Did the Railway Invent the Seaside? Census Growth of British Resorts Before and After the Line Arrived, 1801 to 1911

The British seaside resort is often told as a railway story. I test it with an event study. For the 205 places on Wikipedia's list of seaside resorts in the United Kingdom I date the railway as the earliest opening of a station within 3 km (Wikidata, checked against each resort's article): 177 had one by 1911, 51 of them first in the 1840s. For 68 resorts in Great Britain I assemble parish or township census populations from 1801 to 1911 and measure decade growth on unchanged boundaries, and I compare them with a random sample of inland towns. Before any railway (1801 to 1831) the typical resort grew 1.63% a year, against 1.43% for inland towns (p = 0.34). With resort and decade fixed effects, growth was 1.33 points a year higher in the decade the line opened than in the decade before (95% interval 0.24 to 2.42), with no build-up beforehand. But the after-railway gain is not clearly larger than inland towns' gain from their own lines (difference 0.08 points, interval -1.20 to 1.36). The resorts that grew most after the railway had been slow before it; the pre-railway boom towns, such as Weston-super-Mare, Torquay and Brighton, slowed. Resorts nearer the large industrial towns were reached first. The railway did not invent the seaside: it reached resorts that were already growing and added a burst. Coverage is partial and the results are associations. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/seaside-railways/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/seaside-railways. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/seaside-railways/.