Sarah Lancashire looks at the history of Wakes Week. In the cotton towns of Lancashire, all the mills in a given town used to close down for a week (a different week in each town) to allow the workers to take a summer holiday. Whole communities went on holiday together, usually to seaside resorts such as Blackpool or Llandudno. The practice died out with the closure of the cotton mills and with the increase in the number of people taking holidays abroad.