Читать книгу Great Book of Spoon Carving Patterns - Joseph Fullman - Страница 19

The early- to mid-19th century would prove the region’s industrial zenith. By the 1830s Cornwall alone had more than 200 mines employing in excess of 30,000 people. In the decades that followed, the West Country would become a sort of giant workshop for one of the greatest figures of the industrial age, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, many of whose projects – including the railway between London and Bristol, the Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar between Devon and Cornwall and the transatlantic passenger steamers, the Great Western and SS Great Britain – connected the Southwest with the wider world as never before.

Brunel’s railways brought new visitors to the region, helping to expand a recent industry, tourism. The region’s tourism began in a small, upper-class fashion during the Napoleonic Wars when members of aristocratic society, denied access to their usual foreign holiday resorts, adopted many towns in the Southwest, including Torquay, Exmouth, Sidmouth and Lynton, as domestic replacements. The expansion of the train network from the 1840s onwards opened up the rest of peninsula, which until then had been little visited owing to the poor quality of roads. Soon the middle classes had joined the aristocratic vanguard, and by the late 19th century the Southwest was enjoying a tourism boom which saw many formerly down-at-heel fishing towns transformed into seaside resorts. In places like Torquay and Dawlish, seafronts once lined with modest cottages now boasted grand stuccoed hotels, boarding houses and piers. The Victorians became fixated with the idea of the health-giving benefits of a seaside holiday, and the range of ailments that could supposedly be cured by a spot of saltwater bathing and a few lungfuls of bracing sea air. As rail travel became ever more widely available, so the working classes also joined in the fun, although they tended to regard their holidays less as health cures as breaks from the monotony of their industrialized existences, giving them the chance to spend a few days cutting loose in pubs, music halls and amusement arcades before returning to the daily grind.

The region’s economic and industrial peak would, perhaps inevitably, be followed by a long and deep decline. The bottom fell out of the metal mining industry abruptly in the mid 19th century when cheaper sources of copper and tin were discovered abroad, leading to the closure of many mines and the departure of many former miners to America and Australia. Today, there are no mines left. However, as one industry was dying, so another came to life, following the discovery of kaolin, or china clay, near St Austell, which was soon being exploited for use in the ceramics and paper-making industries. Today it is the only major manufacturing industry still operating in the region. However, this success aside, it was clear that, as 19th century gave way to 20th, the industrial rot had set in. Those tourists, originally a welcome source of a little additional money, were going to become an increasingly important (if not vital) part of the region’s economy.