Dancing on the Central Pier, Blackpool c.1906. ‘We have been dancing’, wrote Edith in 1907 to her friend Maggie in Nottingham. ‘We are enjoying ourselves very much.’ Dancing on the pier was just one of many entertainments offered outdoors during the Edwardian summer – and it gave people the opportunity to enjoy themselves without paying to enter the town’s major ballrooms. The sheer number of people enjoying themselves on the decking attests to the strength of the Central Pier, already fifty years old when this card was posted.
‘Dancing – the Bottom Quadrille’ was one of a number of stereos to take a lighthearted look at dancing. Both the stereo cards on these pages date from the late 1850s. Several publishers produced series like this.
‘Dancing on Spaniard’s Road, Hampstead Heath’, from a photograph taken c.1907. This sort of outdoor dancing was impromptu, and not necessarily always accompanied by music.
During the Victorian and Edwardian years, formal dancing went from being an activity generally limited to private parties – and parties in affluent circles at that – to being a public entertainment that could be enjoyed in dance halls and ballrooms. The 1890s saw the working classes embrace dancing as a pastime, and, of course, as a way of making close contact with the opposite sex! To cater for demand, several late-Victorian music halls were built with flat floors to enable them to be used for dancing. Visiting public dance halls was, despite their popularity, initially considered a rather risqué activity because of their lack of supervision!
Development of dance halls was rapid. Blackpool’s original Tower Pavilion dance hall opened in 1894 at the front of the tower complex, and the much larger Empress Ballroom opened as part of the Winter Gardens in 1896. The bigger, more luxurious and more famous Tower Ballroom opened a year later in 1897. The 3,000-capacity Locarno (later known as The Palace) followed in 1899.
By the end of the Edwardian era, most large towns and cities, and just about every holiday resort, offered dancing as one of the many entertainments available, but not everywhere welcomed them. When part of Southport’s Winter Gardens was converted into a ballroom in 1897, the resort felt that this was taking the venue down-market!
‘The Soirée’ comes from a series of humorous cards produced by The London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company, which offered several different views of the pleasures of dancing. Each stereocard was tinted by hand so no two cards were ever exactly the same.