The golden age of the British seaside

David Kernek has been enjoying a new book about a long gone British institution

SOME of the most unclouded memories of my childhood in a gritty, post-war inner London borough were of annual one-week holidays in Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. I remember the beaches – most of them newly-cleared of WW2 mines – the end-of-the-pier shows, the ice cream and hot dog stands, the tea stalls on the prom, candy floss, chips served up on pages from yesterday’s Daily Mirror, the stench of boiling hops from the town’s brewery and, of course, because it was July, the relentless east wind, rain, and the icy sea.

Great Yarmouth’s brewery has long since gone – there’s a supermarket on the site now –just as the world of the Great British #Seaside experience has vanished. It was the product of the 19th century railway boom that carried the toiling masses and their children from the dark, satanic cities to their weeks by the sea, creating a coastal network of towns – many of them previously small fishing ports – whose principal business was the provision of pleasure. Its end came a little more than a century later, done in – year by year – by the growth in the 1960s of the foreign package tour industry. The toiling masses could have their funfairs, hot dogs, chips, and tea in Benidorm, plus the things the Blackpools, Brightons, and Butlins’ couldn’t guarantee: sun and a warm sea.

Beside the Sea: Britain’s Lost Seaside Heritage by Sarah Freeman is an affectionate and informative history of the rise and protracted decline of this island’s coastal pleasure towns, from #Blackpool, #Brighton and Bangor and Scarborough and Southport – the towns that gave us holiday camps, donkey rides, knobbly knees and beauty contests, deckchairs and funfairs, and the great piers stretching out into the oceans. It was in the pavilions at the end of the piers that the entertainment stars of the 20th century laid the foundations of their fame.

Max Miller began his career on Brighton’s – now destroyed – West Pier. The Rolling Stones played the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton in 1964. By 1963, the Beatles had played at that venue 27 times. My first adolescent crush was on Helen Shapiro, a very young blues and pop singer. She topped the bill at a variety show in Great Yarmouth to which I was taken. I’ve never forgotten her!

Beside the Sea: Britain’s Lost Seaside Heritage by Sarah Freeman. Aurum Press, £25.

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Picture Credit: Eastbourne Bandstand - geograph.org.uk - 256414 by Colin Smith. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons, Courtesy of Beside the Sea: Britain's Lost Seaside Heritage.