First-class fun

Glamping may feel like a very 21st-century phenomenon but the idea of camping-made-easy has actually been around for more than 100 years.

During the 1890s, people started buying up old railway carriages to convert them into seaside holiday homes, and from 1933 the railway companies themselves began to exploit this trend. In that year, London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) launched its first camping coaches, a facility, it said, that could just as easily be dubbed “camping deluxe”.

British leisure habits witnessed real change in the 1930s as rising living standards allowed more people to take an annual holiday. Alongside this was a