PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE LAST RESORT, BY MARTIN PARR.
“Do you have any brochures about New Brighton?”
“No.”
“Have you run out?”
“We never had any.”
IT WASN’T THE FACT that I was in an office marked “Tourist Information” that annoyed me. It was that the office was on England’s New Brighton seafront.
A hundred years ago tourists had all the information they needed. New Brighton, on the shores of the Mersey, was famous for its miles of sands, with bathing machines, donkey rides, oyster stalls, and minstrel shows on the pier. Its 621-foot steel tower rivaled the one in Blackpool, further up the coast. Then gradually it all went wrong. First the tower was dismantled. Then the pier went rotten. Somehow the beach disappeared. These days there is only a seawall arid an outdoor swimming pool. Instead of the 35-acre garden with a Japanese cafe, a Himalayan railway, an American rollerskating rink, and a lake of Venetian gondolas (manned by real Venetian gondoliers), now there is only an indoor funfair, a bowling alley, and some amusement arcades.
The place looks and feels like the ruin it is. Small children who pay ten pence to board miniature cars and ride around on tracks with life-sized fiberglass jungle animals on islands in the center must be dismayed to find that the hippo has had his stomach kicked in, and, with an unexpected touch of realism, that the crocodile rising from the pool and baring his teeth has a Wellington boot jammed into his mouth. This is characteristic of Merseyside. “Vandals have done more damage than the Germans ever did,” said one Liverpudlian hotel proprietor.
Adult British holidaymakers abroad often have faces the color of boiled lobster; at home their pleasures tend to be less Bacchanalian. Their young divide themselves into groups and proceed to beat each other senseless. The elders lie half naked for hours in uncomfortable positions, complaining about food and bad accommodation. Physically, even the day-tripper needs the constitution of a navvie—the ability to carry more than your own weight in deck chairs; to withstand extremes of heat and cold; to change into swimming trunks with hundreds of people looking on, using only a single towel and one pair of hands; to queue for ice-cream cones, then walk in the sun with vanilla-flavored muck dripping off your elbows; to hobble for miles over beaches strewn with broken bottles, dog-shit, and unexploded World War II bombs. . . . Emotionally, a day at the seaside demands the exquisite masochism that only a saint can muster. The test is to be able to run out of the water, your teeth chattering with cold, using your hotel towel as protection against the biting wind, shake seaweed and dead marine life out of your hair, look a perfect stranger in the eye and say, “I wouldn’t go to Spain if they paid me.”
The seaside temperament so regularly returns to play, nakedness, oral gratification, and moral unaccountability that it comes as no surprise when children are employed as the permanent excuse for their adults’ behavior—such bad behavior that New Brighton holidaymakers even rejoice in mild punishments like being crammed onto the terraces of the Lido or relegated to odd comers of the promenade. Thus they are allowed to demonstrate their exile from the humdrum and civilized by lying down in garbage or by huddling so close to other groups that the dissolution of the family unit seems imminent. With the funfair to provide a valve for excesses of greed or to punish fantasies of omnipotence, the stage is set for a willed return to childhood, a Golden Age with permanent undertones of Dionysiac revelry. (These never surface. Temptation to actual excess is curbed by ritual consumption of foods with heavily sexualized shapes, like the hotdog or the ring doughnut.) The feeling may be related to that world we have lost—a world of play in which games made up on the spur of the moment can be more fulfilling than those learned by repetition, in which an old cardboard box will yield more fantasies than any computer. If so, then New Brighton, unacknowledged even by its inhabitants, is in reality the essential resort, since it so palpably dramatizes the frolic through ruins that is the essential seaside state.
It may not last much longer: Next to the tourist-information office is another marked “New Brighton Development Corporation.” Inside are plans for a £65 million plan to restore something like the old New Brighton, with a theme park, a conference center, three new hotels, a sports arena, and much more. Book your holiday now to avoid next summer’s rush. The place may never be as boring again.
Stuart Morgan writes regularly for Artforum.
Martin Parr is a photographer who lives in Liverpool; this series, which he titles “The Last Resort,” will be shown at the Open Eye in Liverpool this December and subsequently at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
