I was working on this section of the book during the 2018 World Cup in Russia. I am no great fan of football but even I got caught up in the euphoric national mood (across England at least) as England progressed to the semi-finals. More than 26 million people – 40 per cent of the population – watched England’s defeat by Croatia on their living-room televisions; millions more watched in public venues such as pubs and parks. These impressive viewing figures set me thinking. Despite our apparent addiction to ‘consuming’ our entertainment privately, on small screens, at a time of our choosing, there is still an appetite for watching and doing things simultaneously and en masse, as we once did.

These chapters take us from the mid-nineteenth century, when mass tourism was taking off, to the era of multiplex cinemas; from brass bands to The Beatles live on stage. In this period the huge economic and social changes in society were reflected in the way that mass entertainment evolved and diversified. But whether you were a seaside promenader or a cinema-goer the activity was a communal one. We took our pleasures together, at the same time, and that undoubtedly helped to forge a sense of common identity that feels much more nebulous in the age of the iPad.

The other striking feature of this era of mass entertainment was the splendour of the surroundings. The pier, the seafront hotel, the theatre, the cinema – they were deliberately designed to evoke fantasy and escapism with architectural motifs from the Far East, ancient Egypt or classical Rome. The New Victoria Cinema in Bradford – industrial, no-nonsense Bradford – is a Moorish castle on the outside, a Renaissance palace within. Brighton’s West Pier was embellished with Oriental-style pavilions. The idea was that people taking a well-earned break from often drab working lives deserved to be distracted and transported, not just by the entertainment itself but by the venue that hosted it.

Exploring such places was an exercise in nostalgia for me and it was a particular thrill to explore the New Vic in Bradford as it brought back vivid memories of films I grew up on. My taste was pretty wide-ranging, from Bacall and Bogart (which I mention in the chapter on the cinema) to Bambi (his mother’s death was the most painful moment in my cinema-going life) and West Side Story, surely one of the greatest movies ever made.

In the golden age of Hollywood 3,000 Bradfordians packed into the New Vic’s sumptuous auditorium to wallow in such cinematic masterpieces. In the post-war years, when pop stars were becoming as famous as film stars, people flocked there in similar numbers to see rock ’n’ roll trailblazers from America such as Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent. But I was especially touched to hear stories of when The Beatles played the New Vic in the early 1960s.

I have made no secret of my interest in opera – Wagner’s Ring Cycle in particular – but people don’t have me down as a fan of the Fab Four. My friend and fellow political pundit, the former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson (an ex-politician with a particularly cool hinterland as a rock musician, incidentally), has written four books named after Beatles songs. The latest is In My Life and when he invited me to the book launch he said in the same breath that the title would probably not ring a bell with me. It was a rash assumption. To Alan’s astonishment I promptly reeled off the lyrics of that excellent song.

My – and Alan’s – generation grew up with The Beatles. We mark the milestones of our development with Beatles songs. I was gratified to meet people at the New Vic who had stories about The Beatles from the early sixties. Far from puncturing any illusions I may have had, these stories confirmed the Mop Tops as a great bunch of lads who did not build barriers between themselves and their adoring fans.

That truly was another age. The cult of celebrity has transformed popular culture. People watch films and listen to music in the privacy of their bedrooms and the old pleasure palaces have had their day. But, as I describe in the following chapters, there is a heartening postscript to these stories of change and decay: the Bradford cinema is being reborn; the Brighton pier has a vertical successor. To paraphrase The Beatles, we are getting back to where we once belonged.