Tagungsort Grand Hotel Heiligendamm

as well, more and more people start to swim;
they learnt to swim. Before this, swimming
was an unusual activity. Most people bathed
in the sea, they didn’t swim in the sea. So this
is a swimming lesson in Brighton in the late
19th century. This photograph is of a staid,
quiet, very respectable late-19th century beach
scene. And then from the very late-19th century
into the 20th century things change: the sun
is discovered. Sunshine becomes the most important
aspect of the seaside. And that totally
changes how seaside architecture is used, what
people do at the seaside, what they respond to,
what they want to do. And by the 1930s in Britain
and other European countries, a new architecture
of the seaside emerged. This is the
wonderful De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-
Sea opened in 1935. The pavilion represented
a new sort of architecture for the sunny seaside.
At another extreme there were also little
weekend beach houses, again building on that
idea of the modernist seaside. Perhaps most
iconic of all were the open-air lidos, again unheard
of before the 1930s. This transformation
of the seaside continued into the 1950s and
1960s. It became a very different beach scene
from the ones I showed you 70 or 80 years
before. There were immense changes in terms
of the culture of the seaside, its architecture
and how nature was used.
Turning to the third of my four sections, I
now want to go on to talk about the challenges.
As an expert audience you all probably know
what the challenges are in terms of seaside architecture
and seaside tourism, especially for
northern resorts, for example, in Germany
and Britain and on the north coast of France.
First of all, there’s the challenge of nature or
seemingly authentic nature provided in warm
climates. There is the challenge of sunshine.
I am always amazed by this photograph of
the Italian Adriatic coast revealing masses of
Italians who just want to lay in the sun and
tan themselves. The challenge of the sun and
warmth of the southern seaside still remains
for us in the north. When large numbers of
Italians start to come to the East Coast of
Germany and the British seaside, we’ll know
that this idea has stopped. The sun and the
discovery of the sun have had, as you know,
important implications for today.
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can be pulled back. Technology can now reproduce
the seaside in other forms. The palm
ping
the coastline. So the palm and motif idea,
ped
for contemporary purposes. As before,
the same use of technology and use of capital
to transform the seaside.
We also have a series of challenges around
redundant seaside structures: structures that
were built for one long-gone or no longer
fashionable purpose but which are too important
or too expensive simply to demolish.
How do we use those of derelict structures for
modern seaside tourist purposes? Of course
it’s not only Prora where this applies, but also,
for example, around the coasts of Britain with
disused holiday camps, and Italy with its often
redundant children’s homes, colonies.
Similar stories can be told of many seaside
buildings. One structure that’s very close to my
heart is the West Pier in Brighton. It opened
in 1866 as an open promenade pier. As with
much seaside architecture, the West Pier changed
and developed over time. By the start of
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