Twentieth Century Seaside Architecture E-Book

Kathryn Ferry

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 170

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A nostalgic exploration of Britain's distinctive and architecturally significant seafront buildings from the 1920s to the new millennium. British seaside resorts enjoyed phenomenal popularity for much of the twentieth century. Told chronologically, this book is the first look at how resort architecture around the UK coast kept pace with changing fashions and the increasing competition of foreign destinations. Using vintage postcard images, Kathryn Ferry showcases the inherent playfulness of seaside architecture as it evolved from interwar classicism, through art deco and international modernism, to Festival of Britain-inspired mid-century style, then later to seafront tower blocks and the artificial beaches of 1970s leisure centres. Featuring a wide range of building types, Twentieth Century Seaside Architecture explores everything from beach huts and bandstands to lidos, piers, theatres, hotels and amusement arcades. As climate change and the soaring cost of living provoke changing attitudes to travel, Britain's seaside has witnessed renewed popularity, making now the perfect time to champion our architectural legacy of domestic tourism. Offering a compelling reassessment, Twentieth Century Seaside Architecture will appeal to fans of architecture and design who love to be beside the sea.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 Interwar Classical

Chapter 2 Deco, Modern, Moderne

Chapter 3 Festival Style at the Seaside

Chapter 4 The British Costas

Chapter 5 Decline and New Hope

Threats and Restoration by Catherine Croft, Director of C20 Society

Notes

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Postcard Publishers

Index

About the Author

‘… the greatest asset a seaside town has is its character of being a seaside town.’

THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW, JANUARY 1938

Britain invented the seaside as a place for pleasure, a managed shoreline distinct from the untamed or working coast. From small 17th-century beginnings, domestic tourism by the sea grew into a highly lucrative industry that has left a rich architectural legacy. In the Georgian era pioneering resorts welcomed upper-class health tourists to their clifftop terraces and assembly rooms. During Queen Victoria’s reign the railway democratized access to the beach, along with the piers, winter gardens, aquaria and towers that set the scene for the truly mass appeal of the 20th century.

More recently the fabled ‘death’ of the British seaside has turned it into a by-word for decline and deprivation, resorts killed off by the inexorable rise of cheap foreign package holidays from the 1960s onwards. Though evidence suggests the picture was far more nuanced, the conventional narrative records a sort of stasis after World War II. Seaside architecture of the 1930s is presented as a peak of modernist optimism that was crushed by years of resort closure during hostilities, the downhill trajectory hastened by lack of investment and vision postwar.

It is undeniable that the British seaside underwent huge changes during the 20th century, but the lifeblood of all resorts was novelty, and there was a lot more happening along seafronts than has generally been acknowledged. Some resorts had a limited lifespan; others were so well established that the existing townscape offered few opportunities to modernize. Whereas development phases were affected by changing fashions and local factors, the best buildings always responded to their location on the coastal fringe by adopting a holiday mood, soaking up some extra salt and vinegar and making nautical playfulness a priority. The importance of much seaside architecture has been fleeting, and it is perhaps this sense of ephemerality that explains the tendency to neglect buildings that actually tell a fascinating story of social change and shifts in leisure practice, between 1920 and the Millennium.

Probably no other architectural genre is so well documented through the pictorial format of postcards. Many millions were sold and posted every year, with numerous publishers recording the same buildings and stretches of seafront from different angles at different times. The illustrations in this book are avowedly nostalgic, not just because of the architecture but because of the fashions, the cars, even the heightened colour saturation. In these pieces of printed cardboard, holidaymakers could transmit multiple messages to family and friends back home, not just about the weather but about their tastes and aspirations. When someone chose a picture of a newly built attraction they were proclaiming their choice of destination as modern and worthy of envy. This was pertinent between the wars as competition between resorts intensified, but it continued to be a significant factor as greetings from Blackpool and Southend tumbled onto doormats alongside postcards from Benidorm and beyond. British seaside resorts fought hard for their share of the visitor market. This is the untold story of seaside architecture in the 20th century.

Seaside buildings evolved to suit changing fashions. This image shows the 1930s pavilion on Weston-super-Mare’s Grand Pier paired with a 1970s entrance.

Twentieth-century architecture was shaped by the development of modernism, which arrived in Britain in the 1930s and evolved over ensuing decades. It was not the only choice open to architects, but for those places and projects that sought to stand out, it was the most likely to elicit acclaim. This book, however, begins in the 1920s, before modernism, in a transition period that has tended to be overlooked. As this chapter will show, the shift towards a cleaner aesthetic was already underway. Influenced by Edwardian classicism, seafronts took on a new whiteness that consigned the Victorian love of colourful cast iron to the past. Building types that had become seaside staples thanks to the technological and decorative potential of iron were now reimagined in pared-down concrete and faience. Designs for new pavilions, winter gardens, bathing pools, bandstands and shelters all underwent this revision in a bid to present themselves as the products of forward-looking resorts.

This side view of Folkestone’s 1927 concert hall suggests the impressive views available from its terraces, which were built out from the cliff.

Curved shelters were a crucial part of Blackpool’s North Promenade extension in the early 1920s.

On the face of it, political and economic circumstances should have made for a quiet decade at the seaside as post-World War I depression was followed by industrial downturns, the 1926 General Strike and the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Nevertheless, visitors kept coming. In 1923 and 1924 fine weather at Easter and Whitsun encouraged record-breaking crowds to flock to the coast, an increasing number of them arriving by road in charabancs, forerunner of modern coaches. Even in the mining communities of South Wales, which suffered mass unemployment and wrenching poverty, people clung tenaciously to their annual day trip to Barry Island as a release from the cares that otherwise pressed upon them. For those in work, the prospect of paid holidays was slowly becoming a reality, so that by mid-decade around one in six of all wage earners were covered by some form of agreement. Although legislative endorsement of holidays with pay was slow in coming, other government policies were to have a profound impact on resort development.

The Health Resorts and Watering Places Act of 1921 was a seemingly modest bill that ultimately proved to be a major breakthrough for local authorities. It allowed borough and urban district councils to spend the income they received from hiring out deckchairs and wheeled bathing machines, as well as admission charges to any municipally administered attraction, on promoting their resort in guides, railway posters and newspaper adverts. The majority of resorts took advantage of this extension to their powers and, moreover, interpreted the terms of the act as an opportunity to expand provision of municipal amenities on an unprecedented scale. Figures for money spent became a weapon in the publicity arsenal as competition between resorts intensified. Paradoxically, high unemployment in seasonal seaside economies supported this interwar burst of activity because from December 1920 local authorities were able to apply to the newly created Unemployment Grants Committee for help with public-works schemes. Financial assistance had previously been restricted to building roads and houses but over the next two decades direct labour was used to construct everything from boating lakes to bathing pools.

Two vast promenade shelters at Barry Island provided covered space for thousands of day trippers.

With so much responsibility for tourism infrastructure now devolved to local government, borough engineers, surveyors and architects became pre-eminent. The men (and they were all men) who held these roles had the power to shape and define a wider resort vision yet have rarely been given due credit for their successes. Though they were not part of the metropolitan architectural elite they were all connected through the Institution of Municipal and County Engineers and took great interest in the emerging discipline of town planning. This was particularly relevant for seaside towns that had to juggle the competing demands of visitors and residents within the constraints of a geography that gave them half the potential area for expansion enjoyed by inland towns. While resorts could stretch along the seafront and behind it, there was a limit to how much land they could reclaim from the sea. Along the promenade, however, classical and Beaux-Arts styling, inspired by contemporary French and American examples, gave 1920s seaside buildings a new civic grandeur. It was a grandeur that also aspired to Georgian elegance, looking back a century to the early days of the seaside before mass transport opened up the coast.

One of the most widely used forms was the classical colonnade, an open line of columns typically finished in this period with Tuscan capitals of the simplest type. It was particularly well suited to seaside shelters, which were an important resort amenity because landladies generally locked guests out of their boarding houses between mealtimes, whatever the weather. Blackpool’s first classical shelter on Princess Parade dates from 1912 and was part of the sea defences subsequently extended along the North Shore during the early 1920s. The new promenade was really three, as can be seen in the postcard on page 12, with the top-road level then a Middle Walk featuring five curved Tuscan shelters and a lower path by the beach. At the northern end, out of view, the first shelter to be built was the grandest, its paired columns accessed via a monumental entrance of four concrete pillars swagged with shells, seaweed and fish, and crowned with giant urns. Similarly impressive entrance pillars can be seen in the postcard of South Shore paddling pool (page 24) designed by the same person, John Charles Robinson, who took up the post of chief architectural assistant under borough surveyor Francis Wood in 1920. Robinson had worked as managing assistant to Sir Banister Fletcher for three years before the war, then volunteered for the Artists Rifles, a London army regiment founded by painters, musicians, actors and architects in 1859. After being demobbed he found a job in His Majesty’s Office of Works but it was in Blackpool that his architectural talents found fertile ground. From 1925 the new North Shore shelters took centre stage in railway posters advertising the town.

Herne Bay’s 1925 shelter was designed to fit in with the clock tower of 1837.

At Barry Island, the pair of oversized shelters dominating Whitmore Bay (page 15), show how the colonnade form could be expanded to meet local demand. A meteoric rise had seen this South Wales resort become the third most popular day-tripper destination in the country after Blackpool and the recently opened Wembley Empire Stadium. New sea walls were needed and their integrated shelters, designed by borough surveyor J C Pardoe, would benefit visitors as well as the out-of-work labourers recruited to build them. The first one, opened in April 1924, included six shops and lavatory accommodation. Its flat roof extended the promenade area by a third of an acre, creating space for open-air band concerts and dances.

On the County Durham coast at Seaton Carew colonnaded shelters were also a key component of the promenade works opened by Princess Mary in August 1926. Borough engineer Francis Durkin designed the North and South Shelters to hold up to 1,500 people each, most of them day visitors from the nearby industrial town of Hartlepool. Just like at Barry Island, staircases provided access to their flat reinforced concrete roofs.

The 1928 bathing pavilion at Sandbanks in Dorset was praised for its ‘municipal classicism’.

Shelters in Kent took a more ornamental approach to the basic classical form. The 1925 postcard of Herne Bay’s new shelter (opposite), shows Italianate arches framing the central toilet block with columns at either end. At Ramsgate, architect Sir John James Burnet provided Winterstoke Gardens with a semi-circular ‘sun shelter’, its convex front edged with pairs of Tuscan columns. Southport’s Crescent Shelter of 1931 also formed part of a seafront landscaping project, located on a processional route through Princes Park with views inland over the Marine Lake. In the postcard shown right, visitors sit out of the sea breeze in one of the glazed arms that curved away from a pedimented central bay; above their heads, decorative beams extended the shelter’s roofline to suggest the effect of an Italian loggia on the Lancashire coast.

Inside the curve of Southport’s crescent shelter.

Tuscan colonnades also provided sheltered space in buildings designed for other seaside purposes. Bathing pavilions were basically blocks of changing accommodation that visitors wishing to swim in the sea were encouraged to use for payment of a small fee. Undressing on the beach was frowned upon well into the 1930s but hiring an old-fashioned bathing machine was not an appealing prospect for young holidaymakers; these cumbersome vehicles had been invented as horse-drawn changing rooms back in the mid-18th century. To maintain a useful source of income, local authorities designed new facilities like the 1928 colonnaded pavilion in the postcard shown opposite at Sandbanks in Dorset. On two sides of an angled crescent, Poole borough engineer E J Goodacre offered visitors the option of sea-facing beach huts for day, week and seasonal hire, or short-hire cubicles facing the car park. A Beaux-Arts-style copper dome crowned the central walkway through to the sands while a balustraded flat roof carried on Tuscan columns provided an elevated space for deckchairs. Members of the Sandbanks Property Owners’ Association feared opening of the bathing pavilion would see their secluded beach become ‘like Margate’. The Swanage Times, on the other hand, praised the building’s municipal classicism for its civilizing influence on this previously uncultivated stretch of coast, enthusiastically reporting that visitor numbers had never been so large.1

If Sandbanks didn’t ultimately become a populist paradise, Margate’s reputation was well deserved. As one of the country’s oldest resorts it had grown on the profits made from sea-bathing Londoners since at least the 1750s. In 1922 the council’s Entertainments Committee noted how city excursionists still ‘seemed to come down with the main object of getting into the water’, and determined to build a magnificent new bathing pavilion for their comfort. Around the same time, construction of Margate’s new Southern Railway station was underway, itself an exemplar of interwar classicism designed by the young Edwin Maxwell Fry. Holidaymakers were to be funnelled through the gracious space of his Beaux-Arts booking hall in a straight line towards a T-shaped pier 65m (214ft) long on Marine Sands. Opened in July 1926, the pavilion at its end featured three so-called ‘saloons’, blocks of male and female changing cubicles separated by a central café above the waves. The steel-framed building in the postcard opposite was covered in rusticated boarding between wood pilasters, which the East Kent Times and Mail described as being ‘designed after the Tuscan style of architecture, this style being the most suitable for construction in timber’. From this grand platform, up to 320 bathers at a time could descend stairways directly into the sea in an arrangement that Margate Council confidently proclaimed would make them ‘the envy of all other resorts’.2

This steel and timber bathing pavilion opened on Margate Sands in 1926.

Exterior and interior views of the vast Open Air Baths built opposite Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1923.

In fact, other developments were already taking bathing provision in a different direction. The first salt-water pool designed to outwit the tides opened in Scarborough’s South Bay in July 1915. Borough engineer Harry W Smith first proposed it in 1900 as a means of seizing back the initiative from newer competing resorts, but construction as part of a robust sea-defence scheme only began in April 1914; special dispensation was later given for work to continue after the outbreak of war. Above the pool, changing cubicles were entered through a colonnade and Smith used Italianate details for the subsidiary buildings. Here, then, was the prototype for the lidos that came to be associated with art deco and modernism but which grew out of Edwardian classicism. In 1916, the smart resort of St Anne’s in Lancashire opened its newest attraction, ‘in the shape of a “Roman” open air swimming bath’, designed by Accrington architect Fred Harrison. The Fleetwood Chronicle praised it as the work of a most progressive Urban District Council: ‘The buildings – the dressing rooms, the café, and the machinery and administration departments – are all of classical and beautiful design, their façades adorned with Ionic pillars and their flat roofs laid out as promenades.’3 Nearby Blackpool took note and proposed to build two bathing pools the following year. Nothing happened until after the arrival of J C Robinson, under whose influence the first decade of outdoor-pool design reached its apogee. Proclaimed in 1923 as ‘A New Colosseum’, Blackpool Open Air Baths (opposite) cost the enormous sum of almost £80,000.4

Even the South Shore paddling pool was given classical grandeur by Blackpool’s borough architect J C Robinson.

Robinson’s Open Air Baths were likened to a new Colosseum.

Blackpool’s D-shaped pool measured 115 × 52m (376 × 172ft) and could hold 7.3 million litres (1.6 million gallons) of filtered sea water. The concourse running around it was over 500m (a third of a mile) long and, when full, the oval amphitheatre could accommodate 8,000 spectators and 1,500 swimmers. Construction began at Christmas 1921 and as the ferro-concrete structure went up it was given a permanent whiteness by the application of faience brick cladding from Shaws of Darwen. Around the exterior, fluted columns broke the two floors of tripartite windows into bays of a punchy, factory-style rhythm. On the eastern elevation the main entrance was impossible to miss, rising up to the tip of a glazed Beaux-Arts dome and accessed through a pair of tall columns more suggestive of a neo-classical bank building. As Allan Brodie and Matthew Whitfield have observed, it was ‘as much a civic celebration as a leisure facility’.5 Directly under the dome was a café that opened onto outdoor terraces with jaunty pergola-style roofs. The postcard on page 25 shows the colonnades that swept around the inner ring in front of the changing cubicles, with spectators looking down from their flat roofs. On the opposite beach-side of the building the main seating was spread over 11 tiers. In 1937 an account of recent seaside architecture published in Official Architect singled out Mr Robinson’s very fine swimming pool, ‘which in its restfulness to the eye, strained by the surrounding glare, refutes those who would speak slightingly of the Classic’.6

Southport’s 1928 Sea Bathing Lake referenced the design of Blackpool baths in its domed entrance.

Skegness was so proud of its joint music and swimming venue that postcards were produced of the architect’s drawing.

At the end of the 1920s there was still architectural mileage in the colonnaded style, and Blackpool’s South Shore baths attracted 4 million people during its first six years of operation. Southport had invested in a Sea Bathing Lake as early as 1914, when borough engineer Alfred Ernest Jackson was just two years into his job of reshaping the resort’s seafront. By 1926 it was thought to lack sophistication, so a new site was chosen in Princes Park, part of a huge space reclaimed by tipping refuse onto low-lying estuarine land. Jackson’s second pool design required the council to borrow £60,000, which was offset by the creation of 300 jobs. Opened in 1928, the new Sea Bathing Lake (opposite) and its enclosure were oval, the amphitheatre style clearly inspired by Blackpool and making more than passing reference to its rival in the imposing café building with glazed dome. Overall, however, the architectural effect was less formal. The Tuscan colonnade that framed the view outside the café held up a pergola roof and along the 70m (230ft) verandah enclosing the western side of the pool, white wooden spars projected under a gentle pitch of green tiles. Spectators on the tiered seating below could look out over the pool’s open east side towards the wider parkland, making Jackson’s design a highly appropriate one for a resort that promoted itself as a garden city by the sea.

On the east coast, Skegness was still a relative newcomer among resorts. Before investing in its own bathing pool, the council sent a deputation, including borough surveyor Rowland Henry Jenkins, to report on recent improvements at Blackpool, Lytham St Anne’s, Southport, Morecambe and New Brighton. The £40,000 scheme they sanctioned in 1924 aimed to do something none of those places had, by uniting the popularity of bathing with musical entertainments. The design produced by Jenkins, with Skegness and Derby architects John Wills & Sons, was reproduced as a postcard. Its central feature was a shared bandstand between the open-air pool and grandly titled Orchestral Piazza (opposite). Classical colonnades imposed a uniformity across the different site elements and on the promenade the complex was fronted by a Grand Pavilion housing a café; this would later become the Embassy Ballroom. As construction began in May 1927 the Boston Guardian anticipated that future visitors would ‘be able to spend the whole of the day at a minimum of expense and gain a maximum of enjoyment and invigorating exercise’.7