I grew up in a nearby English seaside town around the time the photographs were taken and as a child I was taken to the places in the photos by my family. These were once bustling places full of holidaying industrial workers but as the UK's industrial base declined so did these resorts; better service and weather was available overseas for not much more in terms of real cost. My hometown is now a standard English costal town, renovated 50 years too late by private developers to whom the local authorities have sold or leased land at rock bottom prices, a heady mix of drug addicts, tracksuited iPhone Facebook addicts and old dears struggling with their trolley bags. Still a lovely place to be when the weather is fine, but basically, purgatory.
You could make almost anywhere look this grim, in B&W on a rainy day. That said, I spent much of my childhood in south wales in the 1960s and 1970s, and it had grim writ large through it. Not always, but often.<p>Also places of stunning beauty, and history. You have to know how to pick.<p>Contrast this with e.g. rural japan (Toyama fishing harbour) which has gutted fish heaps, rotting jetties, next to amazingly cared for plants wrapped in hessian with bamboo struts, Onsen, amazing Kaiseki food...<p>Rhyl can be lovely. Rhyl can be cold and forbidding. the 1970s were a time of 17% mortgage interest, rampant inflation, mass unemployment... I went there hunting diesel shunting locomotives in my train spotting days.<p>If you want grim wales, Barry Island. But then, steam engine burial ground. Yes, grim, but also amazing. Like chernobyl but for steam engines. (maybe thats gone now)
I feel like anywhere else in the world North Wales would be taken much more advantage of. It's a stunningly beautiful place, maybe one of the most beautiful in the world, but it is massively impoverished and undervisited and it is hard to understand why.
Rhyl Pavilion 1870:<p><a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/260064" rel="nofollow">https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/260064</a><p>Seaside 1950:<p><a href="https://gohomeonapostcard.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/wp-319.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://gohomeonapostcard.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/wp-319...</a><p>The piers stood as major tourist attractions for (more than a century?):<p><a href="https://www.cheshirelife.co.uk/out-about/places/the-piers-of-north-wales-a-testament-to-victorian-engineering-1-1570747" rel="nofollow">https://www.cheshirelife.co.uk/out-about/places/the-piers-of...</a><p>Edit: Many postcards of the piers:<p><a href="http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/Wales-Piers.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/Wales-Piers.html</a>
Im from Liverpool, live in Chester and love North Wales. I encourage everyone to visit this amazingly beautiful part of world.<p>I actually rather liked these images because there’s a certain grit to it that is still sometimes present.
"Trudging slowly over wet sand<p>Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen<p>This is the coastal town<p>That they forgot to close down<p>Armageddon, come Armageddon!<p>Come, Armageddon! Come!<p>Everyday is like Sunday<p>Everyday is silent and grey<p>Hide on the promenade<p>Etch a postcard :<p>"How I Dearly Wish I Was Not Here"<p>In the seaside town<p>That they forgot to bomb<p>Come, come, come, nuclear bomb"
This remind me of Killip: <a href="https://time.com/4185463/chris-killip-martin-parr-in-flagrante/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/4185463/chris-killip-martin-parr-in-flagran...</a> (there's a slider to view the rest of the photos)<p>These are on the other side of the country though. But same 'atmosphere' more or less. Kind of a photographic counterpart to and reminiscent of 'Post War Dream'
Does anyone remember what the "You Have Been Warned" sign was all about? The full text of the warning itself must have been an impressive sight, if that was just the reminder.
Wales is gorgeous.. perfect place for a software company or to work remote. The govt needs to incentivize remote work to revitalize the local economies that need it.
> The project arose when the Mostyn Gallery in Llandudno was due to reopen in 1979 after decades of closure. Its director commissioned a photographic project from Bennett, with the intention of capturing the atmosphere of North Wales coastal resorts in winter<p>> With a working title of Anatomy of Melancholy, an exhibition was scheduled soon after the gallery’s refurbishment and reopening. Bennett’s project was ultimately deemed likely to cause funding problems by showing the region’s resorts in too negative a light<p>I had to laugh at "Anatomy of Melancholy". I'm not sure what the gallery was expecting, but I can see why they might've been apprehensive about showing these off in their freshly-opened local attraction!
I wonder how they'd feel about this Goldie Looking Chain joint, then: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvuxYxmlfrc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvuxYxmlfrc</a>
The sense of “something has changed here?” is so deep in places like this. They are populated still but the architecture points clearly to a time when there was so much more going on in the area.<p>All around the UK there are spa towns and resorts that were clearly bustling with wealth (community and personal) a century ago, but have now slumped in popularity.<p>A town like Malvern for example. It was the <i>height</i> of Edwardian (I think that’s the right era) sophistication. A must visit tourist destination for the middle classes. All that really remains anymore of the town’s prestige are the schools and the immovable hills. You see some spa infrastructure still but a lot of it is derelict.<p>I was in Llanthony valley a few summers ago and took a really interesting guided tour through some local unpaved roads. Our guide, Henry was born in the village in 1930. He showed us the sites of two former pubs, now completely gone except for some York stones on the threshold. They’d drink there, or walk an hour across the valley to the pubs on the other side when they felt like it. We looked through the old school that taught 15 children of local families. It’s now just another big house with two cars parked outside.<p>The big house up the top had a squire who rented land to Henry and his father where they grew valuable soft fruit crops for sale in the local market towns. The village had other services: a shop and a farrier.<p>All gone. The fruit plots are now overtaken with ash and briar. People still lived in all of the houses, but they were now the country homes of people who worked in the big local towns, or London, or had just retired to the area. I don’t begrudge them for that, and it was surely a much poorer life back in the 1950s, but it was also a much more of a <i>local</i> one and that felt like it had a lot of value. It also felt like the people were all there but they just didn’t know each other any more. Or they did, but they didn’t work together, so it was a dormitory suburb albeit in the heart of a Welsh valley. <i>No one worked there.</i><p>It felt quite melancholic. The big towns took so much away from the second cities, villages, and countryside. When you can find British communities that still thrive away from the major cities it is <i>magical</i>.<p><a href="https://www.malvernremembers.org.uk/wp-content/gallery/great-malvern/great-malvern-7.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.malvernremembers.org.uk/wp-content/gallery/great...</a><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwmyoy" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwmyoy</a><p><a href="http://thirdeyetraveller.com/st-martins-church-cwmyoy-crooked-church/" rel="nofollow">http://thirdeyetraveller.com/st-martins-church-cwmyoy-crooke...</a><p>...and here’s another great link:<p><a href="https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-tenbury-wells-spa-1978-online" rel="nofollow">https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-tenbury-wells-spa-...</a>
My old classmate ( a colorectal surgeon ) was moved to a job in a smallish town in Wales as a punishment.<p>He upset a few too many people in NHS management.
The past is, as they say, another country. I was a child in the UK in the 70s and that is indeed what people looked like. These days, the pictures seem grim, but people were happy enough. I think it's the clothes. By 2020 standards, everyone dressed very formally, and it just looks a bit alien and unnerving now.
Good photographer but very unprofessional. Taking photos of the ugliest people available or from food sellers picking their noses in the job <i>-after you are hired to promote tourism in that place, none less-</i> is clearly not what your employer expected from you.<p>Going ballistic artsy and finding something nice to photograph at the sea in winter wasn't so complicated after all; the ocean is gorgeous in winter. It seems that he was very unhappy in that place for some reason (maybe somebody robbed him?) and that his relationship with the locals was very difficult and sour. This photo gallery is the definition of revenge.
Some context in a BBC feature on the same subject:<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-55537454" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-55537454</a><p>And the photographer's website with many more pictures:<p><a href="https://michaelbennett.uk/pier-closing-time" rel="nofollow">https://michaelbennett.uk/pier-closing-time</a><p>Fun fact: the exhibition that has brought these pictures to our attention was apparently co-organised by the Turner Contemporary in Margate, which is itself another seaside town they forgot to shut down.
One of my best friends moved to Wales 4 years ago. His wife was from there, missed home and he could work remotely, so why not buy twice the house for a quarter the price?<p>He's back in the greater London now after 4 miserable years. The locals objected to an outsider in the village. He was refused service at the local pub. The pub shut ultimately because of lack of business. But he was sick of it and came back here where people don't care where you were born and things open on Sundays.
By total coincidence, I’m on the last couple of chapters of Paul Theroux’s 1983 travelogue <i>The Kingdom by the Sea</i>. He described these exact scenes in great detail, visiting only three years after the photos.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_by_the_Sea" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_by_the_Sea</a><p>In 1979, Thatcher had just become PM, so when Theroux got there, the slump foreshadowed in these images was in full ruinous collapse.
I grew up in Tamworth, which is about the furthest you can get from the coast, but my nan lived in Anglesey in North Wales, and in the summer it looked vaguely tropical it was so stunning. It wasn't touristy at the time though. Local councils seem to have a habit of 'tackyfying' seaside towns in the name of tourism unfortunately.
Well they're terrible photos. Black and white with sharp contrast and bad angles. Whoever is displaying these likely does not want to you like what you see.
Humanity has gone to hell in a handcart since then. So we marvel over such pics from the past: the nostalgia, the simplicity, how natural people are with themselves and each other, that we now consider them wonderful glimpses of a bygone age, myself included. But life is and always was a struggle, and I don't blame people at time considering the images too negative. They wanted something better and things were getting better, for a brief time. They had the future to look forward to. No more.