Barry Island was a

Butlin's Butlin's is a chain of large Seaside resort, seaside resorts in the United Kingdom, incorporated as Butlins Skyline Limited. Butlin's was founded by Billy Butlin to provide affordable holidays for ordinary British families. Between 1936 and 1 ...

(and later a ''Majestic Holidays'')

holiday camp A holiday camp is a type of holiday accommodation, primarily in the United Kingdom, that encourages holidaymakers to stay within the site boundary, and provides entertainment and facilities for them throughout the day. Since the 1970s, the term ...

located on

Barry Island Barry Island () is a district, peninsula and seaside resort, forming part of the town of Barry in the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales. It is named after the 6th century Saint Baruc. Barry's stretch of coast, on the Bristol Channel, has the wor ...

Wales Wales ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic ...

. It opened in 1966 and closed in 1996.

History

() is a small seaside resort in the

Bristol Channel The Bristol Channel (, literal translation: "Severn Sea") is a major inlet in the island of Great Britain, separating South Wales (from Pembrokeshire to the Vale of Glamorgan) and South West England (from Devon to North Somerset). It extends ...

() about 9 miles (14 km) south by south west of Cardiff, (), south

. Until 1896, when a rail link was completed from the mainland, the only access to Barry Island was either by foot across the sand and mud at low tide, or, when the tide was in, by Yellow Funnel Line

paddle steamer A paddle steamer is a steamship or steamboat powered by a steam engine driving paddle wheels to propel the craft through the water. In antiquity, paddle wheelers followed the development of poles, oars and sails, whereby the first uses were wh ...

. Over 150,000 visitors were recorded arriving one

August Bank Holiday The August Bank Holiday or Summer Bank Holiday is a public holiday in the United Kingdom, part of the statutory bank holiday provision. Originally, the holiday was held on the first Monday of August across the country, but was changed in the lat ...

weekend, mostly by train. Further tourist attractions were developed on the island, and by 1934, the number of visitors to the fairground during the August Bank Holiday week was over 400,000.

Butlins

Billy Butlin Sir William Heygate Edmund Colborne Butlin (29 September 189912 June 1980) was an entrepreneur whose name is synonymous with the British holiday camp.''#refRiverside, American Heritage Dictionary 2004'', p. 135.#refScott2001, Scott 2001, p. 5. ...

's inspiration for his holiday empire came from a less than happy holiday to Barry Island in his youth, when he'd been locked out of his B&B all day by his landlady. He finally decided to build one of the Butlins Holiday Camps at Barry Island. What was to become the last-built and smallest of the Butlins Holiday Camps came to Barry Island in 1965. Billy Butlin took out a 99-year lease on the headland at Nell's Point in 1966. Building work began there in the winter and the gates opened to campers on 18 June 1966. Barry Island holiday camp contained all the tried and tested Butlins ingredients: the famous

Butlins Redcoats ''Redcoat'' is the name given to frontline staff at Butlin's holiday camps in the UK. A Redcoat has duties ranging from adult entertainer or children's entertainer to crowd control, stewarding. History The first Redcoat was Norman Bradford. W ...

, funfair, early morning wake up with Radio Butlin, dining hall, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, ballroom; boating lake, tennis courts, sports field (for the three legged and egg and spoon races and the donkey derby),

table tennis Table tennis (also known as ping-pong) is a racket sport derived from tennis but distinguished by its playing surface being atop a stationary table, rather than the Tennis court, court on which players stand. Either individually or in teams of ...

and

snooker Snooker (pronounced , ) is a cue sport played on a rectangular Billiard table#Snooker and English billiards tables, billiards table covered with a green cloth called baize, with six Billiard table#Pockets 2, pockets: one at each corner and ...

tables,

amusement arcade An amusement arcade, also known as a video arcade, amusements, arcade, or penny arcade (an older term), is a venue where people play arcade games, including arcade video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, mercha ...

, medical centre, theatre, arcades of shops and the Pig and Whistle Showbar. A

chairlift An elevated passenger ropeway, or chairlift, is a type of aerial lift, which consists of a continuously circulating steel wire rope loop strung between two end terminals and usually over intermediate towers. They are the primary on-hill tran ...

system was opened in 1967. There were 800 basic, 'no-frills' chalets, designed to modern 1960s standards, which, on the outside, meant wooden panels and

flat roof A flat roof is a roof which is almost level in contrast to the many types of List of roof shapes, sloped roofs. The slope of a roof is properly known as its Roof pitch, pitch and flat roofs have up to approximately 10°. Flat roofs are an anci ...

s. The camp continued to be enormously successful throughout until the 1980s, but on 29 October 1986, Butlins announced that it would have no place in the company's future and would close after Christmas, and it did so on 31 December 1986.

Majestic Holidays

The camp was sold to Majestic Holidays and re-opened on 23 May 1987 as ''Majestic Barry Island'' (later renamed ''The Barry Island Resort''). Majestic Holidays' plans to demolish the camp and rebuild the site did not reach fruition though the camp was given a complete refurbishment, including refurbishing swimming pools. Majestic Holidays continued to use the Redcoats until 1989 but they became the Bluecoats in 1991, following Butlins threat of legal action over the name. Maintenance had now become such an issue, especially with the chalet's flat roofs and wooden panelling, that a clause was added to the booking conditions limiting refunds to 20% of the cost of the holiday. Following numerous complaints over the camp, the BBC show ''

That's Life! ''That's Life!'' was a satirical consumer affairs programme on the BBC, at its height regularly reaching audiences of fifteen to twenty million, and receiving between 10,000 and 15,000 letters a week. The series was broadcast on BBC1 for 21 yea ...

'' investigated. The report aired in January 1989 and the report said "It's Barry Awful, It's Barry Hell" and the presenter at the end said "If you're off to Barry Island this summer, send us a postcard." They did! By the end of the summer of 1989, That's Life had received 8,000 postcards in praise of the camp, with only about 40 complaints. Majestic Holidays' owner, Rick Wright, sued and Majestic received £500,000 damages. By 1996, with storm damage causing more maintenance problems,

Vale of Glamorgan Council The Vale of Glamorgan Council is the governing body for the Vale of Glamorgan, one of the Subdivisions of Wales, Principal Areas of Wales. History The new Vale of Glamorgan Council unitary authority came into effect on 1 April 1996, following th ...

threatened to refuse renewal of Barry Island Resort's entertainments licence, unless work was carried out to improve the now 30-year-old site. Majestic's now trading company, Insurebowls Ltd, continued through the summer, but closed the camp for good on 7 November 1996, although they had originally intended to reopen the following year.

Closure

The holiday camp site was sold for £2.25m to

, in October 1997, who demolished the camp and sold it to

Bovis Homes Vistry Group, formerly Bovis Homes Group, is a British home construction company based in Kings Hill, England. Bovis Homes completed a deal to acquire Galliford Try's housing arm in January 2020, renaming the combined business Vistry. It is lis ...

for housing development. Now known as Bryn Llongwr, houses were built on the site between 2002 and 2003, with the remaining two original camp buildings and outdoor pool being demolished in early 2005. On 27 September 2014, the Mayor of The Vale of Glamorgan, Councillor Howard Hamilton, unveiled a

blue plaque A blue plaque is a permanent sign installed in a public place in the United Kingdom, and certain other countries and territories, to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person, event, or former building on the site, serving a ...

in the new 'Seafront Garden', part of a £3,000,000 refurbishment of the coastline round Nells Point. The plaque, designed by former AEM, Steuart Kingsley-Inness and paid for by him and former Barry Redcoats, was dedicated to the late Entertainments Manager, John Wilson, it commemorates the Butlins Holiday Camp and its operator, showman and philanthropist Sir William 'Billy' Butlin. Sir Billy's widow, Sheila, Lady Butlin, sent a letter expressing her delight at this tribute to her husband and "one of his favourite camps."

Film and television appearances

Between Butlins' closure and Majestic's reopening the camp was used for filming scenes in the "Shangri-La" holiday camp from the ''

Doctor Who ''Doctor Who'' is a British science fiction television series broadcast by the BBC since 1963. The series, created by Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber and Donald Wilson (writer and producer), Donald Wilson, depicts the adventures of an extraterre ...

'' serial '' Delta and the Bannermen''. Filming took place between 24 June – 8 July 1987

References

External links

Barry Island
at Butlins Memories

at Butlins Memorabilia {{DEFAULTSORT:Barry Island (Holiday Camp)

Economy of the Vale of Glamorgan Barry, Vale of Glamorgan