A seaside tradition
Most of our current perceptions of the British, and especially the English and Welsh, seaside are all the stronger for having Victorian roots. Indeed, the survival of English Professor John Walton, in the face of changing tastes and intensifying competition at home and abroad, owes much to positive associations of the 'traditional' summer holiday. Childish innocence (buckets, spades and sandcastles), nature (starfish, rock-pools and gulls as well as the power and tranquillity of the sea itself), simple 'old-fashioned' fun (donkeys, roundabouts, Punch and Judy, boat trips, beach entertainers), and tasty, informal seaside food: fattening, glutinous and eaten out of the bag while on the move, in defiance of conventional table manners (fish and chips, ice cream, candy-floss, cockles and whelks).
Most of these attributes, or their identification with enjoyment, are invented Victorian traditions. They are only part of the panorama of Victorian seaside attractions, which also embraced the fashionable promenade, military and German 'oompah' bands, a spectrum of seaside entertainment's from minstrels and pierrots to music-hall and variety which now survive only as self-conscious 'heritage' revivals. The piers on which many of these activities took place, where they survive, may now be drawn into the cloud of affectionate nostalgia through which the idealised seaside of the past is viewed and, where possible, reproduced.
Published: 2001-03-01
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