Travel

_{A box tunnel on the newly opened Great Western Railway. © Getty Images}

Three days after the first national census in June 1841, as he walked from Market Harborough to Leicester, Thomas Cook came up with his big idea that changed the way people travelled for leisure for the next century and a half.

One month later, 500 people travelled the 12 miles from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance meeting, riding in open carriages on a specially chartered train. From this, Cook’s regular excursion trips were born.

In the same month, the Great Western Railway was opened between London and Bristol, cutting the journey from six hours by road to two hours by train. Exactly one year later, Queen Victoria made her first trip by train, from Slough to Paddington.

As he walked, Cook may have dodged a passing horse-drawn stagecoach, a long-distance service running regularly from inns around the country. Relatively expensive, stagecoaches were used largely for business or other essential travel on the much improved turnpike road network.

The poor, travelling to look for work in the rapidly growing industrial cities, walked or hitched lifts on farmers’ carts. City dwellers complained of streets congested by horse-drawn omnibuses, hackney carriages and hansom cabs.
River or coastal steamboat trips provided a popular means of escape from fetid cities, but it was rail that was destined to make long-distance and leisure travel widely available.

The wealthy, for now, generally clung to the privacy of their coach-and-four but ventured onto railways occasionally. One lady, sharing a half-open carriage from Yorkshire to Liverpool with ‘chiefly navvies’, found the experience ‘a new insight into life … a wholesome dose of democracy!’