Designs For Health And Beauty

The coming of mass tourism to the seaside produced an era of iconic Modern architecture and design, as Clive Aslet discovers

- Clive Aslet

Does anyone still have a beach cape? If so, Ghislaine Wood, curator of the Sainsbury Centre’s new exhibition, would like to hear from you. Beach capes—voluminous, tent-like robes that allowed the (female) wearer to change into a swimsuit without any loss of modesty—were an essential accessory of the 1930s seaside.

Brightly coloured and strikingly patterned, these once ubiquitous garments seem to have been thrown out, together with the knitted bathing dresses over which they were worn, once fashion changed. Elaborate evening dresses had a more obvious value; the exhibition contains some sleek and shimmering examples borrowed from Southend Museums. (One of the aims of the show has been to draw on out-of-London collections.)

Architecturally, Art Deco found a natural home at the seaside. Bold, eye-catching and cheap to build, it was particularly suited to cinemas, lidos and hotels. There were some masterpieces, such as Oliver Hill’s Midland Hotel in Morecambe, Serge Chermayeff and Erich Mendelsohn’s De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea and Joseph Emberton’s Blackpool Pleasure Beach—not that the architects would have seen themselves as working in the Art Deco style, as the term was only coined in the 1960s. Billy Butlin’s first holiday camps (Skegness, 1936; Clacton, 1938) used the style to catch the eye of the middle classes.