‘We hiked wearing plimsolls from Woolworths': What holidays in the Lakes looked like 70 years ago

Telegraph

01-05-2025

William Wordsworth is often considered the man who spilt the beans on the Lake District by drawing the world's attention to its natural beauty. But there's a pretty good case for suggesting a genial-looking, pipe-smoking Borough Treasurer did his bit, too. With his meticulously hand-written, hand-illustrated Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, Alfred Wainwright introduced thousands of people to the area's wild charm.
As he said in the introduction to the first of his guides – published exactly 70 years ago, in May 1955 – 'This book is one man's way of expressing his devotion to Lakeland's friendly hills… It is, in very truth, a love letter.'
And, goodness, how we have fallen in love. More than 18 million people visited the Lake District National Park in 2023. It's doubtful whether the reclusive, Blackburn-born Wainwright foresaw the impact of his books – he'd initially intended just to write for himself but, when friends enthused over the samples, he changed his mind.
'He was insistent about not using a publisher; he didn't want printers' type,' explains Chris Butterfield, Wainwright archivist and co-curator of the Wainwright 70th anniversary exhibition at Ambleside's Armitt Museum and Library. Instead, he took his painstakingly hand-written pages, maps and drawings to the Westmorland Gazette in Kendal (the town where he lived and worked) for printing.
Thirteen years in the making (the last of the seven books was published in 1966), the series – complete with diagrams, summit panoramas and incidental sketches – was truly a labour of love for Wainwright, a man who didn't drive and insisted on describing every route up 214 fells. 'You can almost hold the book and feel you're walking up the mountain,' says Butterfield.
But while the fells are still as high and the lakes still as deep, how has the area changed since Wainwright's day?
Most people travelled by bus and train
Discounting day-trippers on coach tours, a week or a fortnight's holiday was the convention in the Fifties and Sixties, according to Dr Christopher Donaldson, director of Lancashire University's Regional Heritage Centre. 'Typically, [visitors headed] to Bowness, Windermere, Ambleside and Keswick, places which had been established since the middle of the 19th century.' Accessibility by train was key; car ownership was relatively rare, certainly at the beginning of this period, and there were train stations at Windermere, Keswick, Coniston and Lakeside, Bassenthwaite Lake, Troutbeck and elsewhere.
Today, a two- or three-night break is the most common length of stay at hotels and B&Bs (for longer breaks, holidaymakers typically opt for self-catering), and, of those mentioned above, the only station still welcoming regular passenger trains is Windermere (but the frequency of services has been greatly reduced).
The rise of 'adventure marketing'
The big attraction, then as now, is 'the power of the landscape', observes Donaldson, 'uplifting and romantic; a continued appeal from Wordsworth's day'. Strolling around lakefronts, taking boat trips (both Ullswater Steamers and Windermere Lake Cruises have been running for almost 200 years) and visiting beauty spots such as Tarn Hows and Aira Force waterfall is no different today – just busier, swisher (Ullswater Steamers offers gin-tasting cruises) and with a forest of phones capturing every nuance.
Literary associations also drew in visitors then as they do now: Wordsworth's Dove Cottage opened in 1891, while Hill Top, Beatrix Potter's farmhouse home, attracted some 2,400 people over its short summer season when it opened in 1946. Today, it's a magnet for around 92,000 visitors a year.
One of the big differences of today's attractions, Donaldson believes, is 'the rise of adventure marketing', including mountain-biking trails, stand-up paddleboarding and adrenaline-boosters such as Honister Slate Mine's via ferrata (an iron path soon to be joined by a kilometre-long zip wire that took 15 years to receive planning approval).
'We had to write off to get nailed boots for walking'
Fell-walking was an attraction long before Wainwright's guides; Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lengthy walks, for example, fed their poetry. But Wainwright helped showcase fell-walks to the average visitor. 'We loved those books,' recalls Carol Donnelly, now in her 80s and living near Carlisle. 'There was so much extra information that we would have missed otherwise.'
As a teenage member of the Ramblers Association in Barrow in the Fifties, Donnelly travelled by coach on day-walking trips kitted out in corduroy walking breeches ('so comfortable and sensible compared with today's semi-showerproof trousers'), a Herdwick wool sweater ('a bit of a devil to knit but so warm and almost waterproof'), plus an anorak and rucksack. While lower paths were busy, she says, 'the higher you went you'd not see so many people. I don't think there is a quiet time to go up Helvellyn now.'
Around the same time, a teenage Hilary Moffat, now 91, went youth hostelling with friends from her home city of Liverpool, taking buses to get around to different fell-walks. In 1956 she joined the Fell & Rock Climbing Club (FRCC), the area's leading mountaineering club (founded in 1906). She wore nailed boots for walking ('we had to write off to a place in Scotland to get them') and plimsolls for climbing 'bought from Woolworths'.
Dedicated outdoor shops barely existed in the Lake District; George Fisher, which opened in Keswick in 1957, was a novelty (today, it's an institution). Now, you can't walk five minutes in Keswick without being assaulted by another Gore-Tex emporium.
Another FRCC member, Andrew Hall, a sharp 101-year-old, recalls travelling overnight by train from his London home to Seascale, on the Cumbrian coast, and walking with all his gear the 10 miles up Wasdale (still a favourite walkers' valley) to the FRCC hut at the head. 'It was a lot less crowded with cars. Virtually no cattle grids; the road was gated. Now it's a different world. [People are] probably ruining the very thing they want to go for.'
From cold baths to infinity pools
In the post-war decades, accommodation was mainly hotels, inns and a plethora of B&Bs. 'Everybody in the village did B&B in a spare room,' recalls Susan Dowie, whose parents bought The Royal Oak Hotel in Rosthwaite, Borrowdale, in 1970. The hotel's 12 rooms shared three bathrooms, although each room had its own basin with hot and cold water. This was an improvement from the Sixties, says Dowie, when 'jugs of hot water were put on the shelf at the top of the stairs each morning.'
Self-catering properties – which, arguably, make up a good proportion of today's accommodation – were an unknown concept. 'Now, in Borrowdale, when a place is sold it becomes a holiday cottage,' Dowie says.
Even smart hotels didn't offer en-suite rooms. In the Fifties and early Sixties, the 36 rooms at Low Wood Hotel – a former 18th-century coaching inn in a peerless position overlooking Lake Windermere – shared 10 bathrooms, although there were 'housemaids pantries' on each landing plus a billiard room, writing room and dance floor in the dining room.
It wasn't until 1984 that all rooms (around 140 by then) had private bathrooms. Today, it offers considerable bells and whistles, from in-room roll-top baths and an exclusive wing (similar to flying first class) to a spa with outdoor infinity pools and Ibiza-style DJ evenings.
Camping and caravanning were limited by car ownership, still a rarity in the Fifties, but had begun to grow by the end of the decade. Forward-thinking farmers, such as Jim Allen who farmed above Ullswater's eastern shores, spotted diversification opportunities. Jim, now 93, opened Park Foot Holiday Park in 1951, offering pitches in three fields and loos in a converted barn. 'There were no showers or electricity,' explains his daughter Barbara, who helps run the business now. 'People didn't expect a lot then, they were just glad to be out of the towns.'
Today, the site bristles with modernity: electrical and water hook-ups, waste disposal, showers, Wi-Fi, a shop, bar and restaurant, pony-trekking, a zip-wire in the playground, plus private jetty. Its static caravans, swish with en-suite bedrooms, are the size of apartments.
'It was hard to get a decent meal in Ambleside – now it has Michelin-starred restaurants'
Possibly the unlikeliest development (which no doubt would have bemused Wainwright) is the area's star-spangled culinary status. It now has 13 Michelin-star-rated restaurants to go with its gastropubs, smart country inns, funky bistros and cool cafés. With the notable exception of Sharrow Bay on Ullswater (opened in 1948), this is a largely 21st-century revolution – with deserved credit given to chef Simon Rogan and his flagship Cartmel restaurant, L'Enclume.
Even in the Seventies, food was primarily designed to be fuelling and/or quick to prepare to meet the demands of day-trippers. David Morton, whose parents ran the Kirkstone Pass Inn at the top of the pass between Ullswater and Windermere, recalls chicken in a basket, cheese or ham sandwiches and Club biscuits for the coachloads.
'My dad would bribe coach drivers with cigarettes to get them to stop,' he remembers. 'And it was hard to get a decent meal in Ambleside,' he adds. Today, the town has three Michelin-starred restaurants, and David, now 61, works as a barista in the town's funky Copper Pot café, run by his daughter and son-in-law.
Back at the Royal Oak Hotel, Dowie recalls no-choice meals with 'roasts every other night' and 'hefty puddings'. Its scones with rum butter and homemade jam 'were renowned', she says. Now (the venue changed hands in 2021), scones are still offered, but without the rum butter, and evening meals are rather more refined (think confit duck leg with dauphinoise potatoes and sea bream in lobster bisque).
Local dishes are still on menus too, but often gussied up. The Crown Inn at Pooley Bridge, a popular pub at the northern tip of Ullswater, offers Cumberland sausages with spring-onion mash and caramelised onion gravy. The local Herdwick lamb comes with salsify, wild garlic and hen-of-the-woods at The Wild Boar Inn, near Crook. It's also rare to find a dessert menu without sticky toffee pudding (allegedly invented at Ullswater's Sharrow Bay Hotel in the Seventies).
'I hate to say it, but there are just too many people'
Crowds, cars, parking, traffic jams, litter… the Lakes' current problems and irritations are not so different from those in Wainwright's early days. 'There is no doubt that Helvellyn is climbed more often than any other mountain in Lakeland,' the writer once noted, with 'thousands of pilgrims… attracted to its summit every year.' The 950m fell is still the area's most popular, and not always attempted wisely
Though car ownership was rarer, the narrow roads still became congested – a situation made worse by cars carelessly parked on verges. Drastic solutions were proposed and shelved, including a dual carriageway from Kendal to Ambleside, and a Keswick by-pass that would have effectively separated the town from its lake, Derwentwater. Today, the traffic jams continue – most notoriously between Windermere and Ambleside, where it can be quicker to go by boat.
Litter on felltops was already a concern in 1955, causing the National Park's volunteer wardens to place notices on the summits of Scafell Pike, Great Gable and Helvellyn asking people to take their rubbish home. Caravan parks – still a divisive issue – were not always welcomed either. Peter Hensman, president of Lake District Estates which owns holiday parks and attractions, recalls 'there were speeches in Parliament' when the business proposed Hill of Oaks caravan park on Windermere's shores in 1954. 'It would bring in lots of nasty tourists who didn't know how to behave, they said.' It went ahead and Windermere survived.
Other issues are newer. Flexible holiday periods and the rise of the mini-break mean locals don't experience any off-season. 'People in Grasmere say September is their busiest month,' says Donnelly. 'I hate to say it, but there are just too many people.' Mike, a volunteer at the Armitt Museum and a keen walker, has to get up early if he wants to be on the fells before the crowds.
Marion Thompson, who works at the National Park's Information Centre in Bowness, says queries used to be about getting around. 'Now they're about being entertained. For example, where to hire jet skis – which they can't, of course!' she snorts. 'Or they bring the whole family, grandparents to grandchildren, and want you to plan the holiday for them. Planning a holiday is supposed to be part of the fun.'
I finish my trip using Wainwright's guide to climb the 841m St Sunday Crag overlooking Ullswater. I meet very few people (the contrary weather, from sunshine to snow, may have contributed), which Wainwright would certainly have approved of. When asked in a television interview what the ideal number of people on the hills is, he paused, smiled and answered succinctly: 'One'.
Helen Pickles was a guest of Low Wood Bay and The Crown Inn. The Alfred Wainwright exhibition at The Armitt, Ambleside continues until December 20, 2025; see alfredwainwright.co.uk