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ABSTRACT
The seaside resort has long held a distinctive position within the history of British leisure. Its peculiar physicality whereby the natural landscape of sea and sand combines with distinctive architectural elements, such as pavilions and piers, has accommodated many and varied leisure activities across the years. However, to date, the majority of research on British coastal resorts considers these activities solely in connection with tourism. Using a combination of contextual archival research, participant observations, semi-structured interviews and oral history narratives, this article attempts a deliberate shift in focus where the leisure activities of a young local population are brought to the fore in the history of British seaside entertainment and, in particular, their experiences of pleasure piers in the post-war era. The article also explores the potential for the concept of the ‘community pier’ in terms of nurturing seaside leisure cultures in the present and future.
RÉSUMÉ
La station balnéaire occupe depuis longtemps une position particulière dans l’histoire des loisirs britanniques. Ses évocations physiques associent le paysage naturel composé par la mer et le sable à des éléments architecturaux distinctifs, tels que des pavillons et des jetées, qui ensemble servent de cadre à de nombreuses activités de loisir depuis de nombreuses années. Cependant, à ce jour, la majorité des recherches sur les stations balnéaires britanniques considèrent que ces activités sont uniquement liées au tourisme. Par la combinaison d’études de documents d’archives contextuels, d’observations de participants, d’entretiens semi-structurés et de récits d’histoire orale, cet article tente délibérément de déplacer l’axe des réflexions en présentant les activités de loisirs d’une jeune population locale dans l’histoire du divertissement balnéaire britannique, en particulier leurs expériences sur les quais et jetées dans la période d’après-guerre. L’article explore également le potentiel du concept de « jetée communautaire » en termes de développement des cultures de loisirs balnéaires dans le présent et le futur.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Matt Brennan (University of Edinburgh) and Archie Lauchlan (University of Brighton) for their contributions as part of the larger research team working on ‘The People’s Pier’ project. The authors would also like to thank staff and volunteers at The Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust and The Hastings Pier Charity for their help and encouragements.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. This is a field dominated by a focus on British seaside history and architecture but Fred Gray’s work takes an international perspective with valuable detailed points about pier culture and seaside entertainment in several North American resorts. Other work that seeks to broaden the traditional focus includes Towner and Wall (Citation1991), which takes in both European and North American histories when framing seaside resorts from a leisure history perspective, and Demars (Citation1979), which is critical when thinking on how influential British seaside culture has been on the North American seaside.
2. At the start of the nineteenth century only Gravesend and Margate could be argued to have provided seaside resorts for the middling-, let alone the working-, classes (Whyman, Citation1981) but the development of the railways mid-century carried those lower down the social ladder in ever-increasing numbers (Walton, Citation1983; Walvin, Citation1978).
3. We note that the dominance of the tourism perspective within leisure studies is not exclusive to seaside culture. The editors addressed this very issue in their call for articles for this special issue of Leisure/Loisir.
4. See also our previously published work on seaside screenings for local audiences (Brydon & Jenzen, Citation2018).
5. About 3,000 shareholders invested in the project and two-thirds of these were local to Hastings (communityshares.co.uk/hastings-pier-charity/).
6. Hastings Pier won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2017.
7. The call was put out via various local news outlets and attracted participants born in the 1940s and early 1950s. The recordings are now held in the Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust community archive.
8. The larger project entitled ‘The People’s Pier: The popular culture of pleasure piers and cultural regeneration through community heritage’ ran in 2015–2016.
9. Not all the participants in the Hastings round-table discussion provided a name, so comments from this part of the research are typically referenced as ‘Group interview’. However, in breaking down some of the discussion for further analysis we have had to resort to giving the unnamed participants numbers.
10. From 2015 the town’s brand has been ‘Famously Hastings’.
11. Listed structures are protected by law. They are monitored by Historic England, a public body predominantly funded by the British government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
12. For an examination of the experiences of black and minority ethnic communities at the seaside and how racial exclusion operates in coastal resorts see Daniel Burdsey’s research (Citation2011, Citation2016). His work includes a consideration of how leisure activities and entertainment at the seaside ‘promote exoticized orientalist representations of the ethnic or racial Other’ (Citation2011, p. 543), reinforced by and reinforcing the tourist gaze, combined with nostalgic representation of whiteness.
13. Another interview with Norman also clearly situates the leisure time spent on the pier as a teenage activity: ‘The main age of us from there was 14 ‘til like ‘til about 18 and then you was [sic] in the pub or something like that’ (Norman, interview, August 2015).
14. Although vending machines have a longer history, Coca-Cola machines were only introduced to the market in the early 1960s. Regardless of the type of vending, the interviewee’s comment underscores that it was a very modest outfit and, for the purposes of our argument, that it was affordable to young people.