Camping

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Camping begins with a single act: leaving behind developed areas to spend a night somewhere else. Not in a hotel, not in a borrowed bed, but in a tent, a hammock, under a tarp, or simply under the open sky. It is an activity old enough to have a named father, a British traveling tailor named Thomas Hiram Holding, and popular enough that around 113 million nights were spent at French campsites alone in a single year. What draws so many people, across so many countries and climates, to willingly sleep on the ground? The answer turns out to involve much more than a love of fresh air. It touches on class, on religion, on national identity, on survival, and on the surprisingly blurry question of what camping actually is.

• 2. Defining the Undefinable

  ›

  The Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary describes camping as the act of staying and sleeping in an outside area for one or more days and nights, usually in a tent. The Britannica Dictionary shortens that to sleeping outdoors in a tent, usually for enjoyment. Both definitions seem clear until you push on them. There is no universally held definition of what is and what is not camping, and the edges get complicated fast. A children's summer camp with bunkhouse accommodations and dining hall meals has the word "camp" in its name, but it does not reflect the spirit of camping as most people understand it. A homeless person sleeping outdoors and cooking over a fire shares many of the same physical acts as a camper, but lacks the elective quality, the pursuit of spirit rejuvenation, that sits at the heart of the activity. The same campground can serve recreational campers, school field trips, migrant workers, and the homeless simultaneously, which points to how much camping depends on intent rather than setting. What actually separates camping from a day trip or a picnic is spending the night away from home. That single criterion is the load-bearing distinction, and even then the spectrum runs from a survival camper setting off with almost nothing to a glamper arriving with the comforts of a hotel room.

• 3. The Father of Modern Camping

  ›

  Thomas Hiram Holding did not invent sleeping outdoors, but he did more than almost anyone to turn it into a pastime with a community behind it. His first encounter with the activity came when he was a child, traveling across the American prairies with his parents. Years later he organized a cycling and camping tour through Ireland with friends, and the book he wrote about it, Cycle and Camp in Connemara, led directly to the founding of the first camping organization in 1901: the Association of Cycle Campers, which would eventually become the Camping and Caravanning Club. Holding followed that with The Campers Handbook in 1908, an attempt to share his enthusiasm for the outdoors with a wider audience. The Association opened its first camping site in Weybridge in 1906, by which point it had several hundred members. By 1910 it had been absorbed into the National Camping Club. The First World War interrupted the momentum, but Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, took over as the association's president in 1919 and gave it new energy. Meanwhile, what may have been the world's first commercial campground had already opened decades earlier: Cunningham's camp, near Douglas on the Isle of Man, which welcomed its first visitors in 1894. Recreational camping on the River Thames had already been drawing large numbers by the 1880s, connected to the late Victorian enthusiasm for pleasure boating, which means the organized movement Holding helped build had popular roots well before his books appeared.

• 4. Camping Crosses the Atlantic

  ›

  William Henry Harrison Murray's 1869 publication Camp-Life in the Adirondacks is often cited as the moment American camping became a public phenomenon. The book sent a flood of visitors to the Adirondacks that same summer. Decades later, a group called the Vagabonds pushed camping further into American culture through sheer celebrity. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John Burroughs, and Harvey S. Firestone spent ten years traveling to different states, their trips heavily documented by the press from across the country. As one account of their journeys put it, these rough and tumble pioneers would drive toward the Adirondacks and essentially live off the land, camping at farms and buying food along the way just like ordinary Americans out for a holiday on the road. Their example helped make camping feel accessible rather than eccentric. The International Federation of Camping Clubs, known in French as the Federation Internationale de Camping et de Caravanning, was founded in 1932, and national clubs from many countries joined it. By the 1960s, camping had become an established family holiday standard across Europe and North America, and campsites spread widely to accommodate the demand.

• 5. Who Camps, and Where

  ›

  Camping's popularity is not evenly distributed, and the numbers from individual countries reveal the scale of the activity. In 2015, British residents took almost 4.5 million camping and caravanning holidays in the first half of the year alone, averaging 3.7 nights per trip. That represented an 8% increase over the same period in 2014. In France that same year, around 113 million nights were spent at campsites; French holidaymakers accounted for 77 million of those, with Dutch, German, and British tourists making up much of the remainder. The Languedoc and Roussillon region was the most popular destination, drawing around 19,331,663 nights at campsites, while the Vendee had the highest number of campsites. Australia saw a record 13.9 million caravan and camping journeys in the year ending in 2019, before COVID-19 disrupted travel. After restrictions lifted, spending on camping trips surged to an unprecedented 10.5 billion dollars by June 2022. In Canada, before the 1910s, camping in national parks was reserved for men only. The first campground established in a Canadian national park opened at Lake Louise in 1964. A study by Camping Quebec in 2016 found that 20% of the province's population, roughly 1.6 million people, had gone camping that year. Youth organizations have also kept camping central to their programs. Scouting uses it specifically to teach self-reliance and teamwork, and school camping trips are credited with playing an essential role in the personal growth of students.

• 6. The Right to Roam

  ›

  In Sweden, the right to camp on privately held wilderness is not a custom or a courtesy. It is enshrined in the constitution as a right of public access, guaranteeing outdoor recreational activity on privately owned land. Large groups must still obtain the landowner's permission, but individuals can move and camp freely. Scotland extends a similar freedom: people may camp on most unenclosed land, whether state- or privately owned, subject to a leave-no-trace policy and a common-law outdoor-access code. These legal frameworks stand in contrast to countries where land ownership effectively closes off the countryside to campers without explicit permission. The question of who gets to sleep outdoors and where has shaped camping's history from its earliest days, when it was a pursuit of elites, through its gradual opening to other socioeconomic classes as the twentieth century progressed. Today, modern campers most often use publicly owned resources: national and state parks, wilderness areas, and commercial campgrounds. But Sweden and Scotland point toward a different model, one where the right to spend a night in nature does not depend on finding a designated site or paying a fee. Phil Ochs captured something of camping's broader cultural presence in the circa 1962 album Camp Favorites, a reminder that the activity has long been woven into popular music and media as well as policy debates.