‘I’m taking the Costa Brava plane’: affluent British workers’ holidays to Spain in the 1950s and 1960s

From the 1950s, millions of newly affluent British workers began to holiday abroad for the first time with the majority travelling to Spain. We enjoy no detailed social and cultural history of this transformation which turned Spain into a major site for British social history. But studying this history can help us re-think our understanding of both affluent workers and tourists while enriching Spanish tourism history and British social history. To do this, this article focuses on the life narratives of early British mass tourists and how holidays became linked to their sense of personal development and framed around joy in overcoming fear, benefiting from new opportunities, demonstrating personal adaptability and experiencing personal growth. In this way, it shifts the debate on affluent workers from concerns around income and status to considering how leisure and holidays became linked to consumerism as identity making and the forging of meaning. It also highlights the importance of understanding tourists historically and within their life narratives. This helps shift the Spanish historiography on tourism from the effects of tourism to the tourist experience and opens up a new field of agency and experience to British social history.