This abandoned camping site with overgrown cabins perfectly captures the early post-WWII time era of camping and a growing middle-class that suddenly could afford a car. During the 1950s and 1960s, it was really a movement where people went on camping holiday with their families to and were perfectly fine with a low standard of living. Compared with living on a motel, this was really cheap, which made it attractive for people traveling on a shoestring.

Walking around in these abandoned and silent premises is a thoughtful experience where one quickly realizes how the standard of living and consequently – our requirements for comfort have skyrocketed the last forty years. Campers back then accepted a common sink for the camping site where cooking, washing and cleaning was performed. Only cold water was available, sometimes not even by the sink itself and buckets had to be carried. Given was a dry toilet and installation of a shared WC, let's guess around 1970 or so, probably was regarded as a significant standard improvement. To me, there is no such thing as an absolute sense of luxury - it's all about the relative sense of enhancement compared with the norm. Say in 1960, if the alternative is a small cotton tent out in the forest where the rain seeps in and makes your cotton-wool sleeping bag wet in no time, a cabin with running water and a dry toilet is like staying in a luxurious hotel. Just like a VW Beetle type 1 could be considered a limousine relative to the typical camper's bicycle of the 1930s.

A fair guess is that a long downward slope started around 1970. As wealth increased, a wide range of affordable alternatives became available. As competition increased, standard requirements followed suit and a place with such rudimentary facilities was simply doomed over time. When looking into the shower cabin, probably brought there around 1980 or so, one could almost sense the despair of the owners. Just having a bucket of cold water for washing was not okay any more and it probably hadn’t been so for the last ten years. To me, it seems like the owners were somewhat clueless about what a new generation of people wanted and demanded when modern times arrived.

The final blew must have come when the adjacent highway, which was the only reason for this place to be built in the first place, was rebuilt with a new route, leaving the camping site hopelessly in the shadows. With its lack of maintenance, lack of investments, lack of guests, lack of income – the spiral downwards continued ruthlessly, now with even higher speed.

It’s an amazing site – everything is just frozen in a state of preservation of an era that no longer exists. Apart from an omnipresent decay, the middle-class Sweden of 1965 or so, with all the attributes is there.
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