16 C O N T E X T 1 3 0 : J U LY 2 0 1 3 de heritage seaside tage Our seaside heritag Our seaside heritage Ou easide heritage Our itage Our seaside heritage seaside heritage Our seaside herita of the sea and shore, the seaside began to be valued for other than the assumed benefits. There was a growing acceptance that the seaside should be appreciated for its beauty, for the visual delights it offered, for the nature it revealed, for the exercise and relaxation it could provide, and for the quality and purity of its air (ozone was the thing). These new ways of experiencing the seaside produced a remarkable new array of architecture and open spaces. Promenades, parades, piers and towers, for example, functioned as platforms from which to take in sea views and breathe sea air, and the winter garden, floral hall and aquaria demonstrated the subjection of nature by society. Around some parts of the coast the booming 19th century seaside resulted in large-scale and grand designs. In Sussex alone, examples include Kemp Town and BrunswickTown in Brighton, Burton’s St Leonard’s, the early Bognor Regis, and significant parts of Eastbourne and Bexhill. In all these places there were dominant (and often aristocratic) land owners and landlords keen to fashion their own resort and architectural visions. There is no single seaside style, but from the early 19th century, until the coming of the 20th, ‘orientalism’ was often used to transform the seaside – think of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion and countless exotic pier pavilions, bandstands and seafront shelters fringing the coast. The style was eclectic and derivative, but it did the job of suggesting other mystical worlds. TheVictorians delighted in employing cast iron as the seaside building material of choice. It was cheap, strong, endlessly replicable and quick to use in the building of say a pier or shelter. Neptune-head, dolphin or sea-serpent casts decorated functional seaside structures. Developers of seaside accommodation scrapped with each other for the prime development sites with sea views. ‘Sea View’ became the archetypal name for a seaside guesthouse or home. By the end of the century, though, many elements of the established resorts were challenged. An increasingly significant group of holidaymakers set out to make their own holidays away from the constraints and regulations of older resorts. One result of this search for freedom was the first western versions of the bungalow. Indian in origin, bungalows migrated to British shores from the late-1860s, where they were constructed at Birchingtonon-Sea andWestgate-on-Sea in Kent, and both emerging as exclusive and modern small resorts in contrast to Margate, their excursionist-packed and rowdy older neighbour. More marginal coastal locations, including shingle banks and land liable to flood, became locations for new unregulated ‘plotland’ settlements made up of motley collections of ramshackle structures, including huts, sheds and old railway carriages. Although they had been an enduring feature of the British seaside for almost two centuries, holidaymakers also often disliked the cost and regulation of bathing machines.With swimming rather than bathing growing in popularity, an increasing number could literally swim away from the clutches of the bathing machine proprietors. There was also increasing enthusiasm for active leisure and pleasure on the beach and in the open air.The result, by the 1930s, was the cult of the sun and emergence of modernism as an innovative architectural form. Critics bemoaned the awfulness of the shoddy, old-fashioned and styleless Victorian seaside: where possible there was no compunction in sweeping the past away.Most symbolic of all, bathing machines were burnt in beach bonfires, reused as garden sheds or converted into static beach huts. The cult for the sun had concrete results for the design of the seaside in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Concrete, steel and plate glass were the new and dominant building materials. The new seaside architecture included sun terraces, communal beach bathing stations, solariums, holiday camps and beach huts. An array of new pavilions, hotels and mansion blocks was fashioned in the modernist aesthetic. The holiday camp boom of the interwar and early Informal huts by the sea, Isle of Portland
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