Inspired by Michael Portillo (and who isn't?), I've taken to looking up places I'm about to visit in my copy of Bradshaw's Railway Guidebook. This book was published in 1866, and is a bafflingly-thorough, somewhat didactic, guide to the places Victorians could reach on their new shiny-shiny railway, telling them where to stay and what to see - and it's £2.39 on Kindle. Whilst I'm probably destroying the British book industry single-handedly by using Amazon's instant-gratification, it is amazing to be able to access this sort of text so cheaply, and use search to find the specific entry to easily.
Bexhill, then just a village, only justifies a few lines of Bradshaw's text, but it gets a reassuringly English thumbs up:
'Many people prefer the retirement of Bexhill, with its fine bracing air, to the excitement and bustle of the neighbouring towns'
Read: those with taste will like it here.
Leaving the station, built with wide platforms to hold the summer day-trippers, a rather restrained selection of chippies and offies is interspersed with slightly-twee artists' galleries leads down to the pebble seafront.
A row of chalets illustrate the nexus at which random-crap flotsam meets middle-class low-skill improvements - a higgledy, lumpen mess of styles and materials, on generous plots with beautiful sea-views. Probably insanely expensive.
Flavella chic.
This leads to the really very nice set-piece of colonnades [oh, that's how it's spelt], from 1911.
Despite a recent refurb, it's already a bit tired-looking. Interesting also to think that, were this building 75 years newer, it would be dismissed as a wafer-thin PoMo nonsense and knocked down immediately. Thankfully, we're allowed to like building that are old enough, so this gets to stay.
Behind the colonnade is the simply super 30s wonder of the De La Warr Pavilion, a Modernist steamliner run aground in Sussex. Lovely.
Inside, there's the famous sexy spiral staircase with a somewhat space-age Dalek eye-stalk light installation. There's also a (strangely affordable) café bar, from which you can sip a beer and pretend you're out at sea. Lovely.
On the other side of the building, an equally lovely 180-degree glass staircase cantilevers out in a lovely way. Lovely.
From the window of which, you can see some new-build flats doing a half-arsed impression of the Pavilion and its wraparound fenestration. How strange that it's quite normal to design new buildings to ape the curves of 80-year-old Modernism.
Meh.
Along the sea front are dotted some interesting and angular shelters. And old man shuffling past tutted his clichéd disapproval at this 'modern rubbish'. He was a touch younger than the Pavilion.
Those as puerile as I may be blessed with similar memories of geography video at school which began with a wildly bearded man proudly announcing "I'm standing here on this sizeable groyne..."
