The book by Will Scott is a photographic journey around the UK documenting the seaside shelters in whatever state they were in at the time. The photographs are not meant to be ‘beautiful’, but a representation of the shelters as they are in that current moment. I think that’s what appealed to me the most when I bought the book a few years back. The atmosphere demonstrated in each photo, the mundaneness, but the ability each photo has to evoke the seaside with just one structure. The idea of a standalone piece of architecture, one that is intrinsically linked to the seaside, as well as one with such a differing approach across the country, couldn’t help but draw me in.
The book documents the changing nature of the shelters both by location but also by time. The shelters photographed represent the earlier Victorian structures made mostly of cast iron and glass; new materials and technologies at the time, taking inspiration from railways stations, to the exploration into orientalism and more exotic architecture. This developed into the more Art Deco designs that took inspiration from trains and ocean liners with streamlined structures and cleaner lines with materials such as concrete. Other shelters took on a more Arts and Crafts design with timber and tiles, a more garden shed or bus stop approach. And most recently a Brutalist design with pebbledash finishes.
Edwin Heathcote describes the seaside shelters in the book in a way that perfectly sums up how they feel to me; the loneliness of a small structure, the struggle against the elements, the optimism of a day at the beach despite the weather, the nostalgia, the municipal sense of a public good, one he describes as mostly a memory. And of course, a piece of architecture that is owned by us and open at any time of the year. What also appeals in this book that has been eloquently picked up by Edwin is the ‘air of melancholy’ and economic decline that these shelters represent. My thesis module will explore the decline and regeneration of the seaside resort and these seaside shelters demonstrate this in little pieces of architecture. Edwin describes little panes of glass often missing, the iron and paint ‘stained and streaked with rust’, timbers rotting away. But the shelters also represent a ‘municipal generosity and pride’, an architecture that represents the British obsession with the weather; sheltering us from most of it but still ‘exposing’ us to much of it, an architecture for everyone; young, old, homeless. An architecture with ‘no doors, no opening times, no profit motive, no real purpose’. They just exist, they are just there.
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