Towns by the sea made their mark

1:59pm Monday 11th August 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

Bold new buildings, many of them a delight to the eye, studded seafronts in Sussex during the 1930s and some still survive.

A new book called England’s Seaside Resorts (English Heritage, £24.99) says modernist architecture found a second home by the sea away from its base in London and the Home Counties.

Authors Allan Brodie and Gary Winter add: “New construction techniques matched perfectly with new attitudes towards fresh air and sunshine.

“Architectural forms that had more justification in the clear atmosphere of the seaside inspired the design of numerous leisure and entertainment buildings, hotels, blocks of flats and private houses.”

Leading the way, in the unlikely resort of Bexhill, was the improbable figure of an English aristocrat.

The ninth Earl De La Warr was a forward-thinking man. He persuaded the council to be bold when designing a badly needed new entertainment centre.

The design brief specified the building should be of modern materials with big windows. Serge Chermayeff and Erich Mendelsohn came up with a magnificent concept and the De La Warr Pavilion was built in 1935.

In danger of demolition in the 1990s, it has been restored to its original splendour during the past decade .

The same has happened to Embassy Court, a tall block of flats which the book describes as “a bold counterpoint to the adjacent Regency terraces”, and which was designed by the modernist architect Wells Coates.

Brodie and Winter comment that its visual impact seems modest compared with that of Marine Court, built on the seafront in St Leonard’s.

This enormous building, which from a distance looks like an ocean liner, was modelled on the Queen Mary, then the largest vessel afloat.

The 14-storey block, still one of the highest in the Hastings area, contained an underground car park, shops, a restaurant, a tea lounge and a promenade deck as well as flats.

Back in Brighton, Sir Herbert Carden wanted to turn Brighton into a modern, forward-looking city and was prepared to destroy much of the historic seafront fabric to achieve this.

In the mid-1930s, Carden produced a sketch of the seafront showing a dual carriageway with modernist buildings replacing Regency and Victorian homes.

He cited Embassy Court as the “model building” and was even willing to eat into the heart of Brighton with his plans.

Brodie and Winter say: “If Carden’s plan had been realised, the Royal Pavilion would have been replaced by a conference and entertainments centre and The Lanes would have disappeared.”

One block which slipped through the planning net was Marine Gate, an eight-storey block of 105 flats built at Black Rock between 1937 and 1939. This block, at one time painted pink, is much bigger than neighbouring Kemp Town houses.

It is ironic some residents there now oppose even larger flats planned for the neighbouring marina.

Like Marine Court in St Leonard’s, it also boasted a restaurant but that was converted into housing in the 1950s.

Another handsome building of the era is Saltdean Lido, where the curved design was strongly influenced by that of the De La Warr Pavilion.

It was built just before the Second World War and closed during hostilities, not opening again until the mid-1950s.

The Lido declined in the 1990s and was in danger of becoming derelict. Fortunately, it was saved and is now one of the few lidos left on the English coast.

Also in Saltdean, the Ocean Hotel was built in 1938 in grand art deco style. It had 426 bedrooms in a main building and six detached blocks.

High on a hill, this large set of buildings still dominates the skyline in Saltdean. For many years it was run by the holiday camp king Billy Butlin and was later renamed the Grand Ocean Hotel. It is now being rebuilt and modernised.

The culture of radical architecture by the seaside was interrupted by the Second World War.

Although people flocked back to resorts in the 1940s and 1950s, there were few significant new seafront buildings.

When new buildings began to appear in resorts such as Brighton in the 1960s, they tended to be brutal rather than beautiful.

Sussex Heights is still the tallest building in the county but it is far less architecturally significant than Embassy Court, a few hundred yards down the road.