Whilst we wait for normal service…

Posted by oddbob on September 26, 2007 · Lovingly Filed Under Personal 
Print this Article | Help us keep RR online

We're raising money for SpecialEffect. Please donate if you can.


Southport

It’s hard to explain precisely why, but I just love British seaside towns off peak. Sure, they may come alive when the tourist throngs are milling throughout the streets, camping out on the beaches with their sand ridden sandwiches and deckchairs spending a small fortune on tat and ice cream - but you really can’t beat the feel of a town just going about its normal business.

Ice Cream!

When I was much, much younger than I am now - I used to visit Southport regular with my grandparents. I remember it pretty much like it is today, the long, long walk down Lord Street amongst the shops and tree’s, the park with the lake, the beach that stretches for miles. Only, in my minds eye - it’s a beautifully kept place where the blue paint of the bridges is vivid and bright, the huts a relic to a time long past - reserved as resting places for families and pensioners alike, the water sparkling in bright sunlight as ducks glide across searching for crumbs.

Southport

Whether there was a time when it looked like this, or it’s just the reflection of a childs wide eyed fascination with somewhere that wasn’t the drudgery of an industrial town pumping cancer inducing chemicals into the air, pavements covered in rubbish and dog shit and the grim brick and corrogated iron combination of the nearby bridge that ran down the centre of the main town drag - well, I don’t know.

More Southport

Southport today, in 2007 - just isn’t. The park and promenade look like they haven’t seen barely a sniff of paint in the time since I last visited many years ago. Windows on the huts are put through, walls covered with graffiti and the remnants of take aways litter the park, scattering paper in the wind.

Theme Park

The old theme park come fair now resembling something from the Batman Graphic Novel “The Killing Joke”, wrecked rides in the car park, kicked in doors… close your eyes for a second and you could well believe The Joker is inside commiting some sort of atrocity.

Southport

Yet, I still love it. I don’t love it for the memories of what it used to be or how I remember it (aided from a few photo’s stashed away with other childhood memories).

I love it because there’s something distinctly British about it.

It may be a faded shadow of its former self, and no longer the postcard-esque ideal of a seaside resort, but none of that really matters. There’s something endearing about the decay, something very natural. Something that can only really be appreciated when the place is free from the international rush for fish, chips and novelty postcards, when you’re free to roam whilst barely meeting another soul outside the main shopping drag.

The coastline

But you know something, I don’t think I’ve ever, in all my years of visiting, seen the tide come in at Southport. I’m assured by a taxi driver that it does, as it should, come in two times a day without fail. But damn, I’m not convinced that faint blue line on the horizon ever gets close to the promenade.

Until I see it with my own two eyes, I’ll sigh and just assume it’s a myth…

Lovely Beach

Tags:

Speak your brains

3 Responses to “Whilst we wait for normal service…”

  1. Richard Phipps on September 27th, 2007 10:27 pm

    Sad is good for deep people?

  2. swith on October 3rd, 2007 11:15 am

    Nice warblings, Mr.Bob. I too love the depressing but self affirming vibe of a British seaside town off-peak.

    At this moment in time, Weston-super-Mare is like Jason Vorhees’s corpse rotting quietly at the bottom of Crystal Lake. There’s faint but certain signs of life, like it’s saving up precious energy to slaughter newcomers from Birmingham come next May.

    Long live the atrophied husks of our hibernating seaside towns.

  3. oddbob on October 7th, 2007 5:47 pm

    Cheers Swith, it’s been years since I’ve been down Weston way.

    Still, can’t be as grim as Morecombe.

Hello Reader! Perhaps you'd like to comment on this piece?.
As well as allowing you to type out your innermost and deepest thoughts about this piece, we've magiced up (well, installed a plugin) a fantastical ajax malarkey that lets you edit your post up to 15 minutes after you've posted it. Superb eh?