An Englishman’s hut is his castle
From preservers of British modesty to kitsch and unloved relics, our nation’s beach huts are back in vogue, believes Patrick Galbraith
From humble to hip, the beach hut is a beloved staple of British beaches, says Patrick Galbraith
BEYOND the newly painted windows, down on the golden sand at Wells-next-the-sea, a poodlecross chases the shadow of a seagull. The dog’s owners—a young couple in Wellington boots—help their crying toddler to untangle his kite. It’s a blustery morning in north Norfolk, one of those days when a walk seems like a fine idea before you set off and feels like an achievement when you’re back, but is teeth-chattering when you’re actually outside, with conversations lost on the wind.
Beach huts, such as the refurbished one in which I’m drinking tea, were born out of 18th-century prudishness and have since become a cherished part of our coastal heritage. Over the past decade, as our nostalgic romance with seaside kitsch has blossomed, their popularity and prices have soared, but, at the heart of it, the beach hut remains a steadfastly salty place to seek tranquillity, change into your trunks and eat sandwiches sans sand.
Until about 150 years ago, bathing wasn’t something one did ordinarily for fun, but was prescribed as a remedy for everything from fever to psychosis. In 1788, George III’S doctor, John Crane, who wrote the seminal book Cursory Observations on Sea-bathing, suggested that the ailing monarch should spend time convalescing in Weymouth, Dorset. Fanny Burney, the English lady of letters, records that, on one occasion, a band ‘concealed in a neighbouring machine’ struck up a verse of God Save Great George our King when the monarch ‘popped his Royal head under water’.
The machine Burney refers to would have been a bathing machine, which was the precursor to the modern beach hut. These shedlike contraptions on wheels allowed men and women to head down to the sea, change out of their clothes into heavy woollen bathing suits and then be pulled into the shallows by
a horse—the idea being that nobody would be seduced by the sight of a bit of ankle. On some beaches, after you’d had enough, you would head back into the machine and raise a flag, signalling that you were ready to return to dry land.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Victorian morality thawed and the toiling masses began to flock to the sea, bathing machines gradually lost their wheels and were set back against the sand. A roughly 1950s picture postcard of Wells shows a row of huts surrounded by men in suits and a lady wandering up the beach in the sort of thing you might nowadays wear to a christening.
Not long before the picture was taken, in 1947, my friend Constance Meath Baker’s great-grandfather bought the hut I’m sitting in. It is visible in the postcard, its ornate roof lantern putting the more functional huts alongside it to shame. Hanging our enamel teacups back on their hooks, Constance explains that, over time, the North Sea blows sand up around the huts and the salty air eats away at the timber. Last
summer, deciding that patching up would no longer do, her grandmother took the hut off the beach entirely to have the windows mended and some of the wood replaced with local oak, in the hope it might last another four generations.
Tony Brown, a full-time beach-hut restorer —the best carpentry job in the country, he reckons—says that, in decades gone by, huts were usually passed down the generations, but, nowadays, they often come up for sale and are riding a wave of popularity. In the past, he thinks that lots of families didn’t take much care of their huts, but there was little point in selling because they weren’t worth a huge amount. In recent years, however, they’ve been going for £50,000 in Norfolk, £150,000 in Suffolk and upwards of that in Dorset. Unsurprisingly, the market is moving, as people who don’t use inherited beach huts want to release the capital and new owners, who have parted with large amounts of money, want to do their beach hut justice by restoring it.
Margate girl Tracey Emin, a pioneer of Britain’s seaside revival, is possibly the nation’s most famous modern-day beach-hut owner. Although Miss Emin’s Whitstable hut could have done with a bit of love from Mr Brown’s restorative hand, art collector Charles Saatchi parted with £75,000 for it in 2000. Unsportingly, rather than eating sandwiches in it on rainy days, he moved it to London and called it art.
Since the photograph on the 1950s postcard of Wells beach was taken, the number of huts there has reached 208. Wandering along the sand, Constance and I discover Stephen and Antonia Bournes wrapped up warmly at number 189, flasks of tea in their laps, looking out at the seascape with the beach-hut doors pinned open. After a successful career as the owners of Southwold Pier, Mr and Mrs Bournes moved to Wells, where they now run the famous Globe Inn.
When she first suggested to her husband they buy a beach hut, he was very rude about the idea, reveals Mrs Bournes: ‘A shed on legs, he said!’ He is now a convert and believes the Wells huts are far superior to the ‘pedestrian huts’ at Southwold in Suffolk. ‘You could walk down to a Southwold hut in stilettos, but here you’ve really got to get your togs on,’ Mrs Bournes sighs.
Last year, the pair completely restored their hut and were interested to hear that
the Meath Bakers had done the same. ‘When I’m old, I hope that, like your grandmother, I have grandchildren who enjoy using the hut as much as I do,’ Mrs Bournes says to Constance, before we carry on along the beach.
There may be whispers that it isn’t always adhered to, but sleeping in the Wells huts is forbidden by the Holkham estate, which owns the ground. However, according to James Clark, a former Times journalist and classic-car enthusiast, what happened after dark was the very best thing about the beach huts on Mudeford sandbank in Dorset, where he lived in 1990. Mr Clark was only 18 at the time and was working at The Nelson Tavern, on the other side of the spit.
‘You had all the “yachties” coming in and, at 10.30pm, they’d see the fires on the other side and ask how they could get across,’ Mr Clark recalls. He told them that walking around would take five hours—or they could wait for him to lock up. ‘About 10 minutes later, people would leap into a rowing boat with a bloke they’d never met, we’d all head off into the darkness and they’d find a party they liked on the other side.’
I suggest, slightly enviously, that this sounds a real bohemian idyll. ‘I suppose it was, in a very British sort of a way,’ Mr Clark reflects—but he’s never been back. ‘We were young, we were carefree and we were living on a beach. If I went back now, it would be like trying to put on a pair of jeans I owned when I was 18—it would be ultimately disappointing and possibly uncomfortable.’
That afternoon, as Constance and I sit on the front in Wells, eating pineapple fritters and watching families crabbing on the harbour wall, I ask whether she thinks you could install wifi in a beach hut. ‘I think that would be missing the point entirely,’ she replies.