Somewhere in Blackpool, probably around 1908, an entire mill's worth of people arrived on the same train on the same Monday, booked into the same boarding houses, and spent a week eating the same fish suppers within earshot of each other. This wasn't a coincidence. It was infrastructure. Before budget airlines, before package holidays, before anyone had a credit card…

August 1938: Eleven million British workers are given the legal right to a paid holiday for the first time. Most take one week somewhere, and then have no idea what to do with it. There was no lack of imagination as to how to take a holiday. Rather, knowledge of how to take a holiday – when to go, what…

There's a quarry in the Mendip Hills in Somerset that has been blasting limestone out of the ground since the 1800s. Today, a good chunk of what it produces ends up as rail ballast – the angular grey stones packed under railway sleepers that keep the track from shifting. Some of it becomes aggregate for runway resurfacing. Some goes into…