Camping began as elite leisure before becoming everyone’s tent
Camping means overnight outdoor stays in tents, vehicles, cabins or other basic shelters. Early twentieth-century elites popularized it as recreation; later classes followed into national parks and campgrounds. Dictionaries stress sleeping outside for one or more nights, usually under canvas.
Shelter can be almost anything: an RV, a cabin, a bivy sack, a hammock, a tarp or nothing at all. What separates camping from a picnic or day hike is the night spent away from home. Even so, no single definition holds. The same campground may host holidaymakers, school groups, migrant workers and homeless people at once, while a summer camp with bunkhouses and a dining hall carries the name without much of the practice.
British recreational camping first caught on along the River Thames, where crowds took it up by the 1880s as part of the late-Victorian enthusiasm for pleasure boating. The travelling tailor Thomas Hiram Holding, who had crossed the American prairies as a young man, is often called the father of modern camping and promoted a different, cycle-based style in the early 1900s. Cunningham's camp near Douglas on the Isle of Man, opened in 1894, may have been the world's first commercial campground. The Association of Cycle Campers opened a site at Weybridge in 1906, merged into the National Camping Club in 1910, and gained Robert Baden-Powell as president in 1919.
In the United States, William Henry Harrison Murray's Camp-Life in the Adirondacks of 1869 sent a wave of visitors into those mountains that summer. Early in the 20th century the self-styled Vagabonds, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John Burroughs and Harvey Firestone, spent a decade on heavily reported road trips, camping at farms and buying food as they went. An international federation of camping clubs formed in 1932, and by the 1960s a camping holiday was a family standard.
Variations abound: canoe camping, car camping and ultralight backpacking; glamping, rooted in early-1900s African safaris; and workamping, where campers trade labour for site fees. Sweden and Scotland even allow camping on private land. A pocket survival kit might hold a small metal pot for boiling water, a strip of duct tape and an emergency space blanket.
Source: Camping
