how they take on the bathing.” There was even a female contributor to the Camper’s Handbook, a “Mrs F Horsfield” who described it as a break from domestic chores. Well, up to a point.

Holding began a craze that would grow to huge heights after the Second World War, always a passionate evangelist for the outdoors. Camping, he explained, “keeps old men young” and “revives his taste and love of the country”. He advised that “it enabled a man to get away from his family; or his family to get away from him for a spell” and “It makes men more tolerant of the domestic life”.

The last one, of course, is the key. People go camping so that they can appreciate home again, enjoy the absurd luxuries of a power-shower or bath, a dishwasher, a sofa, even an actual bed. It’s a very strange way to view holidays, like going to a failed state just to appreciate the transport infrastructure back home. Indeed, it’s more like a medieval pilgrimage, where the whole point is to suffer rather than simply “enjoy”.

But we do it because it’s our tradition — even if, like all the best traditions, it is entirely invented.