The great British seaside museum collections come together for Seaside Heritage project

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

An exciting new project is bringing together museums with collections that tell the story of the great British seaside

Visits to Britain’s fabled seaside locations are soaring as Brits rediscover the peculiar attraction of crazy golf, piers, candy floss, donkey poo and something quintessentially British.

Many seaside towns boast a tradition that stretches back to the coming of the railways in the Victorian period and some of them even earlier, so it’s timely that the UK’s unique seaside heritage is being celebrated and preserved by a new museum collections project spearheaded by Scarborough Museums Trust.

The Seaside Heritage Network aims to promote the value of seaside heritage and culture, further understand and research the British seaside and seaside-related collections, locate custodians of seaside heritage and share vital knowledge and expertise.

Overseeing the venture is Project Manager Esther Graham of Scarborough Museums, she says that “from the introduction of bathing machines to ‘Kiss Me Quick’ hats, the seaside resort culture of the UK is absolutely unique.”

 “Because a lot of the items relating to the days out at the seaside that we all remember are seen as throwaway, more often than not they’re not preserved,” she says. “We’re in danger of losing a remarkable part of our collective culture.”

Scarborough Museum’s own seaside heritage collection includes everything from a Box Brownie camera, brochures from the Pavilion and Raven Hall Hotels to postcards, souvenirs, theatre brochures and vintage summer dresses.

Partner organisations initially involved in the project include Southend Museums Service, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, Manx National Heritage, Blackpool Museum Project and the National Piers Society, but the network is looking for new members.

“We are open to everyone interested in preserving our seaside heritage, whether they’re members of the public, museums, or heritage organisations,” says Esther. “And, of course, we’re always interested in receiving donations of objects which will boost the seaside element of our collections.”

A long term aim is to kick-start a ‘collections mapping’ exercise locating which seaside-related collections are held around the UK.

For further information on the Seaside Heritage Network, visit www.seasideheritage.org

Scarborough

Scarborough can lay claim to being Britain's first seaside resort with a spa town status well established by the 1660s. The coming of the railway in the 1840s saw the holidaymakers flood to the town for the summer season - a tradition that continues to this day. 

And as this taster of photographs and postcards from Scarborough Museums shows, the resort has provided the setting for some of the most quintessential of seaside pastimes - from late Victorians and early post war families enjoying a spot of rock pooling, to donkey rides in the late 1950s.

Note the colourised Victorian postcard 'Children on the Sands Scarborough,' which even manages to evoke the Impressionist beach paintings of Claude Monet and Edward Potthast. 

Blackpool

Scarborough may have been the first, but Blackpool is without doubt the most famous; the quintessential bucket and spade, kiss me quick family holiday for over a century with the railways bringing tourists from far and wide since the 1840s.

As these photos from the Blackpool Museum Project reveal, the Edwardian period saw an impossible throng of people crowd onto the refined promenading deck of the town's North Pier, the first of three piers, built in the 1860s. 

Into the 20th century and even the notorious crashing waves of the Irish Sea were a unique selling point for Blackpool, but by the sixties and seventies an upbeat publicity shot couldn't disguise how the advent of cheap foreign holidays had impacted on the popularity of the resort.

Today Blackpool is on the up again and remains the biggest and brashest seaside resort town in the UK.

The Isle of Man

Despite being anchored in the Irish Sea The Isle of Man has long enjoyed a history as a popular seaside destination - dating back to the late nineteenth century when thousands of Lancashire mill workers took the Manxman steamer from Heysham to Douglas, which boasted hotels and theatres by the bucketload.

These archive photos from Manx National Heritage show how by the 1930s the crowds on Douglas Beach were still wearing their best suits, flannels and frocks whilst soaking up the pleasures. The kids were a bit more with it - even if their bathing costumes were probably made of wool.

The tourist trade was still booming in the post war years, with a 'bathing beauty' competition at the Villa Marina offering a soupcon of seaside sauciness in 1947 and 20 years later Sean Connery muscled his way past the furs, fags and dinner jackets to help open the Palace Casino with a spell on the roulette table.    

The National Piers Society

Surely the most iconic symbol of the British holiday resort, the first public seaside pier opened at Ryde on the Isle of Wight in 1814 precipitating a century of pier building as Victorian engineers set about creating a variety of wrought iron designs in nearly every major seaside resort of the British Isles.

Today there are 58 of them left standing and the National Piers Society, founded in 1979 by Sir John Betjeman, celebrates and promotes their conservation, preservation and importance to the economic wellbeing of our seaside towns.

The first British pier designed by Eugenius Birch, Margate Jetty opened in 1855 as the first iron pier in Britain, but after more than a century of improvements and repairs it finally succumbed to the elements in 1978 isolating the lifeboat station at the pier head.

The longest pier in the world can be found at Southend on Sea, whose slender seaside structure stretches for an incredible 1.34 miles across Southend’s beach mudflats into the Thames Estuary. Little wonder the pier, which originally opened as a wood structure in the 1830s, boasts a pier railway to ferry passengers back and forth.

Elegantly sleek and minimal, Clevedon Pier opened in 1869 to receive paddle steamer passengers from Devon and Wales. Today it is the only Grade 1 listed pier you can visit in England. You can also take boat trips from its jetty via a steamer and paddle ship.

Britain's recent seaside renaissance came too late for Brighton’s West Pier, another Eugenius Birch structure, which opened in 1866 and closed in 1975. Subsequent storm damage and a devastating fire left it as nothing more than an evocative ruin and a monument to seaside pleasures past.

Hastings

Hastings first became known as a seaside resort in the 1760s when the Georgians began visiting the old Cinque Port and beach-based fishing port to take in the waters. The coming of the railways in the 1840s brought even more visitors and today both the Georgian and Victorian eras are reflected in its seafront architecture.

The recent re-opening of its Victorian pier - almost destroyed in a devastating fire in 2010 - has seen Hastings get some of its seaside swagger back.

These old postcards from the collection of Hastings Museum reveal a long seaside history - from the Victorians who enjoyed rock pooling and bathing to the straw boatered Edwardians, entertained here by an alfresco Pierrot troupe called The Pencils. Such concert parties, with their distinctive French inspired costumes and songs and sketches, flourished at many seaside resorts in the first part of the twentieth century. 

Southend-on-Sea

Southend-on-Sea owes much if its seaside town status to the origins to the coming of the railways, so it’s fitting that a railway poster of the 1930s, a period when the town was still welcoming throngs of tourists to its seven miles of beaches, is here featured from the collection of Southend Museums Service.

Posters and other ephemera from the heyday of the British seaside resort dominate the collection, like this piece of 1930s souvenir porcelain and a 1950s example from their extensive bathing costumes collection, which stretches from the early 1900s to the present day.    

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/historic-buildings/art557041-The-great-British-seaside-collections-come-together-for-Seaside-Heritage-project