Designing the Seaside: Architecture, Nature and Society (review)

This instructive, enjoyable, and beautifully presented book is a must for anyone interested in the evolution of the material fabric of the seaside resort. The focus is the author's own stamping ground of Brighton and the English south coast, but he uses this as a base from which to explore other resorts in Britain, and to make much more than passing allusions to the development of the seaside throughout the western world. His "intention is to provide illustrative accounts of the cultural design of the most significant seaside architectural forms," and acknowledges that his "approach is therefore selective and fragmentary: the book is neither a compendium of seaside architecture nor complete cultural geography or history" (13–14).

This approach is reflected in the organization of the volume. The first four chapters tackle broadly thematic issues and set the context for the later form-centered chapters. The way changing perceptions of nature initiated and then modified the character of the resort is the subject of the first chapter. The discovery of the sea in the early eighteenth century as a therapeutic resource was the starting-point, but from the late eighteenth century there was an emphasis on marine aesthetics. In the late nineteenth century the "cult of the sea air became dominant" (29), a hegemony replaced by the interwar period by the cult of the sun, which in the later twentieth century was to undermine the appeal of "the colder and older resorts" of northern Europe (34). Chapter two addresses the forces and people responsible for the building, design, decline, and revival of resorts: technology and transport, social class, landowners, municipal authorities, planners, regenerators, and conservationists. Representations (largely positive but some negative) of the seaside, and the "dynamic relationship between the representation and the viewer or reader" (65), are the subject of chapter three, from municipal guides and cultivated images of beautiful young women, to the postcard—"the single most important way of representing the twentieth-century Western seaside" (83–84)—personal photos, and cinema. The notion of a resort architectural style is explored in chapter four, where the need to create a "fantasy architecture designed to transport users to alternative worlds" constitutes the underlying requirement (91). "Seaside Orientalism," in one form or another, emerges as the most characteristic manifestation of this and the Brighton Pavilion as the "formative building" (91).

The remaining six chapters offer a typology of architectural forms to be found at the seaside. "The seaside resort is structured by its open spaces" (115), chapter five boldly declares, proceeding to explore the beach and its furniture, parks and gardens, and promenades and boardwalks. The interaction between sea/water and beach are the subject of chapter six, in which the principal foci of attention are the bathing machine, the bathing room, the bathing pavilion and sun terrace, and the beach hut. Chapter seven turns its attention to built forms which corralled the sea or water to produce pools for bathing in, from the therapeutic indoor baths of the Georgian period, to the pleasure-driven open-air pools and lidos of the early twentieth century and the exotic water parks of today, some located miles from the coast. The curious pleasure of "walking on water" forms the topic of chapter eight and its examination of the pier phenomenon, which includes a compelling case study of the rise, decline, and demise of Brighton's West Pier, which, opened in 1866 and devastated by storm and fire damage in 2003–04, "in the later stages of its history . . . was to assume an iconic and national status" (207). The final two chapters tackle towers and pavilions (with a focus on Blackpool Tower and the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill), amusement parks—here Coney Island was the pioneer—and architecture designed to accommodate the multifarious classes of visitors, from bungalows and plotlands, to holiday camps, lodging houses, boarding houses, and the grandiose hotels constructed in late Victorian and Edwardian times, most of which have now been demolished, turned into apartments...