Butlin’s is the British holiday camp: a fenced resort by the sea containing accommodation, restaurants, swimming pools, theatres, funfairs and a permanent programme of organised entertainment, sold at a single all-in price.
Why it was invented
Billy Butlin had a very specific grievance. In the 1920s and 30s, a working family’s seaside holiday meant a boarding house whose landlady turned guests out after breakfast and did not admit them again until the evening meal — whatever the weather. Butlin, who had run fairground stalls, watched families sheltering in bus stops in the rain and concluded there was a business in it.
His first camp opened at Skegness in 1936, with the slogan “a week’s holiday for a week’s wage”. Guests had a chalet, all meals, and entertainment from morning to night, at a price a factory worker could manage.
The Redcoats
The camp’s entertainment staff, in red blazers, whose job is to run activities, host competitions, perform in shows and generally ensure nobody is left standing about wondering what to do. They are the single most recognisable thing about Butlin’s.
The role became a genuine entry route into British show business. Des O’Connor, Cliff Richard, Ringo Starr (who played the camps with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes), Jimmy Tarbuck, Michael Barrymore and Shane Richie all worked at holiday camps early on.
The regimented reputation
The early camps had a distinctly organised quality — wake-up calls over the tannoy, “Hi de Hi!” as a greeting, campers divided into competing houses, and a relentless schedule of knobbly knees contests, glamorous grandmother competitions and communal singing.
The 1980s sitcom Hi-de-Hi!, set in a fictional 1950s camp, fixed this image permanently in the national memory. It is affectionate rather than cruel, and it is what most British people under sixty picture when the word is mentioned.
The decline and what happened next
Package holidays to Spain did to holiday camps what they did to the rest of the British seaside. From a peak of around a million guests a year in the 1960s, camps closed steadily through the 1980s and 90s.
Three Butlin’s resorts survive — Skegness, Bognor Regis and Minehead — thoroughly modernised, with hotels rather than chalets, indoor waterparks and branded children’s entertainment. The wake-up tannoy is long gone.
The most successful modern reinvention is the music weekend. Minehead in particular hosts festivals — most famously All Tomorrow’s Parties and later Butlin’s own events — in which several thousand people watch bands in a holiday camp and sleep in the chalets. The incongruity is entirely the point.
The competitors
Pontins and Warner’s were the main rivals. Warner’s moved upmarket and adults-only; Pontins declined badly and closed most of its parks in 2024. Butlin’s survives as the last of the classic camps operating at scale, and its Skegness site is still on the ground Billy Butlin bought in 1936.