Holiday Time in Britain.

In Britain, the holiday season is now at its height. With improved business conditions, and the re-opening of works and factories in the North and Midlands, workers everywhere are once again in a position to enjoy a well-earned summer vacation, and from all the popular seaside and country holiday haunts come reports of record crowds. The principal London and provincial passenger stations have presented the most animated pictures these summer days, and for many weeks the leading holiday expresses have been operated in duplicate and triplicate to dispose of the immense numbers of travellers making for vacation-land.

As a spur to the hesitating vocationalist, the Home railways have this season issued a wonderful range of attractive pictorial posters and alluring travel literature. The bulky holiday guides annually issued by the Home railways,

A holiday crowd at Liverpool Street Station, London.

each run to nearly a thousand pages, and these are backed up by innumerable smaller booklets, each having reference to some particular corner of holiday-land. The “Holidays by L.M. & S.” handbook issued by the biggest group railway runs to 974 pages, of which 144 are in photogravure. In the “Holiday Blue Book” of the L. & N.E. line there are contained 816 pages of useful data, including 6,000 hotel and boardinghouse announcements, and 192 pages printed in photogravure. These annual holiday guides are each priced at sixpence, and they easily rank as best sellers in the Home publishing world.

Continental tours are being widely patronised this season. The two British railways mainly concerned in this business are the Southern and the London and North Eastern. The Southern continental services are centred on the south coast ports stretching from Dover to Weymouth, page 10 page 11 while the L. & N.E. services are operated through the east coast ports from Harwich northwards. Eight express services a day are operated from London to Paris by the Southern, the service-deluxe being the “Golden Arrow Pullman” by the Dover-Calais short-sea route.