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On the socially transformative roles of the bicycle and holiday camp
MAT COWARD looks at how the bicycle helped spread socialist education and the holiday camp was invented for the benefit of the working class

KIRKPATRICK MACMILLAN is not a firm of City accountants, but something much better: the “inventor” of the bicycle.

(Inventor has to go in inverted commas, because so many people are credited with inventing various versions of what became the bicycle. Macmillan is widely held to be the man who made the key breakthrough of adding pedals).

But this week’s column is really about how socialists came to invent the holiday camp.

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