Seaside
Surveys
Stephen Daniels
Professor of Cultural Geography,
School of Geography, The University of Nottingham
The demands for publicity and souvenirs have made holiday resorts, throughout
their history, prime sites of picture making. They are shown in a variety
of media, from published prints to visitor's snapshots, and in adventurous
compositions, such as 18th century unrolling coastal panoramas and modern
multi-frame picture postcards. Resorts themselves have been organized
as arenas of spectatorship, with views from towers, clifftops and the
proverbial trip-round-the-island. Fellow tourists as well as topography
occupy the field of vision, looked at, down upon, laughed at, ogled. As
a child in the fifties I remember seaside resorts stocked with optical
gadgets, penny operated telescopes, illuminated maps, binocular viewfinders
and slot machines which promised What the Butler Saw.
The British seaside society of the spectacle has distinctive cultural variations, the carefully planned precincts of the polite, with squares, crescents and promenades, the more gaudily commercial or improvised arenas of the plebs, piers, beaches, amusement arcades. Seaside resorts have always attracted a darker counter-image, documentary-style photographs of bleak out of season seafronts, crescents and gardens gone to seed, more recently of benefit claimants in boarding houses and asylum seekers on promenades.
Margate, developed from the 18th century, has always (in contrast to neighbouring Ramsgate) had a slightly rough reputation as place of fun rather than recreation. And yet, in part to improve its image as a place of cultural tourism, it is now trading on its place in British art. As much as that other resort Venice, Margate is a key site in the landscape art of JMW Turner, depicted throughout his life and with searching views of its society and scenery. An Arts Council funded Turner Centre is planned although Turner's views of town are unlikely to leave their present galleries in London, Yale and Oxford on a permanent basis. The cultural register of the place has been raised in metropolitan (although not all local) circles by its role in the autobiographical art of Britart Bad-Girl Tracey Emin. Her solo debut in New York featured a beach hut shipped from Margate and she is planning a feature film on the resort in the seventies entitled Top Spot.
Margate's
place in British geographical awareness is perhaps less certain. A current
web-based, school test lists Margate alongside Cardiff, Swansea and Bangor,
in a multiple-choice question asking to name the capital of Wales. This
exhibition, with its representations of subjects such as networks, routeways,
land use, urban morphology and environmental perception positions Margate
within a broader and richer tradition of geographical knowledge and imagination.
It opens a space for exchanges between geography and art, extending the
seaside resort's rich reputation for visual culture.
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For further information about this project or web site contact: Gary.Priestnall@nottingham.ac.uk