Description
I have to declare two interests. I am a product of a seaside town in the north-east coast of England (Whitley Bay, near Newcastle), a down-at-heel Victorian/Edwardian resort. My partner is from Skegness, also a down-at-heel Victorian/Edwardian resort on the east coast of England. I also harbour an academic interest in travelling fun-fairs. Between these two, I am interested in the static, fixed-site fairground on the sea-side, and the role this plays as a core ingredient of sea-side architecture and urban planning.For this Leisure Coasts Symposium, I will present this and other requisite ingredients in the formulaic design of sea-side leisure towns, and start to tease out some of the paradoxical exceptionalism that is either designed into or claimed by such sites. In particular, I hope to join a discussion on the relations, connections and exchanges that are central to sea-side architecture and leisure. I will follow some of these— between travelling and fixed-site fairs; between visitors and residents; between the coast and the (in)land. It’s hard to avoid the politics of class and taste in this exchange, both historically and in the present: here, I am also interested in the recent ‘export’ or ‘extraction’ of seaside and leisure architectures away from the coast and into corporate and other spaces and sites of neoliberalism.
| Period | 28 May 2025 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom |