The weekend is 100 years old

For 11 years, from 1929 to 1940, the Soviet Union did not have weekends. Instead, to increase productivity citizens were allocated a day off in every seven at random. With 80% of the population at work on any given day, factories never had to power down. A letter from a disgruntled worker to Pravda newspaper, published soon after the implementation of this new working calendar, outlined the problems: “What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children at school, and nobody can visit us?” the letter-writer asked. “It is no holiday if you have to have it alone.” Parents found themselves at home while their children were at school, or with kids unsupervised while they were on shift. With no shared day off, extended family gatherings became impossible. The workforce became demoralised and listless, the projected spike in productivity never materialised, and the policy was first modified, then abandoned altogether. Eleven years, though. Is that not absolutely wild? A world without weekends feels impossible. A world without Saturday Night Fever, without Manic Monday. We may no longer go to church on Sunday, but we still worship the weekend. “The weekend looms large because it represents the triumph of collective time over market time,” says Brad Beaven, professor of social and cultural history at the University of Portsmouth. “It is not just about rest, but about reclaiming autonomy from the industrial clock.” Saturday and Sunday, sacred to the dignity and humanity of working people, are laden with mythology and ceremony. From Cilla Black to Gary Lineker, the main characters of our weekends become giants of the culture. We romanticise the weekend, even the prosaic bits – the distant roar of a lawnmower, the rattle of classified football results on the radio. Everyone knows what a weekend means. The snap of a laptop cover at 4.58pm on a Friday. The clink of the first pint glass and the smell of chips on the way home. The slow-motion pace of a weekend pavement, the gear change from hustle to meander. The rituals have changed with the times, of course, and people-watching at brunch on Saturday is now as much of a tradition as cooking a roast at home on Sunday. A weekend changes shape as you move through life stages, but in each iteration it remains a shared experience between you and your peers. “The weekend that I had when I was 20 was very different from the weekend that I have now, at 40 and with kids,” laughs Pedro Gomes, professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London and author of the book Friday is the New Saturday. “When you are young, you are bonding with your friends, and then when you get older, you might be with your family. Eventually, you might be with grandchildren. We move through different manifestations of the weekend, in our lifetimes.” But it can be hard to pin down, these days, where a weekend begins and ends. Laundry gets done on a work-from-home Friday, but emails are answered on Sunday. A shopping splurge is as likely to be a cheer-up treat on your phone after a tough Wednesday as a Saturday outing. The traditional Saturday 3pm football kick-off has been stretched across the television schedules all the way to Monday evening. The four-day week – first predicted by Richard Nixon, of all people, in 1956 – has become a reality in the Netherlands, with people working an average of 32.1 hours. Friday is forging ahead with a quiet secession from the working week without anyone signing off the paperwork. It raises the question: what even is “the weekend” in 2026? Remarkably, the concept of the weekend as we know it is only 100 years old. In 1926, Henry Ford changed the shape of the week, announcing that the workers at his factories would now do five eight-hour days instead of six, with no cut in pay. Ford did not invent the weekend – the idea had been bubbling under for a century, in campaigns by trade unions, religious groups and progressive employers – but by putting his considerable industrial weight behind it, the two-day chunk of freedom was born. “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege,” Ford wrote in his company’s Ford News in October 1926. Ford’s innovation was in part a response to his earlier invention: the assembly line, which had increased productivity but exhausted workers, with absenteeism up to 10% in factories; in his article he did not disguise that there was self-interest involved. “People who have more leisure require more transportation in vehicles,” he continued. The new fashion for day trips was an effective marketing device to sell cars. Meanwhile, his factories maintained a steady level of productivity despite the reduced hours. In 1938, faced with rising unemployment levels in the Great Depression, the five-day week was officially adopted across the US. On this side of the Atlantic, Boots the Chemist was the pioneer. In 1933, the company opened a new factory in Nottingham, which proved so efficient that there was soon a surplus of stock. Reluctant to lay his staff off with unemployment running at 25%, John Boot ended the Saturday morning shift, reducing hours for the 5,000-strong workforce without cutting wages. It was commercially successful, resulting in lower rates of absenteeism, and was adopted as Boots policy in 1934. A government inquiry led by Richard Redmayne – great-grandfather, fun fact, of actor Eddie – published a “review of the experimental working of the five days week”, which noted “an improvement in stamina and animation of the employees arising from the physiological and psychological effects of a long weekend’s rest and relaxation”. Slowly, the weekend gathered momentum. In the UK, “the early 20th-century version of the weekend was generally recognised as a half-day Saturday and Sunday off,” says Beaven. “The full two-day weekend only really became widely adopted after the second world war.” Before industrialisation, there was little concept of consecutive days of leisure, because animals and crops could not be so long neglected. Work was dictated by the weather and the seasons, the clock mattering less than the sun. Factories, with their whistles and watches, changed the way time worked. A mechanised drumbeat of shifts and paydays drowned out the old rhythms of seasons and saints days. As work became more rigidly organised, the possibility emerged that leisure could be, too. Time off wasn’t merely a concession to workers, but also an engine of consumer capitalism. People with weekends would go to sports stadiums, buy picnic baskets and new clothes, need cinema tickets. By the late 20th century, with the arrival of cheap flights, this had evolved into the minibreak: a miniature holiday, designed to fit into a weekend. Leisure time, once the opposite of the economy, became part of it. For generations, the British weekend revolved around one immovable appointment: the 3pm Saturday kick-off. “The weekend is about rest, but it is also about passion,” says Gomes. “Most of us are not lucky enough to be passionate about our jobs, but at the weekend we can follow our passions.” The link between football and the best day of the week is intrinsic to the national love affair with the sport. It is probably partly because football symbolised the best bit of the weekend that we ended up so obsessed with it. Morals – and the absence of them – have always been a theme of the weekend. When Sunday, a time of worship, was the only day off, skilled workers developed a habit of extending their free time into “Saint Monday”, by not turning up for work after a particularly enthusiastic day of drinking. Saturday afternoons off – and then the whole day – were granted by employers partly in the hope of bringing the hangovers forward by a day. Victorian reformers, obsessed with drunkenness, hoped that free Saturdays would encourage respectable recreation: organised sport, gardening, family outings. Ford, a vehement supporter of Prohibition, believed that the illegality of alcohol made his move towards a two-day weekend safe. (“A day off is no longer a day drunk,” he said.) The reality has never been quite so clean-cut. Weekends are naughty and nice, both bad behaviour and Sunday best. These are the days for shopping splurges and drinking sprees and hook-ups, but also for penance, whether by parkrun, DIY or actual prayer. Though perhaps less so the prayer bit: around one in three Britons attended church regularly in 1900, according to the National Centre for Social Research; now, this is number is around one in 20. Two moments stand out in the story of how Sunday lost its special place as a day, if not of worship, then of higher purpose. In 1994, the Sunday Trading Act allowed large shops in England and Wales to open on Sundays. Then, a quarter of a century later, pandemic lockdowns broke the now-fragile bonds between churches and their communities, and left many older parishioners with a wariness of gathering in ill-ventilated churches that might be bad for the health, even if good for the soul. The late, great Maggie Smith had, as she so often did, the best line. “What is a weekend?” she asked, in Downton Abbey, with the entitled bewilderment of a dowager countess for whom income is spoonfed in silver from birth, not doled out in a brown envelope on a Friday night. The weekend is time carved out of, and in tension with, someone else’s ownership of your time. Not to mention that for aristocrats, who had servants for everything from laying fires to buttoning their dresses, every day was a day of leisure. The weekend feels like a cornerstone of civilisation, of democracy, because it matters most to those who spend the majority of the week following orders instead of giving them. These days, the upstairs-downstairs division is between the hybrid workers and those whose work can never be done remotely. An age-old division between shift work and the relative flexibility of white-collar jobs has deepened. Thinkers like Liselotte Lyngsø, founding partner of the Copenhagen-based consultancy Future Navigator, have argued that the workforce is splitting into “time owners” – knowledge workers who increasingly choose where and when they work – and “time slaves”, whose jobs, like healthcare, manual shift work or gig economy roles like Amazon or Deliveroo driving, remains stubbornly tied to the clock. For the “time owners”, Friday is rapidly turning into the modern Saint Monday. It is an increasingly open secret that the last day of the working week has become, for remote workers, an unofficial half shift: calendar technically open, but both brain and laptop mostly on standby. When Gomes ran a six-month trial of four-day-week working in Portugal in 2023, with more than 41 public and private firms involved, “organisations that can’t reduce hours – a nursery, for example – worked in shifts with a different day off within each week. Other firms made the decision to cut Friday out. Whenever their weekday off was, we found that many employees approached that day a little differently, using it to get ‘life admin’ done so that they could have their Saturdays and Sundays free. The weekend isn’t just about the number of hours, it is also a coordination device for communities to connect.” As with Saint Monday, “Skiveday Friday” has proved in the UK to be stubbornly, if silently, adhered to. In 2024, Transport for London ran a three-month trial scrapping peak fares on Fridays explicitly in order to lure commuters back into central London. It failed, Fridays remaining quiet, despite the discount. For the laptopped-classes, there has been a shift in what Friday is for. Several major rail companies, including LNER and Avanti, have now made Fridays an entirely off-peak day like Saturday and Sunday, acknowledging that the weekend now begins earlier for many. Though it should be noted that, for those same workers, Saturday and Sunday themselves are under constant siege from the mission creep of work emails and contactability outside working hours in the age of the smartphone. “These are two sides of the same coin,” says Gomes. Work intensifies, and the weekend expands in order to absorb the pressure. “The speed of communication means that we now live with constant interruptions, and it is hard to find space either for deep work or for real rest. And yet we continue to structure the work week in much the same way as we did 100 years ago. It is no surprise that this isn’t working.” Hence why a three-day weekend is being suggested as a way to balance the books. But is it all woke nonsense? A pie in the sky idea, dreamed up by a lazy workforce which no longer knows the meaning of hard work? The Green party supports a “move towards” a four-day week, but other politicians are wary. In 2025, the Liberal Democrat-led South Cambridgeshire council, which had been operating a four-day week for two years, was attacked by the then local government secretary, Steve Reed, who said that local governments “should not be paying full-time wages for part-time work”. In April this year, James Cleverly announced that a future Conservative government would look to ban four-day weeks for council staff, denouncing the “push from the left of centre in British politics” towards a four-day week as “completely wrong”. The 4 Day Week Foundation, which is leading the drive for change in Britain, says that 56 out of the 61 companies who signed up for their four-day week pilot decided to stick with it after the scheme ended. They cite an average of 35% increased revenue, and 57% decline in staff leaving rates, during the trial. There are now 260 companies in the UK officially signed up to the four-day week. The divide – between time sharers and time slaves, those working five-day weeks, four-day weeks or more ad-hoc, less weekend-friendly shift work – is problematic because the weekend is designed to be shared. It’s where British culture learned to gather, a collective experience. Every generation has its own shared rituals. Boomers love a Saturday night movie, generation X are obsessed with Sunday lunch, millennials love to flock to a farmers’ market, while gen Z, for some reason, get their kicks standing in line for baked goods that have gone viral on TikTok. Even the Sunday scaries are made manageable by the knowledge that everyone out there is feeling the same. As a gulf widens – between the time owners and time slaves, between inherited wealth and the increasingly weedy salary pipeline – the weekend starts to feel less like an experience, and more like a nostalgic memory. It is funny to think that, at first, technology expanded our horizons. Railways gave ordinary people access to the coast; mass production made bicycles and cars affordable. It is only recently that technology has mutated into the energy vampire it is today, sucking the life from the weekend. Only in the last decade has online autobiography become everybody’s unpaid side hustle, so that your friends have already seen your holiday photos before you meet them for brunch. It is a very modern phenomenon that our friendships have migrated online, this week’s boy drama or family quarrel already debated at length in text bubbles and voice notes without the need to meet in the pub. Add to this the post-pandemic normalisation of the “soft commitment”, in which making plans and cancelling them have become two parts of the same social ritual and “I’ll see how I feel” has become an acceptable RSVP, and we have become less good at a core element of the weekend, which is actually seeing other people. Perhaps we shouldn’t fret so much. Ever since we invented the weekend, we have been anxiously taking its pulse. The Victorians worried that workers would waste their precious leisure days drinking. Mid-century Britain feared television was keeping families indoors. Today’s concern is that we spend Saturday scrolling Instagram and Sunday answering emails. The rituals change; the suspicion that the weekend is being ruined remains. Yet the weekend survives, perhaps because it has never demanded perfection. The lie-in and the late night are equally valid forms of resistance. Its holiest rites – the greasy fry-up, the football terrace, Saturday-night shiny-floor television – are gloriously unrefined. The weekend is where a good time still trumps good taste. The Soviets discovered that a day off is not much use unless other people are off, too; Ford understood that workers needed time in which to become themselves again, even if he hoped they would spend it buying cars. At 100, the two-day weekend is fraying at the edges, leaking into Friday and nibbled away by Sunday night emails. The weekend will keep changing, because work keeps changing. But it will still always be the best thing work ever invented.