As an American I lived for a while in England years ago and went camping (yes, in the rain and under an old-style canvas tent), and that other great UK tradition: a caravan holiday where lots of pale Englishmen sat on deck chairs next to their caravans, soaked up the sun and turned very red.
There’s a chummy companionship to UK campgrounds and caravan sites and when the sun finally appears the countryside is wonderfully green.
Camping is not quite so popular in the US although there are certainly camp sites usually run by the state or federal government. Hiking (and overnight camping) is more popular here and the guy who kicked that craze off after WWII was an Englishman called Colin Fletcher.
Fletcher served for the entire war as an officer in the Royal Marines, including a stint in the Arctic and Mountain Warfare Cadre, so he knew a few things about outdoor survival. In the 1950s he hiked the length of California one summer and wrote a book called The Thousand Mile Summer.
Fletcher’s magnum opus was The Complete Walker which is filled with all the hiking, map reading, and camping advice you’ll ever need. His approach was quite down to earth as befits a former Marine. The layer of trail dirt on your body rarely needs to be washed off because it’s ‘wholesome’. Tents are rarely required because a tarpaulin stretched between branches or sticks usually suffices. His advice regarding bears (not a problem encountered in the UK) is basically to throw something at them and tell them to b*gg*r off (black bears are rarely aggressive; Alaskan grizzlies are a different story).
I love the wilds of the US, but there is (or was) so much homely charm to the English countryside. I hope the UK preserves its natural heritage for generations of campers to come.
Ah, all the way from America. You must be familiar with the Carry On films by now. Carry On Camping, being one. Not only that those pale Englishmen turned very red, but, turned very, very red when a wardrobe malfunction of the kind as suffered by the good lady in the photo at the head of this piece happened. A still from Carry On Camping, I believe. Well, it is. But the north London family guys would be very well-read, instead, having missed the commotion as they would be buried in a good book.
“…Probably uniquely, it’s where you meet all the English…”
Well, you might just find the odd Afro-Carribbean family, but I’ll take any bet that you won’t find any families of Indian descent – not even those born and bred here for a couple of generations. I’m convinced the first day you will see an Indian family at a campingsite in Bognor Regis is the day an Indian is playing center back in the England Football team. 2357 is my current best guess.
In my life I lived about 17 years out of camps – or ‘Camping’ Much rough, on foot or small boats, but the majority out of various vehicles, or trailers pulled by a Truck.
About 15 years ago I was living in a vehicel, we had been living in the Canada for the previous year and a half, and the second winter decided to head to the South as one winter camping without electricity in the North is fine, but a second a bit much.
We passed through this charming town in The Deep South, great Natural beauty, the people seemed nice, so I did my thing, which is construction, for a year and then headed on – but came back a couple months later as I realized that town was about as good a place as I have seen, and bought a fantastic bit of land, so much nature it is like a nature reserve, and began building my houses, and just stayed, and a few years ago I realised I just do not care to travel anymore… As a life long drifter this amazed me – but I have enough, and I just can’t be bothered – my anual trip back to UK has been stopped by covid – 2 years now, and as I am personally anti-vax, may never be able to return to my old UK – which is sad, but not that much, UK is not what it was when I left it decades ago…
As someone who lived camping as my thing – I just am not called to it anymore, I guess age. My family want me to take them on long, remote, road trips, but I seem to just be content …. The article made me nostalgic though.
Camping does put one at a local level, ( 99% of my camping was not in campgrounds). It puts one in nature unlike day visitors, it is a really good thing, I am glad I got to see the world that way – I regret wasting my life that way though – but at least I got to see a lot of stuff.
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
I cannot bear camping and I live in a sunny country.
Indeed, my last (hopefully forever) camping trip put me off it for life. Folding myself into a too-small tent for many hours during a torrential rainstorm, a torture only interrupted by frequent dashes to the facilities because the on-site food vendor’s Thai curry gave me the worst food poisoning I have ever experienced. All that in a field in Lincolnshire, surrounded by New Age types who couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to join in with their pagan sun ceremonies or learn how to make wind chimes from shells.
By the last day I was so exhausted I gave my tent to my neighbor on the condition they took it down for me, and I promised myself I would never be so foolish as to go camping again.
Agreed! The first and last time I went camping was with the Girl Scouts when I was ten. Sleeping in tents, having to use shared public bathrooms. Even the happy campfire memories couldn’t eclipse how much I hated it all. Never again.
I have done camping. Everything about it was horrible. The cold, the discomfort, the lack of a flush toilet! Madness.
ralph bell
2 years ago
Great timely article.
ON the continent, campers often stay for many weeks and take wide screen TV’s and full size fridge-freezers, but I do agree there is something special lying in the tent feeling tentatively apprehensive as the wind and rain batter the canvas.
I guess many being former Scouts/Guides will want to relive those nostalgic memories as adults too.
Gunner Myrtle
2 years ago
In Canada ‘car camping’ as it is called is very popular – although many people now bring huge recreational vehicles to the parks. One of the attractions is that by some consensus we all let our kids go feral. The kids love the freedom and roam all over the place while the parents stay slightly drunk all day at the camp. The other real attraction is that cell phone coverage is often non-existent or spotty so you can tell your boss that you will be out of reach for the trip.
Spot-on. The added attraction for kids is the campfire, sticks, knives and all manner of other ways to introduce a bit of well needed risk into their lives..and not having to wash much is somehow always popular.
Frances An
2 years ago
Hello Ed, very interesting meditation on camping. This makes me want to… go camping. I may try it when the weather becomes drier (but before the summer heat starts in December).
Christian Moon
2 years ago
Nice observation that we have too few second homes not too many. Very Ed West for originality and insight.
Great article. Very funny and right on the button. Camping fine for kids but I have spent enough desperately uncomfortable nights under canvas for it to have any fond memories. Worst experience was a force 9 gale on Lundy Island…Glad the previous, very cheesy, photo has been replaced.
I miss the replaced byline however. I found its characterization of the camping world as a classless utopia, and that as attractive, was spot-on. Our human existence is impoverished by everything that divides us, richer when our human communion is broadened (even when our communion consists in shared misery!). And though class predates the industrial revolution, technological existence only further divides us; see Neil Postman’s “Technopoly” on how there are always winners and losers in the wake of every technological “advancement.” (And this is to say nothing of the divides it creates between individuals within the same strata.) Therefore any sort of return to nature—including human nature, we might say—as hapless as it may be, answers a longing, becomes something of a return to Brigadoon. A place where we all get along. Which is why the replaced pic that evoked the utopic “age of love” that was the 1960s was on the mark as well. (Flag away!)
Last edited 2 years ago by Mark Thomas Lickona
Su Mac
2 years ago
“A change is as good as a rest” as they say! I came late to camping via being late to music festivals but I think the satisfaction comes from making a little home in nature for a few days, leaving everything but the essentials behind so you can see life and even basic chores with new eyes. Best done not too often or too long I find!! Being occupied doing basic stuff somewhere new can be a great pleasure I have found, speaking as someone who has travelled via yacht and RV for 18 months including the Bahamas and the USA East coast. Saw plenty of tents in the gorgeous USA State Parks there, many accompanied by kayaks, fishing gear or deer hunting rigs of course.
Mark Thomas Lickona
2 years ago
This was wonderful. Whimsical yet profound. Camping does indeed promise a return to something fundamental to human existence, a promise we will chase willy-nilly, as ill-equipped or craft-less as we may be (lean-to, anyone? roofs and walls really are an impressive bit of techne: https://youtu.be/_piHZ3CpRk8). The craze probably speaks to how diseased is modernity, the product of Enlightenment abstraction from so many things but our corporeity first and foremost. Urban life didn’t always forget/destroy nature. We have the universal mechanization of life to thank for that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some drying to hang on the line. Right after a quick visit to the composting outhouse.
Mark Gourley
2 years ago
I cannot speak for camping but I have been on pilgrimage and one had to expect fairly basic accommodation as part of the deal..
Terence Fitch
2 years ago
I love the idea of other people camping. Especially on campsites so I can work out how to avoid them.
As an American I lived for a while in England years ago and went camping (yes, in the rain and under an old-style canvas tent), and that other great UK tradition: a caravan holiday where lots of pale Englishmen sat on deck chairs next to their caravans, soaked up the sun and turned very red.
There’s a chummy companionship to UK campgrounds and caravan sites and when the sun finally appears the countryside is wonderfully green.
Camping is not quite so popular in the US although there are certainly camp sites usually run by the state or federal government. Hiking (and overnight camping) is more popular here and the guy who kicked that craze off after WWII was an Englishman called Colin Fletcher.
Fletcher served for the entire war as an officer in the Royal Marines, including a stint in the Arctic and Mountain Warfare Cadre, so he knew a few things about outdoor survival. In the 1950s he hiked the length of California one summer and wrote a book called The Thousand Mile Summer.
Fletcher’s magnum opus was The Complete Walker which is filled with all the hiking, map reading, and camping advice you’ll ever need. His approach was quite down to earth as befits a former Marine. The layer of trail dirt on your body rarely needs to be washed off because it’s ‘wholesome’. Tents are rarely required because a tarpaulin stretched between branches or sticks usually suffices. His advice regarding bears (not a problem encountered in the UK) is basically to throw something at them and tell them to b*gg*r off (black bears are rarely aggressive; Alaskan grizzlies are a different story).
I love the wilds of the US, but there is (or was) so much homely charm to the English countryside. I hope the UK preserves its natural heritage for generations of campers to come.
Ah, all the way from America. You must be familiar with the Carry On films by now. Carry On Camping, being one. Not only that those pale Englishmen turned very red, but, turned very, very red when a wardrobe malfunction of the kind as suffered by the good lady in the photo at the head of this piece happened. A still from Carry On Camping, I believe. Well, it is. But the north London family guys would be very well-read, instead, having missed the commotion as they would be buried in a good book.
Ah! I see the photo has been replaced, by one hardly more edifying than the first.
Absolutely nothing wrong with smutty humour!
“…Probably uniquely, it’s where you meet all the English…”
Well, you might just find the odd Afro-Carribbean family, but I’ll take any bet that you won’t find any families of Indian descent – not even those born and bred here for a couple of generations. I’m convinced the first day you will see an Indian family at a campingsite in Bognor Regis is the day an Indian is playing center back in the England Football team. 2357 is my current best guess.
They are too clever to pursue this nightmare of a holiday.
In my life I lived about 17 years out of camps – or ‘Camping’ Much rough, on foot or small boats, but the majority out of various vehicles, or trailers pulled by a Truck.
About 15 years ago I was living in a vehicel, we had been living in the Canada for the previous year and a half, and the second winter decided to head to the South as one winter camping without electricity in the North is fine, but a second a bit much.
We passed through this charming town in The Deep South, great Natural beauty, the people seemed nice, so I did my thing, which is construction, for a year and then headed on – but came back a couple months later as I realized that town was about as good a place as I have seen, and bought a fantastic bit of land, so much nature it is like a nature reserve, and began building my houses, and just stayed, and a few years ago I realised I just do not care to travel anymore… As a life long drifter this amazed me – but I have enough, and I just can’t be bothered – my anual trip back to UK has been stopped by covid – 2 years now, and as I am personally anti-vax, may never be able to return to my old UK – which is sad, but not that much, UK is not what it was when I left it decades ago…
As someone who lived camping as my thing – I just am not called to it anymore, I guess age. My family want me to take them on long, remote, road trips, but I seem to just be content …. The article made me nostalgic though.
Camping does put one at a local level, ( 99% of my camping was not in campgrounds). It puts one in nature unlike day visitors, it is a really good thing, I am glad I got to see the world that way – I regret wasting my life that way though – but at least I got to see a lot of stuff.
I cannot bear camping and I live in a sunny country.
Camping? Yuck.
Indeed, my last (hopefully forever) camping trip put me off it for life. Folding myself into a too-small tent for many hours during a torrential rainstorm, a torture only interrupted by frequent dashes to the facilities because the on-site food vendor’s Thai curry gave me the worst food poisoning I have ever experienced. All that in a field in Lincolnshire, surrounded by New Age types who couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to join in with their pagan sun ceremonies or learn how to make wind chimes from shells.
By the last day I was so exhausted I gave my tent to my neighbor on the condition they took it down for me, and I promised myself I would never be so foolish as to go camping again.
My husband calls camping “natures way of promoting hotels”. I hated it as a kid and consequently my kids have never experienced it.
There is nothing attractive about camping. Why anyone would voluntarily embrace the misery of it I have no idea.
Agreed! The first and last time I went camping was with the Girl Scouts when I was ten. Sleeping in tents, having to use shared public bathrooms. Even the happy campfire memories couldn’t eclipse how much I hated it all. Never again.
I have done camping. Everything about it was horrible. The cold, the discomfort, the lack of a flush toilet! Madness.
Great timely article.
ON the continent, campers often stay for many weeks and take wide screen TV’s and full size fridge-freezers, but I do agree there is something special lying in the tent feeling tentatively apprehensive as the wind and rain batter the canvas.
I guess many being former Scouts/Guides will want to relive those nostalgic memories as adults too.
In Canada ‘car camping’ as it is called is very popular – although many people now bring huge recreational vehicles to the parks. One of the attractions is that by some consensus we all let our kids go feral. The kids love the freedom and roam all over the place while the parents stay slightly drunk all day at the camp. The other real attraction is that cell phone coverage is often non-existent or spotty so you can tell your boss that you will be out of reach for the trip.
Spot-on. The added attraction for kids is the campfire, sticks, knives and all manner of other ways to introduce a bit of well needed risk into their lives..and not having to wash much is somehow always popular.
Hello Ed, very interesting meditation on camping. This makes me want to… go camping. I may try it when the weather becomes drier (but before the summer heat starts in December).
Nice observation that we have too few second homes not too many. Very Ed West for originality and insight.
Every one should have a second home
Great article. Very funny and right on the button. Camping fine for kids but I have spent enough desperately uncomfortable nights under canvas for it to have any fond memories. Worst experience was a force 9 gale on Lundy Island…Glad the previous, very cheesy, photo has been replaced.
I miss the replaced byline however. I found its characterization of the camping world as a classless utopia, and that as attractive, was spot-on. Our human existence is impoverished by everything that divides us, richer when our human communion is broadened (even when our communion consists in shared misery!). And though class predates the industrial revolution, technological existence only further divides us; see Neil Postman’s “Technopoly” on how there are always winners and losers in the wake of every technological “advancement.” (And this is to say nothing of the divides it creates between individuals within the same strata.) Therefore any sort of return to nature—including human nature, we might say—as hapless as it may be, answers a longing, becomes something of a return to Brigadoon. A place where we all get along. Which is why the replaced pic that evoked the utopic “age of love” that was the 1960s was on the mark as well. (Flag away!)
“A change is as good as a rest” as they say! I came late to camping via being late to music festivals but I think the satisfaction comes from making a little home in nature for a few days, leaving everything but the essentials behind so you can see life and even basic chores with new eyes. Best done not too often or too long I find!! Being occupied doing basic stuff somewhere new can be a great pleasure I have found, speaking as someone who has travelled via yacht and RV for 18 months including the Bahamas and the USA East coast. Saw plenty of tents in the gorgeous USA State Parks there, many accompanied by kayaks, fishing gear or deer hunting rigs of course.
This was wonderful. Whimsical yet profound. Camping does indeed promise a return to something fundamental to human existence, a promise we will chase willy-nilly, as ill-equipped or craft-less as we may be (lean-to, anyone? roofs and walls really are an impressive bit of techne: https://youtu.be/_piHZ3CpRk8). The craze probably speaks to how diseased is modernity, the product of Enlightenment abstraction from so many things but our corporeity first and foremost. Urban life didn’t always forget/destroy nature. We have the universal mechanization of life to thank for that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some drying to hang on the line. Right after a quick visit to the composting outhouse.
I cannot speak for camping but I have been on pilgrimage and one had to expect fairly basic accommodation as part of the deal..
I love the idea of other people camping. Especially on campsites so I can work out how to avoid them.