The Woody is parked up on the Scarborough seafront, drawing sideways glances and grins of recognition from the shufflers-by. The Spanish have their paseo, the Italians the passeggiata – the parade of fine clothes, social oneupmanship and coded courting by which your Latin types like to see and be seen in the cool of evening. The British, on the other hand, have what can only be described as their potter. And it doesn’t even take place in the evening – much too parky for that in Scarborough. No, any time will do so long as the tea stalls are still open for a cuppa and a Custard Cream.

The elderly men and women making eye contact with the Morris Minor Traveller on this autumn morning of golden sunlight are a jolly procession of bald pates and elasticated slacks. Many of these same men and women first came here 50 years ago, when the distinctive timber-framed estate car affectionately known as the Woody was still tumbling off the production line at Morris’s Cowley plant. “On weekdays as well as at weekends streams of motor coaches pour into [Scarborough] from the towns of industrial Yorkshire, disgorging some thousands of trippers near the beach, while trains arrive every few minutes packed to the doors with excursionists from even farther afield,” wrote Christopher Trent in Motoring Holidays in Britain, one of the most popular driving guides of the 1950s.

These “excursionists” were lither of limb then, of course, and not all arrived by coach or train. A minority – less than a third of households in 1960 – had cars but everyone aspired to the freedom epitomized by ownership of even the humble Moggy, the Morris 1000, and its quaintly rustic sibling, the Traveller. But they could not have foreseen the radical changes about to be wrought on our travel and holiday habits over the next three decades. Within a radius of 80 miles of Scarborough the coalfields of South Yorkshire and Durham, the Sheffield steel foundries, the woollen mills of the West Riding and the Tyneside shipyards employed many thousands of men and women in desperate need of an annual paddle and knees up by the sea. This was the era characterized by the phrase attributed to the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan: “You’ve never had it so good.”

In fact Macmillan, addressing a Conservative party meeting on July 20, 1957, had said: "Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime - nor indeed in the history of this country. Indeed let us be frank about it - most of our people have never had it so good." Following the rationing and austerity of the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the country picked itself up after the war, the steel, coal and car industries were booming, the economy was buoyant and people were determined to spend their new-found, modest wealth on enjoying their leisure time.