Wish you were here | Is life always sunny for seaside museums?

Update | 31.07.2024
Please note that this article was written before the tragic events that took place in Southport in July 2024

The annual Sunny Southport marketing brochure was a must-read for the denizens of north-west England seeking fresh air and fun in the early 20th century.

“The brochure used to take a strangely scientific approach to holidaymaking,” says Jo Chamberlain, the heritage and participation officer at The Atkinson, the town’s museum and arts centre.

“One year, it became very excited about asphalt, proclaiming how it prevented promenade dresses from becoming muddy.

SOUTHPORT

The Atkinson is named after William Atkinson, its cotton manufacturer founder. Formerly Southport Arts Centre, the 1874 building shut from 2010 to 2013, to reopen as The Atkinson and is home to a theatre, studio, galleries, library and museum. Its collection holds 3,000 artworks dating from 17th to 21st centuries, and the Goodison Egyptology Collection.

“Another issue claimed a 10-year study categorically proved that it rained less in Southport than in any other resort and that any rain it actually received happened at night so a holiday was unlikely to be interrupted.”

The Atkinson has become something of a tourist attraction in its own right since opening in 2013 in a beautifully refurbished Victorian building complete with exquisitely decorated carriage entrance and grand clock tower.

Its art and social history collections tell some remarkable stories of how the coastline became such a popular destination in the 19th century.

“At the time, Blackpool was the place where working class families went when the factories closed temporarily, so Southport became the focus of people with money,” says Chamberlain.

“They came for three or four months at a time, bringing their households and servants, so an entire leisure industry was established to cater for them.”

Museum exhibits record, for example, how early aviation pioneers provided pleasure flights from the flat beaches, when early Monaco-style events brought racing cars onto the genteel streets, and how nearby green spaces became golf courses.

Rocky relationship

Artefacts and archives also document the area’s maritime history and rocky relationship with the sea, a proud tradition dominated by a local tragedy.

“Southport’s Eliza Fearnley lifeboat, manned by local fishermen, went to the aid of the stricken cargo ship Mexico one December night in 1866,” says Chamberlain.

“They got as far as being able to throw a rope to the vessel but a huge wave put the men in the water and the boat returned to Southport with just two survivors and 28 lost their lives. We have materials from the Mexico and the oars from the Eliza Fearnley.”

The most surprising discovery to be made in the Atkinson, however, is its Egyptology collection amassed in the 1800s by Anne Goodison.

She was married to the civil engineer commemorated in the name of Everton’s football ground and became one of the many wives of wealthy northern industrialists to take an interest in ancient Egypt.

“She used to pay a clergyman called Greville Chester to go to Egypt and secure objects for her. He was also doing the same job for the big museums, but she must have had first dibs and clearly had a very good eye,” Chamberlain says.

The collection – which includes a mummified body, a decorated coffin lid and rare paddle dolls originally thought to have been children’s toys but now believed to be fertility figures – was stored away for 40 years before the purpose-built gallery opened, thanks to National Lottery Heritage Fund funding, in 2014.

“People say they find it an intimate experience to be so up-close and personal with this material,” Chamberlain adds. “While it’s great to go somewhere like the British Museum, it can be overwhelming
as people with the sharpest elbows can dominate display cases.”

Shoreline paradise

They know something about being packed to the gills down in Lyme Regis, that quintessential shoreline paradise on the Dorset-Devon border where, each summer, the population increases five-fold thanks mainly to the influx of dinosaur devotees heading for the Jurassic Coast.

“We have a rich heritage that enables us to punch above our weight, but we rely on that income because our council grant is constantly being cut and seasonality puts a huge pressure on us,” says Bridget Houseago, director of Lyme Regis Museum.

LYME REGIS

Purpose-built in 1902, Lyme Regis Museum laid bare for nearly 20 years. Serving as a Red Cross depot during the first world war and an air raid precautions centre during the second world war, the museum was only returned to its intended purpose in the 1960s. The venue tells the story of the local area, including the fossil collector Mary Anning, to whom a wing was dedicated in 2017. Lyme Regis’s literary connections to Jane Austen, John Fowles and Tracy Chevalier are also highlighted

The museum was built on the site of the first home and shop of famous fossil collector Mary Anning and overlooks the beach, now a World Heritage Site, where 185 million years of history attracts coachloads of part-time palaeontologists.

Indeed, the museum’s fossil walks along the sands and rocks bring in some £85,000 a year, a precious sum for an institution that relies heavily on volunteers.

“As well as locals, we recruit from people who have retired down here or downshifted from London, particularly post-Covid. They love to tap into the atmosphere and the relationship the town has had with the sea,” Houseago adds.

“We’re right on the sea wall and being hit by the gales is, in a way, part of our identity. We couldn’t think of moving – even though maintenance is an ongoing challenge – as our position is a major asset.”

The education room – built in 2017 to cater for the 3,000 schoolchildren who come each year – offers views of the whole of the Jurassic coast. “Being high up, it’s like you’re onboard a ship,” Houseago says.

Some 80% of museum visitors come for the prehistory profiled in the new geology gallery but the town has other claims to fame, notably the literary connections to writers who set their work on the famous Cobb, the ancient harbour wall.

“We try to evoke the atmosphere of the place, which infuses novels like Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier and John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

“Fowles was a curator here for 10 years and he turned the museum’s fortunes around,” Houseago says. “At one point, it was left unlocked for the local children to play in and was also used as an air-raid shelter. Fowles solidified it with his professionalism.”

Dramatic tradition

That heady mixture of artistic endeavour, ichthyosaurs and the whiff of seaspray and candy floss also informs the heritage of the north Yorkshire coast, from the Staithes Group of artists in Whitby to the drama of Scarborough.

“As an early tourist resort, there was a theatre on almost every corner of the town,” says Andrew Clay, who recently left his post as chief executive of Scarborough Museums Trust after 17 years.

The trust supervises Scarborough Art Gallery, Woodend Gallery and Studios – the house where writers Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell spent their summers – and the Rotunda Museum of Coastal Heritage and Geology.

“They’re grouped together in a cultural campus, but a lot of local people don’t know they exist or think they’re not for them,” says Clay. “To that end, a community space was established to help demystify the galleries rather than look to them purely as temples of art.”

Clay adds that a recent seismic shift in the geopolitical landscape adds to the challenge. “All the old boroughs are now in one giant North Yorkshire council with a regional mayor so we are bunched together with Settle, which is three hours’ drive away in the west of the county.

“We have to work out how we promote the coastal strip. Devolution could mean new funding, so we have to keep making the economic case for culture.”

One of the town’s finest buildings, a Grade II Italianate villa on The Crescent, was converted into the art gallery in 1950.

“An early curator bought contemporary prints, lithographs and etchings that charted the history of the town, and we have a large collection of travel posters for London North Eastern Railway and London Midland Scottish Railway by the likes of Kenneth Shoesmith and Frank Newbold,” adds Clay, who admits that not every assemblage tells such a positive, sunshine story.

“Colonel James Harrison was a hunter and explorer who lived locally and his collection was bequeathed to us in the 1920s. Alongside the big game trophies were diaries, photographs and gramophone recordings from his expeditions, but he also brought back some tribespeople from the Belgian Congo whom he exhibited in a sort of human zoo.

“It’s a pretty difficult history, which the gallery examined in a project last year that looked at the effects of colonialism. It was a way of admitting that museums cannot be sleepy places that plod along and that there are issues that need to be addressed.”

SCARBOROUGH

Scarborough Museums Trust oversees three venues: Scarborough Art Gallery, the Rotunda Museum and Woodend Gallery and Studios. The Yorkshire coast became a popular tourist resort during the 19th century (see the colourised photo c.1900s, above). But holding a valuable collection in a location close to the sea isn’t without its challenges– a number of delicate works had to be moved in 2023 because water started pouring through the ceiling. Luckily, everything was saved from any damage

Another challenge is the damage caused by the building’s proximity to the sea. “We had to evacuate our collection of 19th-century paintings by Atkinson Grimshaw last year because of water pouring through the ceiling,” Clay says.

“We had an emergency plan and nothing was damaged, but the whole process takes a toll on morale and running costs with funding quite tight.”

Similarly, Scarborough's Rotunda – constructed in 1829 along the lines of the Pantheon in Rome to house the geological collections of the local Philosophical Society – needs urgent roof repairs. Its facade was recently restored through the Arts Council’s Museum Estate and Development Fund.

“The Rotunda receives a battering from the weather and it’s a story it is developing by looking outside at rising sea levels and the plastic in them, which impacts marine life so terribly,” says Clay, who recently crossed town to become general manager of Scarborough’s Sea Life centre.

“It’s an issue and if you are a museum with a collection like that, you have a duty to be a part of that storytelling. Our existence is now in the teeth of what the climate can throw at us – and there will be a record of what we did about it two or three generations further down the line.”

Idiosyncratic collections

The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum is also housed in an imposing building – a dramatic clifftop country house overlooking Bournemouth beach, which Sir Merton Russell-Cotes, a former hotelier and mayor of the town, gave to his wife as a birthday present in 1901.

The couple filled it with their idiosyncratic collections of British art and souvenirs from their world travels and later presented the house – originally designed to combine Renaissance flair with Scottish baronial fortitude – to the town as another extravagant gift.

BOURNEMOUTH

The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth started off as a lavish birthday present from husband to wife in 1901. Amassing a collection over the years, Annie Russell-Cotes paid for three additional galleries to be added to the cliff-top house, then gifted the freehold of the site to the town. The gallery opened to the public in 1919.

“You can stand in a gallery admiring pre-Raphaelite paintings and look out through the windows to an amazing seascape,” says manager Sarah Newman.

“It’s a time-capsule that has retained all its Victorian heavy decoration and fittings, stained glass and carpentry. Immersive is an over-used word but it truly has a very dramatic impact.

“Alongside the great art, armour and cabinets they collected, there’s stuff they pinched from hotel bedrooms in Japan – chopstick holders and the like. It appears bringing home shampoo bottles and slippers is not a modern phenomenon.”

Around 80% of visitors are holidaymakers and the museum uses changing exhibitions, talks, tours and children’s activities to ensure the townsfolk are not forgotten.

“It’s a challenge to manage a historical house and museum and create a timeless feeling while also ensuring that people will return to see something different each time,” says Newman.

Governance of the museum is a long-standing issue due to a conflict of interest in its status as both a charity and a local authority trust, she adds.

“It is uniquely complicated because the governance was originally outlined in an Act of Parliament and it doesn’t give us financial transparency. It’s progressing very slowly but we’re confident everything will be sorted out eventually.”

In the interim, the to-do list keeps growing, Newman adds. “We are in a vulnerable position, literally in the eye of the storm in terms of climate change and we can see the effects through the accelerated decline of the building, which has had no significant investment for 10 years.

“Sea air may be good for convalescing but it’s not helpful for brickwork and pointing, which wasn’t designed to withstand this amount of water.

“We have a conservatory that’s been in need of repair for years. Recently, a storm was so bad, it looked like it was raining indoors.”

Newman has looked on with curiosity as organisations in other coastal towns have used culture and heritage as a springboard to regeneration.

“What they have done is inspirational and it would be wonderful to play a part in doing that here as we have much to offer,” she says.

“Cultural strategies come and go but finding the will to see it through has been the challenge. Local authorities are under such great pressure and it’s a hard thing to prioritise.”

Meanwhile, the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum is attracting its highest visitor figures in the modern era, Newman adds.

“People see it from different angles; as a fantasy home that people lived in, as a collection of art; and as a story of a couple’s extraordinary love for each other and their philanthropy towards others.”

John Holt is a freelance journalist