Actually, I had no clue that this was the case. - as early as the Fifties.
And of course you are right with Europeans living cheek by jowl, except for the East Europeans and the Scandinavians, where the harsh climate has always limited the number of humans able to exist there. Indeed, many Europeans who traveled in the States, including myself, had no real clue how ginormous the country is 😀, and not just in sheer size.
Thank you very much for sharing this piece of knowledge about the British tourists, which is fascinating to me as a historian.
Although the big wave of tourism was still to come…then.
Oh yeah, as the population grows and transportation infrastructure grows and planes get cheaper and bigger the whole industry got bigger. More and more people on the move.
Yeah America is a challengingly huge place, and not just geographically. Heck a lot of Americans don’t understand how big it is. You see a lot of people here talking like we have a monoculture, we so don’t. We have 4 different major BBQ concepts here, 3 different names for basically the same sandwich, 3 different names for the same category of non-alcoholic drink. And, once you get west of the Mississippi, a whole lotta nothin between cities.