Profile: Clare Hunt
Seaside fun in Southend
Clare Hunt is the curatorial manager at Southend Museums Service. Southend-on-Sea will play an active role in Estuary 2016, a new art, music and literature biennial celebrating the Essex and Kent shorelines, from 17 September to 2 October.
Are we proud of our coastal communities?
When I started working here, the Central Museum did not have anything to do with the bucket and spade side of history. A lot of that was down to snobbery; an old-fashioned desire to concentrate on serious social history and archaeology. But that thinking sparked the Seaside Heritage Network, a group of us who realised the importance of coastal culture in this country. Things are changing from the days when we were simply lumped in with maritime history.
What stories do you tell?
We have a collection of 500 bathing suits that say so much about fashion, design, fabrics and social mores, as well as what people wore on the beach. A day at the seaside also encompasses travel and transport and, in Southend in days gone by, that meant the paddle steamers that moored at the pier from London. This was the eastenders’ playground, Whitechapel-on-Sea as they used to call it. Suddenly, it wasn’t so genteel anymore; it was full of cockneys and candy floss.
What’s your contribution to the Estuary festival?
We’re running a pop-up museum from a container at the top of the cliffs, where the foundations for a new museum were laid out years ago. The focus will be the hundreds of shipwrecks that lie in the estuary waters. An artist has been commissioned to make a map showing the wrecks. We’re also getting a German fighter plane.
How did your museum career start?
I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school but a year’s training came up at a local Devon museum. It was aiming for Accreditation so there was a lot of cataloguing work. I was obsessed with dinosaurs – London’s Natural History Museum was my favourite place – but I had no idea you could work in a museum. I ended up accessioning thousands of shells that I identified from my little Collins Book of Shells. It would have put some people off for life, but it proved I had the right personality for this work.
Are we proud of our coastal communities?
When I started working here, the Central Museum did not have anything to do with the bucket and spade side of history. A lot of that was down to snobbery; an old-fashioned desire to concentrate on serious social history and archaeology. But that thinking sparked the Seaside Heritage Network, a group of us who realised the importance of coastal culture in this country. Things are changing from the days when we were simply lumped in with maritime history.
What stories do you tell?
We have a collection of 500 bathing suits that say so much about fashion, design, fabrics and social mores, as well as what people wore on the beach. A day at the seaside also encompasses travel and transport and, in Southend in days gone by, that meant the paddle steamers that moored at the pier from London. This was the eastenders’ playground, Whitechapel-on-Sea as they used to call it. Suddenly, it wasn’t so genteel anymore; it was full of cockneys and candy floss.
What’s your contribution to the Estuary festival?
We’re running a pop-up museum from a container at the top of the cliffs, where the foundations for a new museum were laid out years ago. The focus will be the hundreds of shipwrecks that lie in the estuary waters. An artist has been commissioned to make a map showing the wrecks. We’re also getting a German fighter plane.
How did your museum career start?
I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school but a year’s training came up at a local Devon museum. It was aiming for Accreditation so there was a lot of cataloguing work. I was obsessed with dinosaurs – London’s Natural History Museum was my favourite place – but I had no idea you could work in a museum. I ended up accessioning thousands of shells that I identified from my little Collins Book of Shells. It would have put some people off for life, but it proved I had the right personality for this work.