Saltburn-by-the-sea – Pierrot don’t surf

A ‘vision of a heavenly city above the cliffs’ led to the creation of this seaside resort, 150 years ago. Quaker industrialist Henry Pease saw the potential for development here and laid the foundation stone to the first row of houses in 1861. Victorian hi-tech followed, like a steampunk virus – railway (1861), pier (1869) and funicular ‘balanced cliff lift’ (1884) transforming ‘humble Saltburn into Saltburn-by-the-sea, the last word in northern seaside chic’. Today ‘Saltburn is at a crossroads, reinventing itself as a leisure destination for the 21st century, a haven for artists and walkers, surfers, cyclists, and lovers of the great English seaside’.

(Quotes from ‘Welcome to Saltburn by the sea’ brochure, (c) Finks Publishing. See also www.welcometosaltburn.co.uk )

This was the first new (to me) pier to be visited on a planned odyssey around all 55 surviving ones, together with trips (where practical) to some fictional and imaginary examples. On a late May Bank Holiday we drove here, past the Angel of the North and the model of Saltburn Pier on the outskirts of the town. We parked near a cafe in a gray drizzle. I looked up at Victorian terraces lowering above the cliffs. A miniature train went past. I had begun the journey in earnest.

We had lunch in the Vista Mar bar-cafe-restaurant, motto ‘love food | love drink | love life’. As we ate I watched a line of freight ships crawl along the horizon. Enjoyed the fishcake but only ate a token chip; I worry about such things, these days. I was nearly 50, a third the age of the town, health enhanced by surgery, tablets and ‘lifestyle’. The time-horizon had been bent in my favour, but for me the landscape was clearly finite – why had I decided to spend precious days wandering around grey margins and peering at strange embellishments? I felt like one of the Challengers of the Unknown, ‘living on borrowed time‘, not having supercharged adventures but instead drifting in some bosky netherworld.

After lunch we decided to explore separately. Outside Vista Mar I futzed with my cameras. A surprise loss of battery power in my digital camera left me with just the Lomo Spinner and a phone with which to capture images. [Further photographic entropy may have occurred - at the time of writing the film from the Lomo Spinner seems to have gone missing, so as yet I have no 360-degree picture to show you.] Head down in the rain I loped towards the pier.

Saltburn has been described as an inter-war ‘stronghold’ of Pierrot shows¹, suggesting that they persisted after other resorts had replaced them with more modern entertainments. Pierrots don’t seem to have hung around until now, however. What I did see were plenty of surfers and, despite the cold day, families enjoying the sandy beach and queuing for fish and chips.

I checked out the souvenirs – coffee mugs with digital images of the town and a plate showing leaping dolphins. Then I walked on to the pier, and took a couple of 360 shots with the Lomo [but you'll have to take my word for it.]

Squeals from children drifted up through the planks – beneath me they were sheltering from the rain and dashing into the waves. I walked down to the end where people were taking advantage of the best fishing spot. I guess I’ll be doing 55 walks like this and, despite the rain and greyness I felt cheered at the prospect of reaching many more of these joyfully absurd viewpoints over the waves.

Halfway back I leaned on the railings, looking along the coast – the classic ‘existential’ pier-pose. I heard a voice: ‘Edge is a man alone’. Jennie had found me. We walked through the amusement arcade – still no Pierrots, but a machine version of the King. (Photos above and below by Jennie; full set here.)

We took the Inclined Tramway (powered by a gas pump and 20,000 gallons of water) to the top of the cliffs, walked through the fossil garden and towards the main streets.

I liked the definite way the town, cliff-railway and pier all joined up. The town itself seemed tidy and purposeful. The brisk energy of the surfing beach, the clean lines of the promenade – these things had seduced my holiday-self. In the secondhand bookshop I found ‘How to See England’ by Edmund Vale (1937). His ‘How to See…’ instructions do not involve ‘wandering round all the piers² taking random pictures’ but I can empathise with his statement that ‘We must rely on a few set pieces and, everywhere else, endless hints, endless clues’ – stated over a drawing of a dolphin – itself perhaps one of the ‘clues’.

We wanted tea but found ourselves in the friendly Artsbank with its five floors containing a vast and splendid array of popular art: painting, prints, photography and sculpture. Amongst these I began to see another role that piers have – as visual subject matter; Saltburn pier was portrayed in various media by several contributors to the Artsbank of ‘affordable art’. Jennie suggested that, just as in Walking home to 50 I had become part of a fraternity of walkers, I would now join some loose group of artistic explorers of the coast. My technique of ‘just showing up with a toy camera’ [then losing the film] is slightly different than the application of skill and judgement seen in the Artsbank pieces, but nevertheless this seemed like a fine way to spend time. My mission began to make sense.

Earlier valetudinarians had sought out seaside resorts for the health-giving benefits of seawater, ‘ozone’, sunlight³ and leisure. I would do the same, seeking instead the therapeutic power of random arrival at places like this, finding streets named Diamond and Coral and Emerald or, hopefully, circa 55 other marvels.

We turned the corner into Marine Parade, with its tall Victorian terraces and curved viewpoint windows.

When we arrived these had seemed foreboding; now I would happily have taken a lease on a basement flat there. From this point the sea was visible again. This was the visionary city, still solid with detail in the miles of salty air: a supercharged adventure after all. On black iron railings, details smoothed by decades of painting and repainting, a fragment of leaf… no, a butterfly flickered in place.

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Notes

¹ In The British Seaside by John K Walton (MUP, 2000) referencing Pierrots of the Yorkshire Coast by Chapman & Chapman (Hutton Press, 1988)

² In fact he mentions piers not at all. Castles, mountains, rivers and monasteries get plenty of space. The spot in the index where piers might be mentioned is bracketed by ‘Pews, Church’ and ‘Pilgrim Fathers, the.’

³ The Sunlight League believed that sunlight was ‘nature’s disinfectant’, I learned in Walton’s book. The Sunlight League reminds me of John Sunlight, arch-enemy of Doc Savage… this link must be investigated further.

Anticipating Hunstanton

I hope to get to Hunstanton one day. Its pier may not currently be in physical existence, but the Hunstanton Pier Company has the majority of its 999-year lease left so who knows what will happen in the future? The now-gone pier features in the last Ealing Comedy Barnacle Bill…

…and George Harvey Bone, the protagonist of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, briefly contemplates the pier while he spends Christmas in Huntstanton with an aunt, in a prelude to the main action of the novel¹. Walking on the cliffs, he observes how ‘The little pier, completely deserted, jutted out into the sea, its silhouette shaking against the grey waves, as though it trembled with cold but intended to stay where it was to demonstrate some principle.’ However the pier’s Pavilion was destroyed by fire in 1939 (the same year Bone destroys himself in the novel), and most of the pier was lost in a storm in 1978.

So there are at least two reasons to visit. But travelling east takes a lot of energy and it will be a while before this happens. In the meantime here’s a very short film by Tina Richardson, schizocartographer supreme:

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¹ The Hunstanton sequence may be just a minor part of a ‘Novel of Darkest Earl’s Court’ featuring some famous passages in Brighton. However the early part of the book is memorable and has inspired at least one poem. For my part Bone’s sojourn with his aunt, a “sport” dutifully ‘pretending that she liked “cocktails”’ has always stuck in my mind as an example of cosy pathos. “But she was a good sort. She would be cheerful at tea, and then when she saw he didn’t want to talk she would leave him alone and let him sit in his chair and read The Bar 20 Rides Again, by Clarence Mulford. But of course he wouldn’t be reading—he would be thinking of Netta and how and when he was going to kill her.” The Bar 20 is a Hopalong Cassidy novel, 17th in an immensely popular series that had also been adapted as films, so it works as an arbitrary example of low-brow reading. However Hamilton himself is recorded as enjoying westerns as ‘leisure reading’ and, at the very end of his life, revealed to a young friend (the 22nd Earl of Shrewsbury and Talbot, who I once met briefly when he was Chancellor of the University where I worked) that he ‘longed to write stories of the Wild West!’ (as stated in Sean French’s biography.) So Hamilton, Bone and myself, in our respective times and 8-o’clock sitting rooms, all enjoy escaping into the literary freedom of the western plains. Bar 20 will go in my suitcase when I finally head Hunstantonwards.

There are some beautiful images of The Bar 20 Rides Again books, including the ‘yellow-covered’ edition that Bone would have had, here.

Southport Pier, golden shift

It is hard for me to get a fresh view of Southport Pier as we go there all the time. Nevertheless, as I turned the corner from Lord Street to be hit by sea breeze fragrant with chip fat and candy floss, I was struck by just how ‘seaside’ the town is – an aspect we often ignore as we head for shops and cinemas (even though the cinema is part of ‘Ocean Plaza’). As I walked down the wide street that leads to the pier, mechanical laughter followed me out of an amusement arcade with elaborately-dressed china dolls in the window.

I walked down by the Golden Gallopers carousel and the cafe where, even on a weekday, bikers were meeting up and chatting over their machines (as photographed by Jennie a couple of years ago.)

I peeked into the amusements at the very start of the pier. I felt oddly scared to go in, despite the inviting offer of cheap tea. For some reason I felt that this was grown-up territory, a place apart.

The pier starts over land – one reason I suppose that it is the second longest in the country. The overland end is surrounded by concrete aprons, large regenerated spaces with graffiti starting to grow in the hidden corners.

Further on to the pier I got out the Lomo Spinner. I may well have taken some great pictures at this point, but there is one serious mistake one can make with this camera – leaving it set on Rewind. If this happens no pictures are actually being taken. I spotted the error and took some 360 shots from the end of the pier.

This pier is surrounded by a long wilderness of sand. There are places of a kind on this territory, Horse Bank, Angry Brow, Foulnaze, The Bog Breast. Hints of danger and alarm in the shifting landscape that stretches to Lytham, Blackpool and future piers.

I had a cup of tea in the cafe, which also houses an antique amusement arcade. As I left, mechanical laughter followed me once again.

Brighton Pier: across a threshold

It was the last day of a long, episodic walk I had made from Southport Pier, lasting over three years. My destination was Brighton Pier, the end of that walk and the beginning of this project. Before I reached the pier I headed into the North Laine where I bought a Lomography 360 Spinner camera from Zoingimage in Sydney Street. The lady was very helpful, talking me through flm types and scanning. Explaining cross-processing to me, she opened a book to show an example – which turned out to be a photo of a pier. This felt like a nice piece of synchronicity to start with.

The Pier was busy on this hot Easter bank holiday and I was flowing with a huge crowd. I’m no pier obsessive; as a local I rarely visited this one, or indeed any of the tourist spots. For the Council tourist people Brighton is ‘vibrant, colourful and creative’, a place where ‘daytime traditional seaside fun mixes seamlessly with night time funky beachside club culture’, while for a geographer (Shields, 1991) it is an ‘institutionalised liminal zone of carnival’, ‘a social as well as geographical margin, a ‘place apart”. But for me actually living there such things were merely a sideshow. However on this trip I began to sense dimly this ‘carnivalesque’, the seaside’s ‘overflow of meaning on the anomalous’ (Fiske, 1989). There was a vast erotic energy flooding to the beach, down from the station, through the streets and shops and bars of the town, terminating here, on a strange Victorian platform jutting over the waves.

‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial.’ – Turner, 1969

There seems to be no definite end to Brighton Pier; the closest one can get to gaze out to sea is a sort of side-bay behind the fairground machinery. Still, it was a place to look at the sea. ‘There curves and glimmers outward to the unknown / The old unquiet ocean.’ If I had crossed some pier-threshold and been transformed, it was to become one of the tourists – plunging into the seaside carnival in search of elusive pleasures, staring out at the ultimate horizon, then turning around and going home with a pocket full of bizarre souvenirs.

‘…there were little lights on the sea facing the majestic Metropole between the two piers outlined with blazing jewels. He wondered what it was all about – the pounding sea, the beach, the rain, the stars, the lights, the piers, Brighton, Hitler, Netta, himself, everything. Why?….” Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

References

John Fiske, Reading the Popular, Unwin Hyman 1989
Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: alternative geographies of modernity, Routledge 1991
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, Aldine 1969