The Creation of Place Image in Interwar Clacton and Frinton by Laura Chase

THE CHOICE OF TIME AND PLACE

Serried ranks of beach huts form a striking visual component of many English seaside resort towns, introducing elements of a miniaturised suburbia into a maritime landscape. In larger resorts, they contrast with the more urban presence of the Pier and its garish amusements.  Jointly, they prompted my interest in exploring the history and use of a place which had acquired an iconic status as a timeless symbol of escape and as a hybrid of the natural and the artificial; the naughty and the restrained.  These oppositional characterisations are epitomised by the comic seaside postcard, where images of release and rejuvenation vie with those of discomfort and restriction.  These tensions also characterised the division of the resorts into the seemingly fixed categories of popular and select, with the artificial and the naughty seen to be in the ascendant at the popular resort, and the natural and the restrained at the select resort….

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