These beach huts are in Westward Ho! North Devon, about a mile from where my in-laws live. There's maybe a hundred of them, huddled along and behind the promenade at Braddick's caravan site. Some of them are literally glorified garden sheds, and each one is unique. Years of repairs and patching-up have given them each a distinct personality and character. Sea Haze, Sea View, Sea Mist, Sea Haven, Sea Breeze. Lazy Days, Ocean View. They contrast starkly with the VeryDesirableLiveWorkApartmentsOnlyThreeUnitsRemaining developments that are growing like ulcers on this bit of coast. Every time I visit I'm dismayed to see that another one of two of the huts have gone, leaving an empty concrete plot with its memories of sandcastles, tea in chipped mugs and the Beano Summer Special. If there is an upside to the so-called Credit Crunch it should put a halt to anymore soulless bunkers being built, with their us-and-them barbed wire and security gates.
4 comments:
I don't quite understand why these rows of wonderful beach huts aren't placed on the listed buildings register. I live in a Grade 2 listed building and, in all truth, it has little architectural or historical merit at all - it's just old, and one of some thousands of similar places. Meanwhile, the wonderful beach huts that have played such a huge and formative part in so many English lives are threatened....
Indeed - especially the "ordinary" ones kept by "ordinary" people at places like Westward Ho, rather than the ones at Holkham or Southwold which The Man wouldn't dare touch.
and ain't westward ho! the most marvelously named place in the world ?
x
Oh yes - and wouldn't it be good if every town in the UK had screamer on the end of it?
Basingstoke!
Cardiff!
Giggleswick!
Alnmouth!
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