All towns have ghosts, none more so than Scarborough.
High atop a castle topped, wind whipped promontory, lies Anne Bronte, overlooking the harbour below, wayward Whitby whalers wail, lost fisher folk seek solace.
Its walls ache with traders past, scissors that no longer snip, click-less shutters, unlettered rock and loaves that no longer rise.
Layers of sun baked, peeling paint on brick, rendered almost illegible.
As Alan Resnais would say Scarborough, mon amour!
When is a subway not a sandwich?
When it’s a doughnut!
Hard by the seafront linking Foreshore, Cleveland Way and Valley Road sits a neat little tight little island, giving pedestrian access to almost everywhere – and a car park.
As with every other torus worth calling a torus, at its very centre sits the presence of absence, darkened concrete subterranean causeways, linking everything to nothing.
There’s a world going on underground.
High atop West Cliff Whitby is a pale blue imitation of the deep blue North Sea below.
A TG Green Cornishware blue and cream striped pot, reimagined on the distant Yorkshire coast, in paddling pool form.
Scarborough Borough Council has resurfaced the paddling pool, re-concreted and repainted the bottom and the sides. The railings adjacent to the footpaths at Whitby Pavilion have been repaired and re-painted and seating next to the crazy golf has also been improved.
West Cliff councillor Joe Plant added:The improvement works that have been done both last year and this year is most welcome. Not only the visitors will benefit, but local people also and it again shows working in partnership with the voluntary sector does make a difference.
The Big Society in action, replacing railings improving lives.
I arrived in late April the pool as yet sans d’eau, more of a pedalling pool than paddling pool as the BMX bandits invaded the space, in direct contravention of the rules and regulations.
The water when present is some twelve inches deep, clearly better suited to larking, splashing and cavorting rather than performing The Twister, a bewildering blur of twists and turns two and a half back-somersaults with two and a half twists during the 1.5 seconds between launching and entering the water at 40mph.
The pool is flanked to the north by a sweeping Lubetkin style, flat roofed pavilion complete with fully functioning toilet facilities.
Turn your back on the Abbey, go wild – take a wet walk on the West Cliff side.
Blimey, I remember the castle and the hamster wheel thing. It was, in those days, as close to you would get to an adventure play park, it was on the same site that is now held by Clambers and it was all outdoors. The Castle, the Hamster Wheel, an army zip slide, seesaws, roundabouts and I think there was a small paddling pool. The Castle stunk of wee, probably where kids couldnt be bothered to get to the toilet. I remember it even had towers that you could go up .
Next to the play park was a putting course and you use to pay where the bowling green hut is now. Then the other side was a crazy golf course and you purchased the tickets from the model village hut. We had some great times up there . We use to spend the morning in the museum and then a snack and a drink at a very small cafe that was just below White Rock Road, in Cambridge Road (since gone) and then off to the putting, the play park and then the crazy golf, in that order
Can you imagine kids being allowed out to do that now ? We were 12 years old in 1973 and use to catch the 433 bus from the Fortune of War (well thats what we called the bus stop anyway) in Priory Road, to the Oval and back.
Happy days
The Hastings Model Village took three years to build and opened on 19th February 1955. Designed by Stanley Deboo, it featured models of classic Sussex houses including oast-houses and timber-framed houses.
Sadly the Model Village was forced to close in December 1998 after vandalism caused £5,000 worth of damage. It was replaced by a miniature golf course built by Chris Richards.
The model village was replaced by a lazer maze style gaming centre in 2011, but still some of the original model village foundations remain at the site to this day.
There is some far-flung corner for Wales, that is forever California.
As the clippers and steamers left the Mersey Estuary for the New World, cram packed with emigres some centuries ago, would they expect on their return, some centuries later, to find this architectural cultural exchange, located sedately on Penrhyn Bay?
This is a typology with a limited vocabulary, but spoken in a lilt, with an ever so slight, polite Mid-Atlantic drawl.
Lightly clad, stone-faced, light and almost expansive the seaside bungalow.
Margate a town of two pools.
The first tucked in by the prom, a moments walk from the station and overlooked by the imposing Arlington House and the shimmer of the Turner Contemporary
– alas no longer the domain of the wild swimmer.
A large delicious expanse of seawater, now sadly designated as a boating pond.
I was drawn magnetically to this elemental artifice, where untamed waters meet a controlled concrete geometry, waves temptingly lapping the walls.
Would that it could be open again to the town’s swimmers.
I am latterly reliably informed, that the pool is well used by local aquarists, despite the Local Authority’s prohibitions and ministrations – bravo!
The second at Walpole Bay still open to the swimmer and what’s more it’s listed.
Walpole Bay Tidal Pool, one of two tidal pools designed by Margate’s borough engineer in 1937, constructed in concrete blocks reinforced by reused iron tram rails, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * Structural engineering interest: an ambitious project because of its scale, the weight of each concrete block, and that work needing to be carried out day and night because of the tides; * Scale and design: impressive in scale and shape, occupying 4 acres and three sides of a rectangle, the sides 450 feet long diminishing towards the seaward end which was 300 feet long; * Social historical interest: provided an improvement to sea bathing at the period of the greatest popularity of the English seaside; * Degree of intactness: intact apart from the loss of the two diving boards which do not often survive; * Group value: situated quite near the remains of the 1824-6 Clifton Baths (Grade II), an 1935 lift and the other 1937 tidal pool.
Where the lone lawn ranger, meets the top of the range Range Rover.
Yippee ki oh ki-yay!
Forever out to out Lutyens.
I think you’re probably out to lunch.
To walk the shoreline path through North Foreland Estate, is to walk an intentionally unintentional free market, mash-up of architectural history.
Hey ho let’s go!
To begin at the beginning, 1636 a lighthouse is erected – leaping forward somewhat:
During World War II a number of radar stations were set up by German forces in France and the Netherlands to detect allied aircraft flying across the English Channel and a chain of top secret radar jamming stations were set up by British scientists along the south east coast of Britain. An array of transmitters was set out around gallery of the lighthouse controlled by equipment in the lower lantern as part of this chain.
The North Foreland lighthouse was last manned lighthouse in the UK, but was automated in a ceremony presided over by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1998.
It seems appropriate that the DoE should preside over the automation, however, I digress.
This is a gently rolling coast line, low chalk cliffs harbouring sandy coves and spies.
And the wealth of nations, £2,000,000 gets you this shiny hunk of real estate.
A gated community, double negated through further gating, ornamental railings, well clipped hedges, picket fences, high grey stuccoed walls, and attendant dogs.
Big dogs, very big dogs, fortunately with even bigger walls.
As is often the case in such areas the residents are short of nothing – excepting residents.
There was but on lone lawnmower owning owner to nod to.
Last seen, receding towards his quasi sixties, semi-dormered detached, hat intact.
So accompany me now through the New England homes of the new England, admire the Mock Gothic, Super Krazed Moderne, pseudo Tudo-Jacobethan delights that await us.
Too rich for your undernourished pockets, have you considered a drawing of a house?
High concept, conceptual housing for the under-housed.
So farewell the North Shoreland I’ll leave you to get on with your high value, property based, rise and fall bollard lifestyle I, like Felix – kept on walking.
“But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
Umberto Eco
Somewhere between Las Vegas Nevada and Casablanca Morocco lies Southport.
Somewhere in Southport lies Pleasureland.
Separated by oceans and oceans of artifice.
A puzzle wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a wind blown fish and chip paper, tipped lazily onto the edge of Lancashire.
The seaside itself an invention of the railways, and an expanding leisured class.
To begin in the middle, the Hollywood cinema creates an Orientalist mythology around Morocco. A confection of exotic confinement, conspiratorial glances and romance.
Who are you really, and what were you before?
What did you do and what did you think, huh?
We said no questions.
Here’s looking at you, kid.
Which in turn becomes parody of itself, constructing an airport that apes its own constructed image, a brash reflection in an eternally wonky mirage of a mirror.
The same mirror that reflects across the Atlantic, to that cap it all capital of Kitsch.
A veritable smorgasbord of visual treats and retreats in Mesquite Nevada.
Or the Casablanca Ballroom Westin Lake Hotel – Las Vegas.
Flying home to the Warner Brothers Stage 16 Restaurant
Or indeed Southport.
2011 – I had my first close up and personal encounter with the wood frame, chicken wire and faux adobe render rendering of North Africa, on the coast of North West England. It was in a state of semi-advanced neglect, an extraordinary experience. Pleasureland had already faked it’s own demise, a pre-boarded up, boarded up frontier town.
Where the edges of meaning are blurred beyond belief, take care.
We are dealing with uneven surfaces.
Who could resist a Moroccan themed crazy golf course?
You are now entering a Scoobidoo-esque scenario, where the mask is never finally removed, nothing is revealed.
2016 – I returned, the world had turned a revival was in part taking place, some of the pleasure returned to Pleasureland, whilst the seafront facing bars remained empty.
One man holds the key the glue, that bonds these distant lands.
The myth to end all myths.
For he is forever in his own orbit, omniscient.
Make the world go away
And get it off my shoulders
Say the things you used to say
And make the world go away
Formerly the site of a much larger, much busier Blackpool North Station – a time when trains arrived sixteen coaches long.
As seen in this archive film of the 1940s.
Cars and closures caused the station to withdraw up the road, to its current much smaller site.
Subsequently Fine Fare arrives with a fanfare of moulded plastic panels, and cast concrete walls.
Opened on May 22nd 1979 by the Goodies.
Superseded by Food Giant, Gateway, Dunnes Stores, Kwik Save and Somerfields – possibly others, currently Wilkinson’s Wilko Superstore and Age UK, retaining at all times the attractive integral car park.
Wilko is now to be relocated and the site redeveloped as part of the second phase of the £220m Talbot Gateway – whereby trams will link the promenade with the Station.
Possibly.
The tale is the typical mix of Council, Developer on/off, binary obfuscation, secrecy, smoke and mirrors.
Councillor Fred Jackson says:
“We are in talks with our development partner Muse but there is a confidentiality agreement so there is very little I can say.”
Whatever the outcome I do hope the panels are saved, having notified Historic England several weeks ago, I eagerly await their hurried and considered response…
In the meantime get y’self on the choo-choo to Blackpool North toot sweet, and have a gander at a fine Fine Fare plastic panel or two, before you can’t.
I’ve been here before, innocently snapping – without incident.
A super-large Roger Booth cop shop and courts, concrete combo.
So why not go back just one last time, prior to demolition and redevelopment.
So I did.
Following the acquisition and demolition of Progress House the Bonny Street Station is to be relocated, and the former site, under the ownership of Blackpool Council, set to become who knows what – who knows?
The Council knows, it plans to develop a new site for the defunct Central Rail Station
A giant of the steam age that became a car park
It is 50 years since Central Railway Station closed with the land being used for a car park ever since. It was proposed as the site for the super-casino until that bid failed to win government backing. Since then plans for an indoor snow-based attraction have also failed to make any progress.
Today happily, snow-based attractions are still failing to make any progress.
Blue skies and chill early March air greeted me, across the wind swept, precast concourses and piazzas – warmish grey, against brightish blue.
I simply didn’t expect the boy in blue – ten minutes of light/half hearted interrogation.
“Who, what, why, where are you?”
Responding in a clear concise and non-confrontational manner, I was free to go about my legal business, taking these pictures for you.
Once, for a very, very long time indeed there was a shoreline, then sure enough, eventually there was a Hoverport – then there wasn’t.
Opened in 1969 just outside Ramsgate along the Kent coast, Hoverlloyd a Swedish owned company began a cross-channel hovercraft service to Calais.
Along came Prince Philip:
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/prince-philip-opens-hovercraft-at-ramsgate
Can came:
And went:
The passengers’ every need was attended to with alacrity and style.
“As a Stewardess your appearance was paramount, a beautician would come in during training to teach us how to apply make up.”
But it simply wasn’t enough.
The life of Christopher Cockerell’s bold British invention, was short and bumpy.
Genevieve Payne, a former stewardess:
“I remember the summer of 1979 as a year of really bad weather and rough seas.”
“I was working on a craft in a force 8, so on this day we were literally hitting the ceiling, passengers were throwing up everywhere.”
“One lady became hysterical I had to slap her to calm her down.”
By the 1980’s Pegwell and the hovercraft were in terminal terminus decline.
It’s a lot less bother without a hover.
What prevails is the shoreline, a concrete landing skirt and the slow process of reclamation, as nature decides that the council is quite right to decide to create a nature reserve.
Thanks to and for further information http://www.hoverlloyd.org/index.html
Here it is today:
It’s ever so easy to fall in love with a building, that’s ever so lovable.
So much of its time and place – a perfect piece of Seaside Moderne.
Sun soaked and whiter than white, against almost clear blue southern skies.
A luxury liner beached and beloved, now returned to showroom condition.
Go see for y’self.
http://www.modernistbritain.co.uk/post/building/Marine+Court/
Facing happily out to sea, hard by Hastings promenade, sits Arthur Green’s, former menswear shop of some considerable distinction. Currently operating as an antiques centre, the whole of the perfectly preserved, period interior is now listed by English Heritage.
A mosaic porch and glass lined vestibule, invite you into a palace of dark hardwood fittings, capacious drawers, glass fronted cabinets, and an ornately carved cashiers booth, all topped off and lit by crystal chandeliers.
Few such example still exist intact, their contents usually ripped out, ripped off and reinstalled in chi-chi overpriced, cosmopolitan boutiques – suits you sir?
I think not!
My thanks to the helpful and patient staff who informed and facilitated my mooching.
Take a walk along the front – pop in.
Idly meandering through Cliftonville, along Northdown Road, I chanced upon the most delightful of cake shop windows. Being something of an aficionado of cakes, shops and windows it seemed like an ideal opportunity to snap away, with customary broad-smiling, wide-eyed enthusiasm. Furthermore why not go in? I was met with the most charming of receptions from the patron Stuart Turner and staff – not unreasonably inquisitive regarding my impromptu picture taking, I explained my particular interest in the patisserie. The interior of the 50’s bakery, shop and café is perfectly preserved, with a little sympathetic restorative work. Well upholstered and formica topped the furniture is the finest of its kind, each table graced with fresh flowers, condiments and loving care and attention. An exquisite array of breads, pastries and cakes, resting on delicate doilies, displayed in glass fronted cases. I encourage you to visit, take tea, take cake, take away the fondest of sweet memories.
Two.
Parachuted from who knows where, onto the unsuspecting seafront.
Backed by a rambling range of well behaved Georgian terraces, facing a remorselessly mutable sea.
Affording space age shelter to the passing pilot of an ever imminent future.
Sit in, look through, out and beyond.
There are days when there is little else to do on the seashore than stare endlessly out to sea, seeking respite from the unrelenting rays of the sun, or conversely turning one’s back on the incoming squall.
Hunker down and hope.
For these very same and sane reasons, the urban district councils have provided you with the very means to realise the wildest of your wildest dreams.
The shelter
No two are the same, look carefully – they are nuanced, under financed, resilient and emboldened against the elements. Design applied by untutored hand, cast in concrete, stone and brick, glazed, unglazed and amazing.
Set a spell, take your shoes off.
Y’all come back now, y’hear?
The seashore seems ideally suited to tall well appointed private housing, this is the architecture and landscape of wealth and privilege.
Built and maintained in the finest sixties and seventies Modernist style and fashion, affording panoramic visits across the Hove Lawns to the sea, and the soft rolling hinterland of the Downs.
If you’ve got the dollar, you’ve got a room with a view, or two.
The very first time I visited Hastings, I was immediately enchanted by the seafront and its enchanting shelters.
Perfectly formed cast concrete poetry, facing the swelling channel.
Offering shade and respite from coastal sun, wind and rain.
Temporary home to some.
Decorated in the finest style.
A short endless walk, sea to the right, back again, to your left.
Somewhere at the edge of the World ice cream vans go to die, I know I saw them from the train back from Brighton, I just had to go and have a look. I was received warmly by the busy proprietors going busily about their business, readying the working vans for their working day on the coast. It seems they break the invalids up for spares keeping the ageing vehicles on the road for another season – dispensing joy to jolly girls and boys in cornet, tub and lolly form. There is however something inevitably heartbreakingly poignant, seeing the signage fade, in the southern sun, as brambles weave in and out of open window, steering wheel, wheel arch and fridge. Ask not for whom the chimes chime. They chime for you. Nevermore.
Embassy Court has always had a very special place in my heart.
Forty years ago as a young art student attending nearby Portsmouth Polytechnic, we were taken by Maurice Denis in a minibus to visit the modernist buildings in our locale, this was my first love.
Two days ago I returned to Brighton, sprinting spryly along the prom to meet an old friend.
We were ever so pleased to see each other after all these years, I walked around admiringly and smiled.
Embassy Court is an 11 storey block of flats situated on the Brighton seafront on the corner of Western Street and the Kings Road. It was designed by the architect Wells Coates and completed in 1935.
It is amongst of the most outstanding examples of pre-war Modernism in the UK, it has a grade II* listed status and remains a major Brighton landmark. This beautiful, elegantly proportioned block contains 72 flats, with awe-inspiring sea views, is considered one of the coolest places to live in Britain.
Restored in 2005 after a long period of decline, Embassy Court is now owned by a limited company, Bluestorm Ltd., born from a Leaseholders Association which obtained the freehold of the building in 1998.
Modern Mooch 