If you were ill in the 1700s, your physician may have prescribed you a “curative pill” made up of an appetising mix of seawater, crabs’ eyes, burnt sponge and crushed cuttlefish bones. If that wasn’t enough to remedy what ailed you, a visit to the coast may have done the trick. In his renowned 1660 account on the “vertues of the spaw at Scarbrough”, Dr Robert Wittie wrote of the town’s hot spring: “It cleanses the stomach, opens the lungs, cures asthma and scurvy, purifies the blood, cures jaunders, both yellow and black and the leprosie.”
This belief in the sea as a powerful panacea goes back a long way. Health is an integral part of British seaside heritage, planting the early seeds of a tourist industry that was to grow into a vibrant and distinctive culture. Around the 1600s, out-of-towners – mostly well-heeled visitors from the upper middle classes – began streaming to coastal areas in large numbers to take in the fresh sea air on the advice of their doctors.
These resorts evolved over time, moving beyond health tourism to serve holiday-makers flocking in on the country’s newly minted railways, seeking pleasure and entertainment as a break from the grime and bustle of the country’s rapidly expanding industrial cities.
To trace seaside history is to see a microcosm of the social transformation that has taken place across the UK over the past 300 years. But because seaside heritage is so broad – spanning a diverse range of subject matter from fashion, sport and popular entertainment to transport, social and natural history – it is often ill-defined, undervalued and under-interpreted in UK museums.
It could be said that a similar air of neglect affects Britain’s once-thriving seaside towns themselves, many of which began to fall on hard times as industrial cities declined and were nearly killed off by the advent of cheap package holidays. This deprivation escalated into a vicious circle, with many resorts becoming rundown after years of under-investment, making it harder to attract new visitors. Some went on to develop a seedy reputation, with an underbelly of drug abuse and prostitution taking hold beneath the bright lights of their arcades and funfairs.
But now some coastal towns have decided to kill two birds with one stone, taking the decision to invest in and celebrate their unique seaside heritage as a means of transforming their wider fortunes. A number of major museum and cultural developments in resort towns including Blackpool, Southend, Great Yarmouth and Plymouth are due to open in the next five years.
In addition, museum professionals have come together to establish a subject specialist network (SSN) to preserve, develop and promote seaside-related collections. The Seaside Heritage Network, which launched last year with the help of a grant from the Museums Association’s Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, has been engaged in a project to develop a classification scheme and map such collections across the UK.
“We want to develop seaside collections and the knowledge behind them to discover what they are and what they could be,” says the network’s project manager, Esther Graham of Scarborough Museums Trust, which founded the SSN in partnership with Filey Museum in Yorkshire and Southend Museum Service.
The possibilities are exciting but it’s still early days – even in a town such as Scarborough, one of the UK’s earliest coastal holiday resorts, the museum service has not traditionally focused on that side of its heritage, instead centring its collections around geology and natural science.
Coastal history
“Seaside heritage is rarely collected discretely as an independent subject – it’s usually dispersed throughout other collections,” says Graham. “Our members are looking broadly at the collections they hold to see if there are patterns.”
This research has already yielded some nuggets of seaside-related history, such as the account of the aforementioned curative pill, which was found in a doctor’s 1752 dissertation on “the uses of seawater in diseases of the glands”. The SSN will not just link collections in coastal towns, but also the vast amount of material held in landlocked cities, brought back by generations of day trippers and holidaymakers.
“It is not as geographically obvious as it might appear,” says Graham. “Kirklees has a large collection of seaside postcards, as do places like Manchester and Leeds. We have found a lot more than we expected.”
In the short term, the network’s research will inform a touring exhibition that will open later this year in Scarborough before travelling to other museums around the UK. In the long term, Scarborough Museums Trust has ambitions to create a museum on the history of the town, in which seaside heritage will play a key role. It comes at a time of resurgent public interest in the British seaside. The National Coastal Tourism Academy, which works to develop the visitor economy in English coastal regions, has identified a growing trend in visitor habits such as staycations and nostalgia tourism. In a 2016 report it said that seaside tourism had “regained its position as England’s largest holiday sector” and was now worth £8bn to the economy.
And although local authorities by the sea are no more immune to austerity than anywhere else, funding from sources such as the Big Lottery’s UK-wide Coastal Communities Fund, established in 2012, is having an impact on social and cultural regeneration in those areas. The fund has already distributed around £125m to support jobs and growth in coastal regions, and has a further £90m to hand out by 2021. “Things are shifting – it’s something positive amid all the gloom,” says Graham.
A similar optimism persists in Southend-on-Sea, the Essex holiday town that is home to the world’s longest pier, where the council is investing around £40m to create a new museum that it hopes will help regenerate the seafront. The museum will be based around the story of the Thames Estuary, using cutting- edge technology to interpret objects ranging from shipwreck material dredged from the Thames seabed to social history, fashion and fine art.
“Southend is a day-trip destination, but struggles with even this,” says Ciara Phipps, the assistant curator of social history at Southend Museums. “This new project is designed to bring people to the area for prolonged trips and repeat visits, predominantly generating income for the area.”
Because of its proximity to London, Southend can struggle to tempt potential visitors away from the cultural attractions on offer in the capital.
“We are trying to change this by evoking a sense of seaside nostalgia, with Southend being the original playground for cockneys,” says Phipps. “It was known as Whitechapel-on-Sea during its 20th century heyday.”
The museum will tap into the public appetite for all things vintage – a trend that ties in well to the evocative visual nature of seaside heritage with its striped beach huts, polka-dot bikinis and saucy postcards – as well as a collective nostalgia for childhood days spent by the sea.
“Sitting on the beach and eating fish and chips is something most people can fondly remember about trips to the seaside, and it is this type of nostalgia that people respond so well to,” says Phipps.
She hopes that the work of the Seaside Heritage Network will help to reinforce “the importance of these collections and their function within the museum display”.
Pooling resources
It would be impossible to consider seaside heritage without taking a look at Blackpool, the UK’s archetypal seaside holiday resort. The town could be described as one of the birthplaces of British popular entertainment, internationally known for attractions such as its illuminations, theatre shows, ballroom dancing festival and vintage wooden roller coasters.
Although Blackpool has weathered well compared with many other seaside towns (the resort attracts about 17 million visits a year) there is a feeling that its heritage and significance to British culture has been underrepresented.
To change this, Blackpool Council is developing the town’s first heritage museum, a £26m institution that will be in the Winter Gardens entertainment complex.
“The museum will celebrate Britain’s love affair with the seaside holiday and Blackpool’s role in shaping popular entertainment for over 150 years,” says Belinda Betts, the director of the Blackpool Museum Project. “The importance of resorts like Blackpool to British entertainment history is a neglected area and many areas of heritage that the Blackpool Museum Project will be focused on are under-represented in museums or at risk, such as circus and dance.”
Displays will feature a wide range of objects related to seaside entertainment culture, from swimming costumes and Punch and Judy puppets, to stage costumes and magic props, as well as the history of the only permanent circus left in the UK (see box, p23).
Betts also hopes the museum will help tackle one issue common to all coastal resorts – the seasonality of their visitor base. Blackpool could never be described as quiet, but it does experience a drop in tourists during the winter, and the new museum is seen as one way of generating footfall from out-of-towners and locals all year round.
“Although there is still a summer season in Blackpool, the new museum is one of the steps being taken to provide an all-year offer in the town,” says Betts. “We will programme seasonally and vary our offer of activities, events and temporary exhibitions. We intend to provide a museum that is fun and engaging for visitors, varied enough to encourage repeat visits and one that actively involves and engages with our local community.”
One question remains, however – with public funding diminishing every year, how will these new museums sustain themselves in the long run? Betts says that having the museum at the heart of Blackpool council’s regeneration and development strategy is key. It has a “robust business plan” in place and will be a charging attraction. Phipps believes there is an appetite among funders to invest in and reboot coastal towns.
“They do want to fund these types of towns, but they need the right information and project ideas to do so,” she says. “There is a real opportunity, if done correctly, to revitalise seaside holidays and what they have to offer.”
In spite of the wider climate of austerity, the future is looking sunny for seaside heritage. Time will tell if the great British seaside resorts of days gone by can rediscover their heyday. If they do, museums will have played a vital role.
What may not be as widely known is that in addition to the variety of music hall, dancing and comedy acts that found their first taste of fame in the town, Blackpool is internationally known for its contribution to circus culture.
So far this element of Blackpool’s heritage has been unexplored; the town council only recently acquired the private business archive of the Tower Circus – the last continuously running, permanent circus show in the UK – and it is yet to be seen by the public. That will change this year after the council’s heritage department won a grant in the latest round of the Museums Association’s Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund to catalogue and develop the collection, and bring it into the public domain.
The scheme is separate but complementary to the Blackpool Museum Project and will inform displays on circus life in the new heritage museum. To this end, the project recently held a variety day with performers from the circus community and other forms of popular entertainment to gather their perspectives and ensure they are included in its displays.
“The circus is integrated into seaside history. Of all our collections, that one has the biggest international significance,” says Caroline Hall, the collections manager at Blackpool Council who is in charge of the Esmée Fairbairn scheme. “It has never been public – it’s never even been listed before. We want to show it off.”
Volunteers are helping the heritage department explore the archive and the project is designed to have a wider public impact through engagement with literacy programmes in local schools.
“We needed to do something that tackles an issue on the cliff-face of the social agenda,” says Hall. “We thought the circus would be an ideal subject for literacy in schools.”
She hopes the project will lay the groundwork for wider partnership work with the museum.
“It will be great for the museum project. Schools are more likely to understand where we are coming from when setting up new projects.
It shows them what our sector is doing and that they will have a museum that is able to listen to their needs.”
This belief in the sea as a powerful panacea goes back a long way. Health is an integral part of British seaside heritage, planting the early seeds of a tourist industry that was to grow into a vibrant and distinctive culture. Around the 1600s, out-of-towners – mostly well-heeled visitors from the upper middle classes – began streaming to coastal areas in large numbers to take in the fresh sea air on the advice of their doctors.
These resorts evolved over time, moving beyond health tourism to serve holiday-makers flocking in on the country’s newly minted railways, seeking pleasure and entertainment as a break from the grime and bustle of the country’s rapidly expanding industrial cities.
To trace seaside history is to see a microcosm of the social transformation that has taken place across the UK over the past 300 years. But because seaside heritage is so broad – spanning a diverse range of subject matter from fashion, sport and popular entertainment to transport, social and natural history – it is often ill-defined, undervalued and under-interpreted in UK museums.
It could be said that a similar air of neglect affects Britain’s once-thriving seaside towns themselves, many of which began to fall on hard times as industrial cities declined and were nearly killed off by the advent of cheap package holidays. This deprivation escalated into a vicious circle, with many resorts becoming rundown after years of under-investment, making it harder to attract new visitors. Some went on to develop a seedy reputation, with an underbelly of drug abuse and prostitution taking hold beneath the bright lights of their arcades and funfairs.
But now some coastal towns have decided to kill two birds with one stone, taking the decision to invest in and celebrate their unique seaside heritage as a means of transforming their wider fortunes. A number of major museum and cultural developments in resort towns including Blackpool, Southend, Great Yarmouth and Plymouth are due to open in the next five years.
In addition, museum professionals have come together to establish a subject specialist network (SSN) to preserve, develop and promote seaside-related collections. The Seaside Heritage Network, which launched last year with the help of a grant from the Museums Association’s Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, has been engaged in a project to develop a classification scheme and map such collections across the UK.
“We want to develop seaside collections and the knowledge behind them to discover what they are and what they could be,” says the network’s project manager, Esther Graham of Scarborough Museums Trust, which founded the SSN in partnership with Filey Museum in Yorkshire and Southend Museum Service.
The possibilities are exciting but it’s still early days – even in a town such as Scarborough, one of the UK’s earliest coastal holiday resorts, the museum service has not traditionally focused on that side of its heritage, instead centring its collections around geology and natural science.
Coastal history
“Seaside heritage is rarely collected discretely as an independent subject – it’s usually dispersed throughout other collections,” says Graham. “Our members are looking broadly at the collections they hold to see if there are patterns.”
This research has already yielded some nuggets of seaside-related history, such as the account of the aforementioned curative pill, which was found in a doctor’s 1752 dissertation on “the uses of seawater in diseases of the glands”. The SSN will not just link collections in coastal towns, but also the vast amount of material held in landlocked cities, brought back by generations of day trippers and holidaymakers.
“It is not as geographically obvious as it might appear,” says Graham. “Kirklees has a large collection of seaside postcards, as do places like Manchester and Leeds. We have found a lot more than we expected.”
In the short term, the network’s research will inform a touring exhibition that will open later this year in Scarborough before travelling to other museums around the UK. In the long term, Scarborough Museums Trust has ambitions to create a museum on the history of the town, in which seaside heritage will play a key role. It comes at a time of resurgent public interest in the British seaside. The National Coastal Tourism Academy, which works to develop the visitor economy in English coastal regions, has identified a growing trend in visitor habits such as staycations and nostalgia tourism. In a 2016 report it said that seaside tourism had “regained its position as England’s largest holiday sector” and was now worth £8bn to the economy.
And although local authorities by the sea are no more immune to austerity than anywhere else, funding from sources such as the Big Lottery’s UK-wide Coastal Communities Fund, established in 2012, is having an impact on social and cultural regeneration in those areas. The fund has already distributed around £125m to support jobs and growth in coastal regions, and has a further £90m to hand out by 2021. “Things are shifting – it’s something positive amid all the gloom,” says Graham.
A similar optimism persists in Southend-on-Sea, the Essex holiday town that is home to the world’s longest pier, where the council is investing around £40m to create a new museum that it hopes will help regenerate the seafront. The museum will be based around the story of the Thames Estuary, using cutting- edge technology to interpret objects ranging from shipwreck material dredged from the Thames seabed to social history, fashion and fine art.
“Southend is a day-trip destination, but struggles with even this,” says Ciara Phipps, the assistant curator of social history at Southend Museums. “This new project is designed to bring people to the area for prolonged trips and repeat visits, predominantly generating income for the area.”
Because of its proximity to London, Southend can struggle to tempt potential visitors away from the cultural attractions on offer in the capital.
“We are trying to change this by evoking a sense of seaside nostalgia, with Southend being the original playground for cockneys,” says Phipps. “It was known as Whitechapel-on-Sea during its 20th century heyday.”
The museum will tap into the public appetite for all things vintage – a trend that ties in well to the evocative visual nature of seaside heritage with its striped beach huts, polka-dot bikinis and saucy postcards – as well as a collective nostalgia for childhood days spent by the sea.
“Sitting on the beach and eating fish and chips is something most people can fondly remember about trips to the seaside, and it is this type of nostalgia that people respond so well to,” says Phipps.
She hopes that the work of the Seaside Heritage Network will help to reinforce “the importance of these collections and their function within the museum display”.
Pooling resources
It would be impossible to consider seaside heritage without taking a look at Blackpool, the UK’s archetypal seaside holiday resort. The town could be described as one of the birthplaces of British popular entertainment, internationally known for attractions such as its illuminations, theatre shows, ballroom dancing festival and vintage wooden roller coasters.
Although Blackpool has weathered well compared with many other seaside towns (the resort attracts about 17 million visits a year) there is a feeling that its heritage and significance to British culture has been underrepresented.
To change this, Blackpool Council is developing the town’s first heritage museum, a £26m institution that will be in the Winter Gardens entertainment complex.
“The museum will celebrate Britain’s love affair with the seaside holiday and Blackpool’s role in shaping popular entertainment for over 150 years,” says Belinda Betts, the director of the Blackpool Museum Project. “The importance of resorts like Blackpool to British entertainment history is a neglected area and many areas of heritage that the Blackpool Museum Project will be focused on are under-represented in museums or at risk, such as circus and dance.”
Displays will feature a wide range of objects related to seaside entertainment culture, from swimming costumes and Punch and Judy puppets, to stage costumes and magic props, as well as the history of the only permanent circus left in the UK (see box, p23).
Betts also hopes the museum will help tackle one issue common to all coastal resorts – the seasonality of their visitor base. Blackpool could never be described as quiet, but it does experience a drop in tourists during the winter, and the new museum is seen as one way of generating footfall from out-of-towners and locals all year round.
“Although there is still a summer season in Blackpool, the new museum is one of the steps being taken to provide an all-year offer in the town,” says Betts. “We will programme seasonally and vary our offer of activities, events and temporary exhibitions. We intend to provide a museum that is fun and engaging for visitors, varied enough to encourage repeat visits and one that actively involves and engages with our local community.”
One question remains, however – with public funding diminishing every year, how will these new museums sustain themselves in the long run? Betts says that having the museum at the heart of Blackpool council’s regeneration and development strategy is key. It has a “robust business plan” in place and will be a charging attraction. Phipps believes there is an appetite among funders to invest in and reboot coastal towns.
“They do want to fund these types of towns, but they need the right information and project ideas to do so,” she says. “There is a real opportunity, if done correctly, to revitalise seaside holidays and what they have to offer.”
In spite of the wider climate of austerity, the future is looking sunny for seaside heritage. Time will tell if the great British seaside resorts of days gone by can rediscover their heyday. If they do, museums will have played a vital role.
Blackpool's circus heritage: a hard act to follow
Blackpool’s reputation as the birthplace of British light entertainment is well recognised. What may not be as widely known is that in addition to the variety of music hall, dancing and comedy acts that found their first taste of fame in the town, Blackpool is internationally known for its contribution to circus culture.
So far this element of Blackpool’s heritage has been unexplored; the town council only recently acquired the private business archive of the Tower Circus – the last continuously running, permanent circus show in the UK – and it is yet to be seen by the public. That will change this year after the council’s heritage department won a grant in the latest round of the Museums Association’s Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund to catalogue and develop the collection, and bring it into the public domain.
The scheme is separate but complementary to the Blackpool Museum Project and will inform displays on circus life in the new heritage museum. To this end, the project recently held a variety day with performers from the circus community and other forms of popular entertainment to gather their perspectives and ensure they are included in its displays.
“The circus is integrated into seaside history. Of all our collections, that one has the biggest international significance,” says Caroline Hall, the collections manager at Blackpool Council who is in charge of the Esmée Fairbairn scheme. “It has never been public – it’s never even been listed before. We want to show it off.”
Volunteers are helping the heritage department explore the archive and the project is designed to have a wider public impact through engagement with literacy programmes in local schools.
“We needed to do something that tackles an issue on the cliff-face of the social agenda,” says Hall. “We thought the circus would be an ideal subject for literacy in schools.”
She hopes the project will lay the groundwork for wider partnership work with the museum.
“It will be great for the museum project. Schools are more likely to understand where we are coming from when setting up new projects.
It shows them what our sector is doing and that they will have a museum that is able to listen to their needs.”