The British seaside resort is enjoying a revival and, as our correspondent discovers, it is architecture that is leading the way
After years of neglect by home-grown holidaymakers, the British seaside is experiencing a comeback – and architecture is very much in the picture. The middle-class rediscovery of candyfloss and kiss-me-quick hats has trickled money – patchily – into our troubled coastline. Most, alas, are as doomed as Margate’s Turner Centre. Little old Littlehampton, though, might make it.
Littlehampton has never been particularly renowned as a hotbed of the decadent avant garde, especially when it comes to architecture. Yet Vogue has dubbed it one of Britain’s hippest spots. Did I miss something? Is crazy golf suddenly de rigueur? Not quite. It’s the East Beach Café ( above). Littlehampton’s newest addition has been compared to many things thrown by a feisty storm on to the town’s shingle beach: the rusting hull of a long-sunk ship, a vast piece of driftwood, a turd washed in from a sewage pipe. Its designer, the much-fêted Thomas Heatherwick, doesn’t mind “so long as it feels as though it has crawled from the sea, with a real raw, rough beauty”. Whatever shape its rippled, ridged abstract steel body takes, though, this Trojan Horse casts enough of a surreally spectacular figure on the promenade to disrupt the normal routine of people taking their afternoon constitutionals along the seafront.
DE LA WARR PAVILION, BEXHILL-ON-SEA, EAST SUSSEX
Almost as peculiar as finding Thomas Heatherwick in sleepy Littlehampton is coming across the staunchly socialist product of a giant of European modernism in gentle Bexhill-on-Sea. During the great seaside building boom in the 1930s, Earl De La Warr commissioned Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff to create this pleasure pavilion. Here you could self-improve, exercise, read novels, sun yourself and have fun – pleasure and enlightenment combined. This Utopia inevitably faded, but it was crisply restored as part of Bexhill and Hastings’ regeneration plan two summers ago by John McAslan, and newly kitted out by one of Britain’s best young furniture designers, Barber Osgerby. Go and slide down the most glamorous staircase around.
SOUTH SHORE PROMENADE SHELTERS, BLACKPOOL
In a town not exactly renowned for its architectural good taste, Ian McChesney Architects last year unveiled its inappropriately elegant take on those classic Victorian promenade shelters. A place where old ladies could gossip and hoodies could swap fags and drink cider, it formed part of the Great Promenade Show public art project. Normally, the words public and art make me run headlong for the hills, but not this time. The pair look like giant white beach towels surprised by a sudden westerly gust, the rippling steel fins catching the prevailing wind and swiveling on their base to protect those perched on its oak bench below. Simply wonderful. Just don’t get a taste for this good-taste malarkey, Blackpool – we like you brassy.
CORNWALL
Lidos puzzle me. They’re adored, they’re sexy, they get us lardy Brits exercising. They should be showered in government money. Yet all over the UK locals are battling to save them, with varying degrees of success. For every recovery, like my newly reopened local London Fields lido, there are several more deaths. But the latest plucked from the jaws of doom is Penzance’s grade II listed beauty. Like the magnificent Tinside lido just up the coast in Plymouth, which nestles on cliffs halfway between the waves and the Hoe, Jubilee is blessed with a glorious position, jutting out like a shark’s fin into the Atlantic. It was designed by Captain Latham, the borough engineer, and opened for King George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935. Go and use it fast before its vital signs drop again.
LINCOLNSHIRE
No, Lincolnshire has not succumbed to sea level rises quite yet. Sleaford is 20 miles from the coast and the rather curiously chosen location for an exhibition – at the Hub Centre (www.thehubcentre.org) – celebrating perhaps the finest piece of generic seaside architecture: the humble beach hut. From rusting iron bathing machines to the one that Charles Saatchi bought from Tracey Emin for £75,000 in 2000, the beach hut is as much a part of seaside life as Punch’n’Judy. The artist Michael Trainor invited architects and artists worldwide to reinvent the hut, none of which really improves on the classic, but you have to admire the ingenuity. Four will be permanently installed later in the summer on the Lincolnshire coast between Mablethorpe and Anderby Creek.
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