RADIO 2 INTERVIEW WITH SITE PUBLICITY DIRECTOR - GRAHAM GREEN
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VICTORIAN TRANQUILITY OF SOUTHWOLD
THREATENED BY RADICAL RE-THINK BY COUNCIL

Beach huts are a weird piece of real estate - their plots are almost insignificantly tiny, and their owners want to be left well alone, but they are often sited on literally shifting sands.

The reason some councils offer huts on a licence basis is because they need to reserve the right to have the beach at short notice for sea defence work, etc.

Prices at Southwold are reported to range from about £8,000, to over £40,000 at the sought-after Gun Hill area.

Waveney District Council reports that "all procedures relating to beach huts" are up for review and the whole issue of beach hut administration is being evaluated. Says Corporate Manager, Tourism and Leisure Peter Wareing, "We are taking legal advice, and our findings will raise a number of issues to consider".

It is not clear whether the Council’s proposals will be adverse or not. We truly hope not, since beach huts add immeasurably to the scenic appeal of dear old Southwold.

Waveney District council are on 01502 562111; email: info@waveney.gov.uk

SAS SHORT OF RECRUITS !

The Sutton & Sandilands Beach Hut Watch organisation, centred on Sutton on Sea, Lincolnshire, reports that it still needs more members to effectively mount its "Beach Hut Watch".

The area boasts literally hundreds of huts and even a beach bar, but suffers from sporadic bouts of vandalism in the face of ‘an apathetic council and almost non existent police presence’.

Plans are afoot to arrange for the installation of CCTV, and SASBHW publishes a newsletter.

Membership for the association is totally free for active ‘Watch’ participants and £10.00 per year for ‘passive’ members.

If you have a hut, or are associated with one, you are urged to join and do your bit to preserve the pleasure and character of this popular area.

Contact SASBHW at 11 Norbeck Lane, Wetton, Lincoln LN2 3JP.

ARTS NEWS

PAINTING YOUR HUT
You probably repaint your beach hut every year or two. Mike Kingston will only paint it once - so you can hang it on the wall.

What is it that draws (no pun intended) artists to huts?
Mediterranean-style sunbleached primary colours?
That 'painterly' light you only get at the coast?
Lots of 'artistic' props like seagulls and lobster pots?
An excuse to spend a day or two at the seaside and earn a few bob into the bargain?
Or is it simply a deep affection for the laid-back nostalgia of the subject matter? Yes, I think so.

Mike Kingston is an architect as well as a painter - hence the seemingly relaxed attention to detail and the easy application of horizontals and diagonals. Perhaps this also explains Mike's preference for a 'flat' style of painting which, he feels, reflects the humour better. (It's also more like an architect's plan).

I like the Roald Dahl-esque conceit of the children turned into gingerbread in the "The children were warned" picture.

Assuming your own hut is a little less sinister, Mike offers to take on commissions and do a painting of your hut. We'll forward any enquiries.

Aristocrats used to commission painting of their stately piles (the houses, not the medical complaint). Not many of us would want our 3 bedroomed semi in Dorking immortalised on canvas, but our huts...now there's something to be proud of.

E.H. Hausbrich
Arts Correspondent

When radical artist Tracy Emin sold her Whitstable-based beach hut to Charles Saatchi for £75,000, the world suddenly looked afresh at beach huts, and wondered what distinguished the average hut from the artistic.

The truth of it is that the beach hut has always been associated with aesthetics, one way or another. Their fore-runners, the wheeled Victorian 'bathing machines', protected the modesty of their occupants and hid their 'aesthetic' silhouettes from the prying eyes of paddlers and donkeys.

Once de-wheeled and planted firmly (?) into the sand, people recognised how pretty and picturesque a line of beach huts was. Their cute dimensions and candystripe colours epitomised British seaside culture. They quickly featured in seaside postcards, too - a sure sign that the iconography of beach huts had entered the consciousness of the people.

The use of the huts themselves is akin to art. You could say that simply lazing in a deckchair, wearing a "Kiss Me Quick" hat and tuning in to The Archers is a complete statement about relaxation. And hut owners' quirky personalisation of their various 'Shangri-la's' tends to be very expressive indeed. Today, after years of red & white, yellow & white and blue & white stripes, coastal aesthetes are painting their huts with dark blue stain and other tasteful treatments.

But it can be more direct. Word has it that P.D James writes novels in her hut at Southwold.

And more direct still. While Tracy Emin poses nude for photographs in her hut, then ships the whole thing off to the Saatchi Gallery, there's one artist who's working with beach huts for what they are, and not making any fast bucks into the bargain.

That hut champion is Simon Withers - a Nottingham based, widely exhibited artist. As part of the Year of the Artist - the enigmatically international-sounding YOTA - Simon returned to his childhood holiday haunt of Sutton-on-Sea, on the Lincolnshire coast.

Great artists of the past worked with earth pigments; Simon works with sand, and waters it down with the sea. Action painters flung paint at their canvas and imprinted themselves onto it. Simon works inside it and walks all over it.

Simon had a two week residency at Sutton in May, and later returned to preside at an exhibition of the work carried out. It included:

• Photographing and documenting the beach huts that run along the promenade at Sutton, also taking in Sandilands and Mablethorpe - showing them "in their current states of upkeep and decline". Simon adds "I...photographed some of the interiors of the huts that have been vandalised. These have produced some of the more compelling images." During the second week, Simon took photographs from further and further away, till they, from the shore line, became a thin strip of land delineated by a concrete sea wall, contrasting with the flimsiness of the "diminutive huts".
  
  
• Unlike house names - which frequently reflect desired status ("DEMONTFORT COURT")or family occupants ("GRETONI"), huts are a fun thing, or a haven, and tend to attract a rather different class of name - from the witty to the wistful. Recognising the distinctiveness of hut names, Simon created names for those currently without a name. He tried to explore off-beat angles; Drag Net, Ape City, Buckingham Palace and Peeping Tom among them.
  
  
  
• Time-based' work came next: "Using a child's bucket and spade, I would fill the bucket up with sand and begin to place sandcastles onto an ever-expanding and widening path towards the sea. I would always return to the starting point ...This process would continue until the hour had been spent."

Did anyone watch Simon? How different did the beachscape look from the sandcastles left after a sunny bank holiday? And after the tide swept in, had it changed anything?

Simon admits that this work was experimental. But he also describes this as a "performance". The art is in the doing; in his recapturing of childhood experiences, expressed in a manically repetitive way. It is not art like the Old Masters or like David Hockney. It is like an 8am church service at which a single parishioner attends; or like a fleeting rainbow which no-one notices. Not something inspirational and deep to hang on your wall, but a moment when the natural march of time was changed, and when, on behalf of all of us, Simon could interact with sand and sea in a pure, slightly sensual way.

Simon's work accidentally had a geophysical dimension. The artist swears that the sand at Sutton today is nowhere near as good for building sandcastles as it was when he was a child. Do we romanticise our memories of the past? Or is something sinister happening along our coastline...

Simon's second experimental work was the building of a sand map of the town of Sutton on Sea, adding paint pigment and text flags, which denoted town landmarks, streets and shops. The vulnerable, temporary nature of sand contrasts starkly with "the concrete sea defences..that protect the sea wall from the powerful destructive nature of the sea".

Perhaps this is the key to Simon's work - a fascination with destruction and entropy. Once-cherished huts that are vandalised. Huts that begin the season with a shining new swimsuit of paint, only to end the year in tatters, ravaged by the wind and spray. Sandcastles that will be obliterated by the sea. A quaint English out-of-time seaside town shored up against the destructive power of the North Sea towering above it.

Indeed, he seems to be fascinated by vandalised huts, makes reference to " the beach hut that had been blown up only last year" and refers to "a local gentleman who had constructed the concrete beach huts (he was later to commit suicide - the two undertakings were not related...)"

The juxtaposition of quaint, modest beauty being relentlessly pummelled by nature and vandals, perpetually springing up again in a kind of rebirth is a valid artistic preoccupation.

But, equally, isn't it nice to have an artist who's simply fascinated by beach huts, finds them visually a treat, and loves being in them.

Perhaps there's a bit of artist in all of us.

Arts Correspondent

For Simon Withers' next project, he talks of a beach hut sculpture, to be entitled 'Beach Hut for the 21st Century'. Read about it first at beach-huts.co.uk!

If you have any news relating to beach huts, send it in.