'Too negative ': Welsh seaside images (1979) | Hacker News Reader

'Too negative ': Welsh seaside images (1979)

theguardian.com

152 pointsbloat70 comments

I grew up in a nearby English seaside town around the time the photographs were taken and as a child I was taken to the places in the photos by my family. These were once bustling places full of holidaying industrial workers but as the UK's industrial base declined so did these resorts; better service and weather was available overseas for not much more in terms of real cost. My hometown is now a standard English costal town, renovated 50 years too late by private developers to whom the local authorities have sold or leased land at rock bottom prices, a heady mix of drug addicts, tracksuited iPhone Facebook addicts and old dears struggling with their trolley bags. Still a lovely place to be when the weather is fine, but basically, purgatory.

My childhood holidays were to Blackpool, Morecambe and Southport. Basically the north-west coast. Rhyl and Anglesey were occasional choices too. I loved Anglesey and crossing the Menai bridge, driving through all the tunnels on the way. The joy of having parents split between Lancashire and Cheshire.

That was in the 90s and early 2000s. Morecambe is famous for a load of underpaid cockle pickers drowning when the tide came in, if I remember right. Southport and Blackpool were great when the tide was out, you could literally cross the estuary separating them if you were stupid enough. The beaches weren't always so fun unless you liked strolling through a mass grave of washed up jellyfish. And the tide was a force to be reckoned with when the sea wall along the prom was as tall as a house.

But that was then. All I've heard about Blackpool, for a long time, is that it became a stag/hen party hotspot and otherwise a dump. Southport was more or less a retirement community like Lytham St Anne's.

Shame really, just a part of the country that's been neglected since Thatcher. And you've got the lake district barely an hour's drive away. Such beautiful nature.

My dad grew up in Rhyl, and we used to go on holiday to Anglesey a lot when i was a kid too. It is indeed an amazing part of the world for natural beauty.

But the towns have seen better days. I remember seeing the infamous closed-down shop branded "Rhyl's Biggest Receiver of Stolen Goods":

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gazh1/184659511/

(as the caption says, mouse over to read the notes - the slogan is not what it seems)

My nan lived in Anglesey, so growing up in Tamworth (couldn't get any further away from the coast), our yearly summer hols there were fantastic. I loved it. I remember a beach there, Newborough I think it was. I remember it looking tropical in the summer it was so nice.

I've always lived in Southport and your assessment is more or less true. But as I'm preparing to bring up a kid here, the decent schools, parks, and services are all I'm really looking for in a place to live. There are regeneration schemes under way with various levels of promise: https://standupforsouthport.com/southport-town-deal-5-marine...

The only other thing I'd add, like a commenter below, is that we went walking the other day on the frosty grassland of the beach, under a beaming wintersun, and it was really quite beautiful.

You could make almost anywhere look this grim, in B&W on a rainy day. That said, I spent much of my childhood in south wales in the 1960s and 1970s, and it had grim writ large through it. Not always, but often.

Also places of stunning beauty, and history. You have to know how to pick.

Contrast this with e.g. rural japan (Toyama fishing harbour) which has gutted fish heaps, rotting jetties, next to amazingly cared for plants wrapped in hessian with bamboo struts, Onsen, amazing Kaiseki food...

Rhyl can be lovely. Rhyl can be cold and forbidding. the 1970s were a time of 17% mortgage interest, rampant inflation, mass unemployment... I went there hunting diesel shunting locomotives in my train spotting days.

If you want grim wales, Barry Island. But then, steam engine burial ground. Yes, grim, but also amazing. Like chernobyl but for steam engines. (maybe thats gone now)

To be fair, British Seaside is black & white and rainy, all the time, for all intents and purposes.

Before moving to England, I never had a use for the word “dreary”. But it fits a place like Morecombe or Blackpool so perfectly.

I live in Blackpool.

On Sunday, I was walking north from North Pier, slightly below the sea wall; with the sound of the waves rolling over the vast beach (rated as "Excellent"). There was pure January light reflecting from those incredible hills of Cumbria, and I had 11 miles of immaculate footpaths ahead of me.

You can find dreary anywhere, but also incredible beauty if you look; Blackpool, or Paris, or anywhere inbetween.

> ... steam engine burial ground

That was an interesting rabbit hole - it would appear to be Woodham brothers [1].

"297 withdrawn British Railways steam locomotives were sent, of which 213 were rescued." One notable rescue being the Hogwarts Express [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodham_Brothers

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-45303331

It was pretty much the standard story for any nascent steam preservation society in the 60s and 70s: is this worth a day trip to Barry Island, to find something.

I may be wrong, but its possible predating on wrecks there early on, reduced the viability of restoration for the latecomers. Its one of those net-present-value things.

The really good locos got held back, didn't wind up in Barry. Stuff in the York railway museum, the flying scotsman, Sir Nigel Gresley. But steam enthusiasts like domestic, boring, black little saddle-tank shunters, factory locomotives, the wierd and wonderful. They didn't have good hopes for being kept, in the big switch to diesel-electric.

I believe some stuff wound up being kept, because e.g. british steel (as was) hung onto them to run shunting in private railroads. So, if you had steam on-hand, you could convert from a coal fired steam engine, to a steam engine which re-charged its tank, and not have to do anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preserved_British_indu...

I feel like anywhere else in the world North Wales would be taken much more advantage of. It's a stunningly beautiful place, maybe one of the most beautiful in the world, but it is massively impoverished and undervisited and it is hard to understand why.

Are you referring to the mountains in the south-west direction from Liverpool ? Lovely place, a true Voyage going there.

They don't really want visitors. They are quite upset that they have been covered in London newspapers in recent years.

They're perfectly (un)happy just being weird and Welsh.

I've spent a lot of time there and by best friend lives there.

Tourism is a blessing and a curse. If you’re content with your way of life, you’ll probably prefer the status quo over change that causes “gentrification” and other maladies of progress.

I visited a couple years back. Did a week long drive through wales. It was absolutely gorgeous.

I've been lucky enough to have been on a few holidays in both Scotland and Ireland for a few weeks at a time (I'm Canadian, but I lived in England for a just under a year). I found the people in Whales to be considerably less friendly than anywhere else in the British isles. To a point where I walked into a pub in a small town and people switched from speaking English to Welsh. I plan to return to Ireland and Scotland, but based on my experience with the Welsh, have no real desire to revisit Wales.

I'm sure they would have warmed up a bit if they'd realised you were Canadian. They probably assumed you were English, or, worse still, from a different part of Wales.

This. When in Wales always make sure they know you're not English. You'll get a MUCH warmer reception

> I walked into a pub in a small town and people switched from speaking English to Welsh.

I suspect they were already conversing in Welsh before you walked in.

In fact, I've sat in many different pubs in North Wales, but not once did I switch from English to Welsh when someone walked in. I'd have no idea what languages they were capable of, and in any case would never be speaking in English with other Welsh speakers.

I apologize for any snark, but we do get tired of this trope. Perhaps this sketch will lighten the atmosphere

https://youtu.be/tJ5DzMmBuwQ

I expect the same thing. My cousins and their friends just speak Welsh, but like anybody who's totally bilingual, they do randomly flip when a word or phrase comes faster in the other language.

Fair enough if that is your experience but I don't recognise that at all. My parents (as English people) moved to North Wales and people have been extremely warm and welcoming to them and also to me whenever I have visited. There is some beautiful scenery and the many of the towns are also very run down. This problem is likely to get worse in the next few years as the development funding the region was getting from the EU will now cease due to brexit.

I love these photos and there is a lot of truth in them. I myself have taken some amusingly bleak photos on the British coastline although clearly not as amazing as these.

Going to the Irish Atlantic Coast with my family made me want to visit Wales. I studied in Swansea in 2005, and took one trip up to North Wales. The Wild Atlantic Way in Ireland is extremely tourist friendly, and it would have been interesting to contrast it with Wales. From my memory, it's sparser, less catered to visitors, and more rugged and dramatic.

It’s quite difficult to actually get there, for one...

I’ve visited some of the “Best Beaches In The World” - Hawaii, Caribbean, Fiji - but none as good (as a beach) as some of those in Pembrokeshire (south west Wales) where I grew up

Now, many had much better facilities, and often much larger crowds, but the beach aspect is pretty darn good.

North Wales is nice too, I suppose

If you’re not in the oil refining business though, good jobs are really hard to find, and everything is rundown compared to my childhood. Those “offseason” photos could now be taken at any time of the year

Rhyl Pavilion 1870:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/260064

Seaside 1950:

https://gohomeonapostcard.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/wp-319...

The piers stood as major tourist attractions for (more than a century?):

https://www.cheshirelife.co.uk/out-about/places/the-piers-of...

Edit: Many postcards of the piers:

http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/Wales-Piers.html

Im from Liverpool, live in Chester and love North Wales. I encourage everyone to visit this amazingly beautiful part of world.

I actually rather liked these images because there’s a certain grit to it that is still sometimes present.

My best mate lives in Llanberis, right next to the Snowdon railroad and the waterfall. His drinking water comes from a pipe upstream.

It can be incredibly beautiful there. I've been many times. It can also be very bleak. Still, it will always hold a fond place in my heart.

I haven't made it over from Canada in a couple of years, but I'm sure I'll be back some day.

"Trudging slowly over wet sand

Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen

This is the coastal town

That they forgot to close down

Armageddon, come Armageddon!

Come, Armageddon! Come!

Everyday is like Sunday

Everyday is silent and grey

Hide on the promenade

Etch a postcard :

"How I Dearly Wish I Was Not Here"

In the seaside town

That they forgot to bomb

Come, come, come, nuclear bomb"

This remind me of Killip: https://time.com/4185463/chris-killip-martin-parr-in-flagran... (there's a slider to view the rest of the photos)

These are on the other side of the country though. But same 'atmosphere' more or less. Kind of a photographic counterpart to and reminiscent of 'Post War Dream'

Does anyone remember what the "You Have Been Warned" sign was all about? The full text of the warning itself must have been an impressive sight, if that was just the reminder.

I'm going to guess it was the tides.

I prefer to imagine that is the entirety of the text - a bleak reminder of the doom that hovers over all of us.

Wales is gorgeous.. perfect place for a software company or to work remote. The govt needs to incentivize remote work to revitalize the local economies that need it.

yeah, i'm sure a bunch of highly paid software engineers swooping in to deprived communities and inflating property prices would go down well with the locals...

If you incentivize remote work, those workers may be spread out enough across communities that they wouldn't necessarily impact the overall housing market in any one community.

Sounds like you're applying a lot of quite American assumptions to rural Wales, to be honest.

In general, rural areas and small towns are not automatically deprived (though they can be), they are quite happy with attracting more well-paid jobs into the community to support the local economy, and they tend not to suffer from chronic shortages of accommodation like the big cities do.

Speaking for my cousins who live in one of these towns, the rich English are moving in, buying up swaths of land that was farmable or whatever, and using it for private vacation homes that they don't use that much. They ship things in rather than buy local. They don't try to speak the language. The list of complaints goes on and on.

That's not the same thing as a few more software developers living full time in the town, in fairness. More remote workers would be akin to having a few extra GPs or solicitors around the place, doing local-person stuff like going to the pub or buying groceries and school uniforms for their kids.

I do sympathise with your cousins though. The few Irish-speaking regions left in the country are constantly facing similar challenges.

> Sounds like you're applying a lot of quite American assumptions to rural Wales, to be honest.

I'm British, I know Wales pretty well. Rural north Wales is pretty deprived

I'm guilty of what I thought I was rebutting. Apologies for my presumptuousness. I do still think that a handful of software developers spread across several smallish towns would be no bad thing though.

Morrissey's 'Everyday is Like Sunday' makes more sense after seeing the photographs.

Well shoot it in B&W and style them deliberately you can make any place look like a dump.

I went to Barmouth (one of the towns mentioned) as a kid and it was great.

I agree, there's something about B&W that makes anyplace look drab and rundown. I think it's because dirt is usually grey, so all the walls and items just look dirty.

It sometimes works for landscapes - especially at night. But for people it, unfortunately, makes them look like they're not alive anymore.

If you've ever seen someone who passed away, they somewhat look like a B&W photo of themselves.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is a great counter example: often lively, fun and showing captured movement rather than stillness and pathos.

Worth a look as the antidote to the OP.

I find Martin Parr’s Last Resort more controversial and they’re in colour. It really moved me as a kid when I first saw it.

Both are great in my opinion. I don’t care what Morrissey thinks, I love the British seaside.

These photos make me think of Malcolm Pryce‘s surreal Welsh noir books. I know they’re set in a different part of Wales but North Wales is definitely on my list of places to visit.

I was going to mention Martin Parr. His website (https://www.martinparr.com/) has a selection of his work.

Barmouth! Circa 1979. When we realised we were swimming in turds and shit tickets we decamped to Harlech.

That said, most of my holidays were in Wales back then and the Barmouth turd regatta is my only grim memory.

> The project arose when the Mostyn Gallery in Llandudno was due to reopen in 1979 after decades of closure. Its director commissioned a photographic project from Bennett, with the intention of capturing the atmosphere of North Wales coastal resorts in winter

> With a working title of Anatomy of Melancholy, an exhibition was scheduled soon after the gallery’s refurbishment and reopening. Bennett’s project was ultimately deemed likely to cause funding problems by showing the region’s resorts in too negative a light

I had to laugh at "Anatomy of Melancholy". I'm not sure what the gallery was expecting, but I can see why they might've been apprehensive about showing these off in their freshly-opened local attraction!

I wonder how they'd feel about this Goldie Looking Chain joint, then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvuxYxmlfrc

North and South Wales don't really mix. Cwmbran is as much of a dump as somewhere like Rhyl that is shown in the pictures. One member of GLC became a local politician to try to improve things.

The sense of “something has changed here?” is so deep in places like this. They are populated still but the architecture points clearly to a time when there was so much more going on in the area.

All around the UK there are spa towns and resorts that were clearly bustling with wealth (community and personal) a century ago, but have now slumped in popularity.

A town like Malvern for example. It was the height of Edwardian (I think that’s the right era) sophistication. A must visit tourist destination for the middle classes. All that really remains anymore of the town’s prestige are the schools and the immovable hills. You see some spa infrastructure still but a lot of it is derelict.

I was in Llanthony valley a few summers ago and took a really interesting guided tour through some local unpaved roads. Our guide, Henry was born in the village in 1930. He showed us the sites of two former pubs, now completely gone except for some York stones on the threshold. They’d drink there, or walk an hour across the valley to the pubs on the other side when they felt like it. We looked through the old school that taught 15 children of local families. It’s now just another big house with two cars parked outside.

The big house up the top had a squire who rented land to Henry and his father where they grew valuable soft fruit crops for sale in the local market towns. The village had other services: a shop and a farrier.

All gone. The fruit plots are now overtaken with ash and briar. People still lived in all of the houses, but they were now the country homes of people who worked in the big local towns, or London, or had just retired to the area. I don’t begrudge them for that, and it was surely a much poorer life back in the 1950s, but it was also a much more of a local one and that felt like it had a lot of value. It also felt like the people were all there but they just didn’t know each other any more. Or they did, but they didn’t work together, so it was a dormitory suburb albeit in the heart of a Welsh valley. No one worked there.

It felt quite melancholic. The big towns took so much away from the second cities, villages, and countryside. When you can find British communities that still thrive away from the major cities it is magical.

https://www.malvernremembers.org.uk/wp-content/gallery/great...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwmyoy

http://thirdeyetraveller.com/st-martins-church-cwmyoy-crooke...

...and here’s another great link:

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-tenbury-wells-spa-...

"When you can find British communities that still thrive away from the major cities it is magical"

Where's that, do you think?

You can probably find them anywhere if you can get access to the local old (ahem, established) people. It can be a tough crowd to break into though. Coming at it from the right angle helps. Deference and respect to the local history is just as important as a trip to any foreign place, or rather, a place where you are a foreigner.

Local businesses unlock a lot of connections. Hardwood sawmills and butchers have worked well for me. A good local butcher supplies the best local pubs so getting to know one can unlock access to t’other. Pubs are extremely variable in the localness of their management. A village pub that’s owned by Greene King and no longer has a snug is a world away from a village freehouse with a family friendly public bar and a saloon bar full of sozzled young farmers.

Knowledge of the countryside and Anglicanism helps too. The old guard’s interests overlap a lot with bird watching and Christ. I’m not religious but I am spiritual enough to enjoy chapel, and choral music is a free gig if you’re into that sound. People are glad to meet you in church: it’s the easiest way of signalling you take the community seriously. With all respect to the actual religious practice, in terms of the old ways far too many villages became Alpha / evangelical over the past few decades and in my limited experience it’s those communities that are letting go of the past. (This is a sweeping generalisation so I hope I’m not offending anyone.)

I used to think that venerable old cultures were a mystical thing one only found in the Far East but they can also be right on your doorstep.

Spain, Australia, Florida.

Nowhere.

The brightest and best leave to go to university and find decent jobs. The dregs stay behind creating a vicuous circle. In some areas retirees move in because the prices are so attractive but they bring very little economic activity with them. Often the only employer is the state which has perverse effects on local businesses (they can't compete with the higher public sector wages).

> The sense of “something has changed here?” is so deep in places like this. They are populated still but the architecture points clearly to a time when there was so much more going on in the area.

My grandmother lived in Llandudno, and the town is the acme of that. So many incredibly grand hotels, arcades, and so on, all now tatty and grim. Some cousins were staying at the Grand Hotel, the biggest and boldest hotel, up on the side of the peninsula. The bedsheets were dirty and the rooms stank.

I have no idea what you could do about any of this.

My old classmate ( a colorectal surgeon ) was moved to a job in a smallish town in Wales as a punishment.

He upset a few too many people in NHS management.

The past is, as they say, another country. I was a child in the UK in the 70s and that is indeed what people looked like. These days, the pictures seem grim, but people were happy enough. I think it's the clothes. By 2020 standards, everyone dressed very formally, and it just looks a bit alien and unnerving now.

Good photographer but very unprofessional. Taking photos of the ugliest people available or from food sellers picking their noses in the job -after you are hired to promote tourism in that place, none less- is clearly not what your employer expected from you.

Going ballistic artsy and finding something nice to photograph at the sea in winter wasn't so complicated after all; the ocean is gorgeous in winter. It seems that he was very unhappy in that place for some reason (maybe somebody robbed him?) and that his relationship with the locals was very difficult and sour. This photo gallery is the definition of revenge.

Some context in a BBC feature on the same subject:

https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-55537454

And the photographer's website with many more pictures:

https://michaelbennett.uk/pier-closing-time

Fun fact: the exhibition that has brought these pictures to our attention was apparently co-organised by the Turner Contemporary in Margate, which is itself another seaside town they forgot to shut down.

Margate is in full hipster renaissance though. Not sure when gentrification will reach North Wales, maybe quicker if working from home is more culturally acceptable.

One of my best friends moved to Wales 4 years ago. His wife was from there, missed home and he could work remotely, so why not buy twice the house for a quarter the price?

He's back in the greater London now after 4 miserable years. The locals objected to an outsider in the village. He was refused service at the local pub. The pub shut ultimately because of lack of business. But he was sick of it and came back here where people don't care where you were born and things open on Sundays.

His wife didn’t cut any ice with them or he didn’t speak Welsh?

By total coincidence, I’m on the last couple of chapters of Paul Theroux’s 1983 travelogue The Kingdom by the Sea. He described these exact scenes in great detail, visiting only three years after the photos.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_by_the_Sea

In 1979, Thatcher had just become PM, so when Theroux got there, the slump foreshadowed in these images was in full ruinous collapse.

I grew up in Tamworth, which is about the furthest you can get from the coast, but my nan lived in Anglesey in North Wales, and in the summer it looked vaguely tropical it was so stunning. It wasn't touristy at the time though. Local councils seem to have a habit of 'tackyfying' seaside towns in the name of tourism unfortunately.

Britain's future now we've brexited. Back to the great days of the 80s!

Wonderful stuff. The bleak tone reminds me of Robert Frank's book "The Americans."

“I was asked to capture the melancholy of seaside resorts out of season,” he says.

Well they're terrible photos. Black and white with sharp contrast and bad angles. Whoever is displaying these likely does not want to you like what you see.

Humanity has gone to hell in a handcart since then. So we marvel over such pics from the past: the nostalgia, the simplicity, how natural people are with themselves and each other, that we now consider them wonderful glimpses of a bygone age, myself included. But life is and always was a struggle, and I don't blame people at time considering the images too negative. They wanted something better and things were getting better, for a brief time. They had the future to look forward to. No more.

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