AR Reading List 021: the British seaside

Could the British seaside town be experiencing yet another boom? As we settle into summer, we’re inviting you to join us and take a trip down the pier to consider the British seaside. Known for the pleasure piers and rusting ferris wheels, the British seaside has a distinct architectural language, with piers reaching into the horizon, donkeys patiently carrying children and ice cream vans filling the beach with the tune of summer.

With more than half of Britain’s piers destroyed due to neglect, the beach towns are losing their appeal. Ever influenced by socioeconomic factors the seasides towns experience a rollercoaster of change each year, forever waiting for summer. As a result of the unpredictable changes and lack of investment, the towns are also known for having some of the highest unemployment levels in the country.

Despite the bleakness of this economic reality the British have a sentimental relationship with the seaside. As Peter Cook writes ‘Suddenly we’re free of inhibition – and there is a parallel to this: buildings by the seaside are also permitted to be flashy, tawdry, flimsy, whimsical’

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• Salt in the wounds: the decline and rise of the British seaside, AR April 2019, Eleanor Beaumont
  ‘In the throes of Great Britain’s love affair with the seaside, we bestowed jewels and trinkets along her beaches’

• Typology: Pier, AR April 2019, Catherine Slessor
  ‘Devised by pleasure-seeking Victorians but now undermined by social change and physical neglect, does the building that defined the seaside have a future?’

• AR 120: Peter Cook on Pleasure, AR January 2017, Peter Cook
  ‘If we permit ourselves to consider architecture as theatre – and able to manipulate the presentation of atmospheres, features and experience in sequence – we only have to stretch a little to allow it to contrive, deflect, hide, withhold, reveal and celebrate: maybe all in the same building’

• Water, water everywhere, AR May 2015, Phineas Harper
  ‘Three key issues will dominate architecture and urbanism this century: agriculture (how cities feed themselves); informality (how cities deal with slums, markets and street vendors); and water’

• The blowsy beauty of bandstands, AR June 1947, Barbara Jones
  ‘The project is removed from the quotidian hurly-burly of the city and yields both continuity with, and distinction from, the haphazard, irregular, smaller-scaled order of its surroundings’

• dRMM’s promise to Hastings, AR September 2016, Jon Astbury
  ‘While for many the thought of Brexit fuelled the desire to leave and never return, to jump in the sea rather than be beside it, the nauseatingly named ‘staycation’ is rising from the ashen reputations of plenty of seaside towns’

• Green mantle: Hampshire’s green belt, AR November 1959, Ian Nairn
  ‘The progenitor of Outrage records the birth of a green belt around the growing cities of Portsmouth, Southampton and Bournemouth’