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Planning for leisure
Planning for Leisure P. Turnbull, OBE, TD’ The County Hall, Exeter, Devon
The Recreation and Leisure industry has more facets of old problems than most, though in an increasingly complex world, others may make similar claims. The complexity is unavoidable, but the way we try to comprehend the pattern of the complexity and try to operate in our part of it becomes increasingly important. This article deals with the topic under five headings: l What are our Leisure Activities ? l Who provides for leisure ? l hTvetTobjectives should the industry l
What pressures must the industry face 7 l How should we seek to reconcile these ?
Firstly, what are our leisure UR
activities?
LEISURE ACTIVITIES ARE
EITHER MAINLY
active or passive : they are also enjoyed either collectively or in small groups. Active leisure covers taking part in sport, or gardening or educational pursuits. Passive leisure ranges from masterly inactivity to reading or enjoying concerts, the theatre or television. Leisure also varies between that taken in a crowd, e.g. at a football match or at a race meeting or on a much frequented beach in high summer, and that taken by individuals on their own or in a small group. Our wishes for leisure take their shape from our ever-shrinking world, our ever-increasing mobility and our ever-extending cities fire the imagination with happy but nebulous visions of either ‘getting away from it all’ or, alternatively, having the best place in the whole crowd. Perhaps this is sufficient to indicate the vast range of possible leisure activities. We all seek our own requirements within this vast range but the leisure and recreation industry seeks to earn its living by providing facilities for only part of it. 0
Secondly, who provides for leisure 7
One has to admit that the demand and fashion for different types of leisure activity are constantly ‘The author is County Planning Officer for Devon County Council.
OCTOBER,
1975
changing, either in the standard of provision that people seek or in the numbers of people wanting a particular type of leisure activity or both. The intending providers are thus always aiming at a moving target. The providers are those who deliberately or accidentally are responsible for managing the existing leisure facilities: some of these are private individuals, e.g.: the farmer, over whose land there are public footpaths or bridle ways; some are private companies providing accommodation or recreation facilities or both; others are official bodies, including local uathorities, and some of the private bodies obtain financial aid from public funds; other private bodies contribute through tax or levy to public funds. Each of these providers is, however, trying to ‘keep in business’ and adjust to ever-changing demands which they are able to detect and which they are willing and able to try to satisfy. lt$y,
what objectives should the industry
There are many worthy and indeed essential objectives that could be stated but perhaps we should say that it should seek to provide the opportunities, through the right use of leisure, to develop healthy minds and bodies with the resources available to our society in terms of money and land and people; that it should seek to do this without causing unacceptable damage to other aspects of our national and individual lives. Of course, such an omnibus objective is hard to apply to every individual project or question, but, it offers a guide line to our approach to dealing with the old problems referred to in the Seminar brochure. Fourthly, what pressures must the industry face? The main pressures affecting the industry seem to be four types : (a) Economic pressures; the industry is constantly seeking to adapt to changing fashion and demand at a cost it can afford. Here enterprise and judgment are the qualities required.
55
00 Pressure from individuals and user bodies to provide the facilities required for definite leisure activities ; such bodies can be the national associations for various types of sports or small local clubs. Government bodies such as the Sports Council and the Countryside Commission and the local planning authorities themselves also seek to exert a pressure on behalf of users.
(4 Pressure from non-user
bodies and individuals seeking to protect their interests; these can be the residents in an area or those who otherwise wish to continue their personal management of property or land, e.g. farmers or those managing nature reserves. This is frequently called ‘the environmental lobby’. It can often include other leisure interests who may be users for their type of leisure but are non-users for other types of leisure. Again the local planning authorities appear in this type. 63 Pressure from owners of land; where the industry requires to obtain land for its activities, the owners of such land can exert effective pressure, particularly as the public planning policies for the area may, necessarily but fortuitously, put owners into a new monopoly bargaining position.
Fifthly, how should we seek to reconcile these pressures ?
It is now time to turn to the question of the reconciliation of these widely varying interests and pressures and to try and suggest in what limited but important way local government, as planning authorities, can contribute to this. There are four main functions of the local planning authorities; these activities are concerned with the overall position as regards to people, employment, land and transportation but in consequence they affect the recreation and leisure industry. These are : (a) To attempt assessments of need (as opposed to demand) for the main requirements for land. (b) To be responsible for producing and publishing indicative plans for human settlement and land. These may often act as a general guide as to where new leisure facilities might be acceptable and where not in certain places. (c) To prepare their own programmes of public works, including land acquisition and which can include recreation and leisure facilities. (d) To operate their regulatory function to the control of development. Since April 1974, county councils in England and Wales are primarily concerned with the main or strategic issues and district councils are primarily concerned with the local environment.
56
It should be obvious that these four functions referred to above are complementary and interrelated: it is the task of both the local planning authorities in any one area to make them so. It is perhaps significant in this context to note that the Chairman of the English Tourist Board-Sir Mark Henig-speaking on the Board’s Fifth Annual Report to Parliament this year is quoted as saying: ‘Government now needs to give guidance on tourism policy and this should be concerned with quality, pattern and location rather than with absolute growth.’ Clearly, the functions of a county planning authorities are a small but important part of our changing leisure patterns. The principles on which these patterns should evolve have been described as the six S’s: Selection, Segregation, Saturation, Season, Scope and Salesmanship. These six principles have been discussed in more detail in a previous paper given as far back as 1962 from which I quote the following predictions then made under the heading ‘The Next Ten Years’. ‘Some guide to the future can be found in population statistics, which suggest that the largest of these islands will have to accommodate an increasing number of people, both home bred and imported. The numbers, mobility and penetration of the motor-car will be an increasing factor. The present division between people in the south taking holidays in the south and those who live in the north taking holidays in the north will largely disappear. Railways will cease to give access, almost like roads, to all parts of the country; they will be limited to more or less main line routes and become similar in this respect to motorways. The few major airports will get even larger and noisier and a number of small municipal airports may well follow the war-time airfields in returning to a large extent to agricultural use. In short, one of the biggest changes affecting the holiday industry in the next decade will be in matters of travel. ‘Another guide can be found in the trends in holiday accommodation. Hotels are the main type, but although many are being improved, few new ones are being built and they cater for the welllined purse. There may be a tendency for some smaller hotels or boarding houses to merge to obtain economics in management and operation. Conversions to holiday flatlets may well continue as part of the desire for the ‘Freedom Holiday’. The static holiday caravan may gradually give way to the chalet, which can provide better for a longer season and be designed for its purpose. Similarly, and for the same reason, the residential caravan may also be replaced by the mobile home. The increasing popularity of the mobile holiday in one, two or three or more roomed tents, with a car or a motor caravan, may lead to “harbours” being established near reasonable roads and just back from the coast or on the edge of the National Parks, where the most mobile holidaymaker can stay for a night or several days.
LONG
RANGE
PLANNING
‘Further changes are likely in the realm of ideas. The needs of the holidaymaker will be recognized as a socially desirable force. The holidaymaker will for this reason be “planned for”-and find, to his dismay, that he is a problem, like overspill. Competition with the Continent in the economic field will extend to the holiday industry and will help to increase regional or sub-regional action, firstly in advertising, then in improving facilities, from scenic routes to entertainment as part of a considered policy for a wide area. Along with this general change in outlook, will come a change in views on the need for individual restraint. We have been forced to accept an almost unyielding discipline in traffic matters if we enter Central London on wheels. It seems likely that this will extend also in the next decade to the use of land in National Parks and around the coast. ‘From these guides it is possible to visualize a future arrangement or pattern for holidays on these islands aimed at trying to satisfy a variety of needs and wishes. Indeed one already exists. The holidaymaker is quite different from the person with housing difficulties in a large city. For the holidaymaker there is no “will you move to a new house in a new or expanded town or stay where you are?’ He simply says “where shall we go ?” Fewer people go to an area just to explore and see what they can find and more will go there because they know that that area seeks to offer what they are interested in. Various regions or parts of the country will compete with each other and similar regions of the Continent in trying to get the type of visitor for which they can cater. There will, perhaps, be a standard type of literature advertising areas rather than towns for holidays, each area or region claiming to have an integrated and balanced programme of development and preservation, each offering the widest selection of types of holiday activity, i.e.: Salesmanship and Scope.
‘Motorways, car rail ferries and car air ferries will enable visitors easily to select the holiday region of their choice. Within each region it will be clear where the various types of holiday accommodation are available. It will be clear, where for example, landscape considerations receive special attention and, dare one hope, those interested in each type of area will be busily engaged in improving it rather than seeking to extend his particular interest into an adjacent one considered unsuitable for this purpose. Other parts of the country will be recognized as being areas not substantially affected by holiday activities, and in these areas the local inhabitants will reign supreme, i.e. : Segregation and Selection.
‘Popular resorts of the varying kinds will work out new methods, perhaps even using the techniques of automation, to try to keep the numbers of their visitors up to the optimum enjoyable capacity and not beyond the maximum enjoyable capacity. Means will perhaps be devised of assembling the necessary information about this which
OCTOBER,
1975
the visitor will want to know. Holiday visitors, for their part, will increasingly seek to make use of all the new sources of information to go to the places that they wish, to find out when they can get there and be there in most comfort, i.e.: Saturation and Season.’
CONCLUSION
It might be thought that quite a few of the changes anticipated then have, in fact, come about in the last decade. This leaves us with the question of what further changes we can expect in the decade to come ? Perhaps the greater expense of travel will begin to reduce the mobility of the leisure seeker. Perhaps there will be an increase in those wishing to enjoy active leisure as the television increasingly brings every major event into the home, only some 2 per cent of the population at present take part regularly in active sport; perhaps our new leisure facilities and accommodation will be forced to become less labour intensive; perhaps the cost of providing new leisure activities and the difficulties of obtaining suitable land may lead to the concentration and grouping of facilities. This may make it very hard for small clubs to start and may reduce competition in a local sense. This would be regrettable, as local competition is a feature relating sport to its local communities, whereas centralized sport concentrates properly on the pursuit of sportsmanship, skill and excellence but only by those who can reach the facilities. These further possible changes are fairly likely. It is more questionable whether society will, of itself, have sufficient will to adhere to the identifiable long-term policies as now required of the county planning authorities. This is because we have perhaps learnt to communicate with so many more people on so many more subjects that this ability is rapidly outstripping our ability fully to understand. We read and hear so many adverse comments that the voice of opposition exceeds the voice of explanation. We are led to thinking that views so readily offered by persons without the related information nor tempered by responsibility are of as much worth as those, so aided and disciplined which are harder to obtain. We live in an age of the interview’s slanted question. No wonder our understanding of what we need to know and what we are collectively trying to do is difficult. Perhaps in teaching people to question and join in everything, we have produced an attitude that is selfcentred and divisive. Perhaps we should each seek to contribute to society within our own sphere and aim to understand rather than to obstruct others in theirs. In short, one can anticipate more easily the changing leisure patterns in the years ahead than one can anticipate our ability as a people to start to bring about these changes much better than we did before. However, experience suggests that some performers will always display skill and judgment to a greater degree than others. n
57
The Recreation and Leisure industry has more facets of old problems than most, though in an increasingly complex world, others may make similar claims. The complexity is unavoidable, but the way we try to comprehend the pattern of the complexity and try to operate in our part of it becomes increasingly important. This article deals with the topic under five headings: l What are our Leisure Activities ? l Who provides for leisure ? l hTvetTobjectives should the industry l
What pressures must the industry face 7 l How should we seek to reconcile these ?
Firstly, what are our leisure UR
activities?
LEISURE ACTIVITIES ARE
EITHER MAINLY
active or passive : they are also enjoyed either collectively or in small groups. Active leisure covers taking part in sport, or gardening or educational pursuits. Passive leisure ranges from masterly inactivity to reading or enjoying concerts, the theatre or television. Leisure also varies between that taken in a crowd, e.g. at a football match or at a race meeting or on a much frequented beach in high summer, and that taken by individuals on their own or in a small group. Our wishes for leisure take their shape from our ever-shrinking world, our ever-increasing mobility and our ever-extending cities fire the imagination with happy but nebulous visions of either ‘getting away from it all’ or, alternatively, having the best place in the whole crowd. Perhaps this is sufficient to indicate the vast range of possible leisure activities. We all seek our own requirements within this vast range but the leisure and recreation industry seeks to earn its living by providing facilities for only part of it. 0
Secondly, who provides for leisure 7
One has to admit that the demand and fashion for different types of leisure activity are constantly ‘The author is County Planning Officer for Devon County Council.
OCTOBER,
1975
changing, either in the standard of provision that people seek or in the numbers of people wanting a particular type of leisure activity or both. The intending providers are thus always aiming at a moving target. The providers are those who deliberately or accidentally are responsible for managing the existing leisure facilities: some of these are private individuals, e.g.: the farmer, over whose land there are public footpaths or bridle ways; some are private companies providing accommodation or recreation facilities or both; others are official bodies, including local uathorities, and some of the private bodies obtain financial aid from public funds; other private bodies contribute through tax or levy to public funds. Each of these providers is, however, trying to ‘keep in business’ and adjust to ever-changing demands which they are able to detect and which they are willing and able to try to satisfy. lt$y,
what objectives should the industry
There are many worthy and indeed essential objectives that could be stated but perhaps we should say that it should seek to provide the opportunities, through the right use of leisure, to develop healthy minds and bodies with the resources available to our society in terms of money and land and people; that it should seek to do this without causing unacceptable damage to other aspects of our national and individual lives. Of course, such an omnibus objective is hard to apply to every individual project or question, but, it offers a guide line to our approach to dealing with the old problems referred to in the Seminar brochure. Fourthly, what pressures must the industry face? The main pressures affecting the industry seem to be four types : (a) Economic pressures; the industry is constantly seeking to adapt to changing fashion and demand at a cost it can afford. Here enterprise and judgment are the qualities required.
55
00 Pressure from individuals and user bodies to provide the facilities required for definite leisure activities ; such bodies can be the national associations for various types of sports or small local clubs. Government bodies such as the Sports Council and the Countryside Commission and the local planning authorities themselves also seek to exert a pressure on behalf of users.
(4 Pressure from non-user
bodies and individuals seeking to protect their interests; these can be the residents in an area or those who otherwise wish to continue their personal management of property or land, e.g. farmers or those managing nature reserves. This is frequently called ‘the environmental lobby’. It can often include other leisure interests who may be users for their type of leisure but are non-users for other types of leisure. Again the local planning authorities appear in this type. 63 Pressure from owners of land; where the industry requires to obtain land for its activities, the owners of such land can exert effective pressure, particularly as the public planning policies for the area may, necessarily but fortuitously, put owners into a new monopoly bargaining position.
Fifthly, how should we seek to reconcile these pressures ?
It is now time to turn to the question of the reconciliation of these widely varying interests and pressures and to try and suggest in what limited but important way local government, as planning authorities, can contribute to this. There are four main functions of the local planning authorities; these activities are concerned with the overall position as regards to people, employment, land and transportation but in consequence they affect the recreation and leisure industry. These are : (a) To attempt assessments of need (as opposed to demand) for the main requirements for land. (b) To be responsible for producing and publishing indicative plans for human settlement and land. These may often act as a general guide as to where new leisure facilities might be acceptable and where not in certain places. (c) To prepare their own programmes of public works, including land acquisition and which can include recreation and leisure facilities. (d) To operate their regulatory function to the control of development. Since April 1974, county councils in England and Wales are primarily concerned with the main or strategic issues and district councils are primarily concerned with the local environment.
56
It should be obvious that these four functions referred to above are complementary and interrelated: it is the task of both the local planning authorities in any one area to make them so. It is perhaps significant in this context to note that the Chairman of the English Tourist Board-Sir Mark Henig-speaking on the Board’s Fifth Annual Report to Parliament this year is quoted as saying: ‘Government now needs to give guidance on tourism policy and this should be concerned with quality, pattern and location rather than with absolute growth.’ Clearly, the functions of a county planning authorities are a small but important part of our changing leisure patterns. The principles on which these patterns should evolve have been described as the six S’s: Selection, Segregation, Saturation, Season, Scope and Salesmanship. These six principles have been discussed in more detail in a previous paper given as far back as 1962 from which I quote the following predictions then made under the heading ‘The Next Ten Years’. ‘Some guide to the future can be found in population statistics, which suggest that the largest of these islands will have to accommodate an increasing number of people, both home bred and imported. The numbers, mobility and penetration of the motor-car will be an increasing factor. The present division between people in the south taking holidays in the south and those who live in the north taking holidays in the north will largely disappear. Railways will cease to give access, almost like roads, to all parts of the country; they will be limited to more or less main line routes and become similar in this respect to motorways. The few major airports will get even larger and noisier and a number of small municipal airports may well follow the war-time airfields in returning to a large extent to agricultural use. In short, one of the biggest changes affecting the holiday industry in the next decade will be in matters of travel. ‘Another guide can be found in the trends in holiday accommodation. Hotels are the main type, but although many are being improved, few new ones are being built and they cater for the welllined purse. There may be a tendency for some smaller hotels or boarding houses to merge to obtain economics in management and operation. Conversions to holiday flatlets may well continue as part of the desire for the ‘Freedom Holiday’. The static holiday caravan may gradually give way to the chalet, which can provide better for a longer season and be designed for its purpose. Similarly, and for the same reason, the residential caravan may also be replaced by the mobile home. The increasing popularity of the mobile holiday in one, two or three or more roomed tents, with a car or a motor caravan, may lead to “harbours” being established near reasonable roads and just back from the coast or on the edge of the National Parks, where the most mobile holidaymaker can stay for a night or several days.
LONG
RANGE
PLANNING
‘Further changes are likely in the realm of ideas. The needs of the holidaymaker will be recognized as a socially desirable force. The holidaymaker will for this reason be “planned for”-and find, to his dismay, that he is a problem, like overspill. Competition with the Continent in the economic field will extend to the holiday industry and will help to increase regional or sub-regional action, firstly in advertising, then in improving facilities, from scenic routes to entertainment as part of a considered policy for a wide area. Along with this general change in outlook, will come a change in views on the need for individual restraint. We have been forced to accept an almost unyielding discipline in traffic matters if we enter Central London on wheels. It seems likely that this will extend also in the next decade to the use of land in National Parks and around the coast. ‘From these guides it is possible to visualize a future arrangement or pattern for holidays on these islands aimed at trying to satisfy a variety of needs and wishes. Indeed one already exists. The holidaymaker is quite different from the person with housing difficulties in a large city. For the holidaymaker there is no “will you move to a new house in a new or expanded town or stay where you are?’ He simply says “where shall we go ?” Fewer people go to an area just to explore and see what they can find and more will go there because they know that that area seeks to offer what they are interested in. Various regions or parts of the country will compete with each other and similar regions of the Continent in trying to get the type of visitor for which they can cater. There will, perhaps, be a standard type of literature advertising areas rather than towns for holidays, each area or region claiming to have an integrated and balanced programme of development and preservation, each offering the widest selection of types of holiday activity, i.e.: Salesmanship and Scope.
‘Motorways, car rail ferries and car air ferries will enable visitors easily to select the holiday region of their choice. Within each region it will be clear where the various types of holiday accommodation are available. It will be clear, where for example, landscape considerations receive special attention and, dare one hope, those interested in each type of area will be busily engaged in improving it rather than seeking to extend his particular interest into an adjacent one considered unsuitable for this purpose. Other parts of the country will be recognized as being areas not substantially affected by holiday activities, and in these areas the local inhabitants will reign supreme, i.e. : Segregation and Selection.
‘Popular resorts of the varying kinds will work out new methods, perhaps even using the techniques of automation, to try to keep the numbers of their visitors up to the optimum enjoyable capacity and not beyond the maximum enjoyable capacity. Means will perhaps be devised of assembling the necessary information about this which
OCTOBER,
1975
the visitor will want to know. Holiday visitors, for their part, will increasingly seek to make use of all the new sources of information to go to the places that they wish, to find out when they can get there and be there in most comfort, i.e.: Saturation and Season.’
CONCLUSION
It might be thought that quite a few of the changes anticipated then have, in fact, come about in the last decade. This leaves us with the question of what further changes we can expect in the decade to come ? Perhaps the greater expense of travel will begin to reduce the mobility of the leisure seeker. Perhaps there will be an increase in those wishing to enjoy active leisure as the television increasingly brings every major event into the home, only some 2 per cent of the population at present take part regularly in active sport; perhaps our new leisure facilities and accommodation will be forced to become less labour intensive; perhaps the cost of providing new leisure activities and the difficulties of obtaining suitable land may lead to the concentration and grouping of facilities. This may make it very hard for small clubs to start and may reduce competition in a local sense. This would be regrettable, as local competition is a feature relating sport to its local communities, whereas centralized sport concentrates properly on the pursuit of sportsmanship, skill and excellence but only by those who can reach the facilities. These further possible changes are fairly likely. It is more questionable whether society will, of itself, have sufficient will to adhere to the identifiable long-term policies as now required of the county planning authorities. This is because we have perhaps learnt to communicate with so many more people on so many more subjects that this ability is rapidly outstripping our ability fully to understand. We read and hear so many adverse comments that the voice of opposition exceeds the voice of explanation. We are led to thinking that views so readily offered by persons without the related information nor tempered by responsibility are of as much worth as those, so aided and disciplined which are harder to obtain. We live in an age of the interview’s slanted question. No wonder our understanding of what we need to know and what we are collectively trying to do is difficult. Perhaps in teaching people to question and join in everything, we have produced an attitude that is selfcentred and divisive. Perhaps we should each seek to contribute to society within our own sphere and aim to understand rather than to obstruct others in theirs. In short, one can anticipate more easily the changing leisure patterns in the years ahead than one can anticipate our ability as a people to start to bring about these changes much better than we did before. However, experience suggests that some performers will always display skill and judgment to a greater degree than others. n
57