The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
In search of the ultimate British seaside holiday, with the artist who knows it best
Oh, we do like to be beside the seaside, says Mick Brown – and Pete McKee’s paintings of classic trips to Scarborough capture the essence of it all
IIt has epic topography and is the closest thing to Positano that Yorkshire has to offer
’d never been to Scarborough before, so I arrived the night before I was due to meet the artist Pete McKee for a walk around the town. McKee does brilliant paintings of working-class life – antic, touching, wryly amusing. His picture The Snog, of a couple kissing, the man in a flat cap, the woman bespectacled and bluerinsed, has appeared as a fine-art print, on coffee mugs and as a giant-sized mural on the wall of a Sheffield pub.
One work I’m particularly fond of shows a family on holiday: the father is standing, arms outstretched facing down a stiff wind, while his wife and kid huddle behind a rock for shelter. It’s titled Who Needs a Fancy Holiday Abroad When You Have All This on Your Doorstep for Free?
The picture actually shows the family in a rural setting – the Peak District, McKee would later tell me. But I arrived in Scarborough the day before
Storm Eunice arrived in Britain, and taking an evening stroll across the magnificent Victorian Cliff Bridge, which connects St Nicholas Cliff to the Spa, I was almost blown off my feet by the wind whipping in from the North Sea. A full moon hung over a steely grey, tumultuous sea, and the lights of Scarborough were threaded around the bay like a string of shimmering jewels.
Scarborough has the most epic topography of any English seaside resort: two sweeping beaches, Victorian buildings that appear to be climbing, or tumbling down, the steep hill. It is the closest thing to Positano that Yorkshire has to offer.
The next morning, the sky was a dazzling azure blue. It was an hour or two before I was scheduled to meet McKee, and I walked along the beach to the Spa, one of the town’s many magnificent buildings, testifying to its place in Victorian times as a fashionable resort to take the waters and the sea air.
For 27 years, beginning in 1959, the violinist Max Jaffa would play a 17-week summer season at the Spa Grand Hall, serenading the coachloads of holidaymakers from Leeds and Sheffield with The Last Rose of Summer and Scarborough Fair. The wrestler Big Daddy was a fan, explaining that listening to Jaffa “would take me completely off what I’m doing in the wrestling ring”.
The hall and arcades of shops were closed, but a poster was advertising forthcoming attractions for the year: the Dreamboys; “Rob Brydon – A Night of Songs and Laughter”; and “John Lydon [formerly Johnny Rotten] – I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right”. I could hear Max Jaffa turning in his grave.
Along the promenade, the shops and cafés were opening for business. Seaview Fish & Chips; the Rock Shop. Outside Gilly’s amusement arcade – a significant staging post, it would later emerge, in McKee’s childhood – stood a glass case, with the legend “Zoltar Speaks”; an animatronic dummy in oriental dress, eyes flashing, hands hovering over a scrying globe. “Come and gain more knowledge from the Great Zoltar.” I paused for a moment, listening to the sound coming from inside – a heady cacophony of electronic clangs, whoops and whistles, with a blaring top note of some half-recognisable pop song. (McKee would later tell me that it was hearing the Specials’ Gangsters while he was playing the slots in Gilly’s that would fire an early ambition – yet to be realised – to be a rock star himself.)
Across the wide expanse of beach, at the sea’s edge, I could see splashing in the water – a solitary swimmer; no, a dog. The horizon was a perfect strip of deep turquoise. A child chased a beach ball being blown along the sands.
I met McKee in a café on the prom – a stocky man in a tartan jacket and jeans, with a salt and pepper beard, a rocker’s
quiff and an amused expression on his face. He had driven over from his home in Sheffield, and being here was bringing back memories.
McKee, who is 56, was the son of a steelworker. His mother died when he was seven, leaving his father to bring up McKee, his elder sister and two elder brothers on his own. Scarborough or “Skeggy” (Skegness) are where the family would take their holidays. His earliest memory is of being pushed along the Scarborough prom in a metal pram.
For a working-class family like his, McKee remembers, there was “a tier system of holidays. There was stopping at home; camping, caravanning, then bed and breakfast; and the mecca was full board in a hotel. You’d arrived then.”
His family was on the fourth tier, bed and breakfast in a pub on the road out of Scarborough. “It were a right trek to the beach...”
At school, he says, art was the only thing he was ever praised for. He went on to work as a freelance newspaper sports cartoonist and greetings card illustrator; it barely paid the rent. Married with one kid and two stepchildren – and “skint, skint, skint”, he was working in Tesco to make ends meet when he made the decision to start painting what he knew best, “which is basically my upbringing, and who I am”.
He had his first exhibition one Christmas in a Sheffield pub. “I thought more people go to pubs than to art galleries.” He sold £400 worth of paintings. Enough for a happy Christmas and to say goodbye to Tesco.
McKee’s paintings offer an affectionate and often deeply sentimental view of working-class life, finding magic in the commonplace: “All of my works have been a positive projection of the working class and what it means to me. For me, it’s important to create a reaction to my pictures, and the two reactions I want are either a smile or empathy.”
An early seaside picture, The Meaning of Life, shows a family taking an evening walk along a prom strung with coloured lights – mum and dad, a kid in a pushchair, a little sister in tow.
“You’re on holiday. You’ve got some money in your back pocket; your dad’s worked three double shifts to get you there. You’ve had your evening meal and you’re just walking along to the slots. You’re all together as a family and at that moment everything’s right in the world.”
A few years ago, McKee did a series of paintings called Six Views of Scarborough – inspired, he says, by the 19th-century Japanese artist Hokusai’s
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. McKee’s paintings are a shuffling of the pack of childhood memories: a family watching the motorised battleships on the lake at Peasholm Park, and making the trek up the steps from the beach, exhausted by the pleasures of the day, burdened with windbreaks and buckets and spades, “and it’s a mile walk back to tea”.
Another picture shows a group gathered around a table in the Lord Nelson pub, inspired, he says, by his elder brother.
“When you were drinking age on your day trip to the seaside, you might spend half an hour at the slots, with a token dip of your feet in the sea, and all the rest of the day would be spent in the boozer, and you’d come back absolutely ratarsed on the train.” His brother is wearing a kiss-me-quick hat. “There’s always going to be one joker in a group...”
We paid for our coffee and set off for a stroll. There was that singular feeling in the air of a seaside resort out of season – the town holding its breath, awaiting the arrival of the holiday crowds. We paused outside Gilly’s. It’s the subject of one of McKee’s Scarborough series. The painting shows a crowded beach and a father pointing out the amusement arcade to his young son. It’s called
“The beach would be rammed. You’d be given 50 pence worth of 2ps, and you’d be off to play the slots while they had half an hour’s peace, having a cup of tea and eating their sandwiches. So the dad is saying, ‘If you get lost, just find that landmark.’”
A steep climb up the hill, through an ornamental garden, leads to the rear of the Grand hotel, the town’s dominant landmark, hugging the edge of the clifftop, with a commanding view over the South Bay beach. When it was opened in 1867, the Grand was one of the largest hotels in the world, its four towers rep
There was that singular feeling of a seaside resort out of season – the town holding its breath
resenting the seasons of the year, a floor for each of the 12 months, 52 chimneys to symbolise the weeks, and 365 bedrooms, one for each day of the year.
I had popped in on the previous evening. One could imagine approaching the hotel in its heyday, being greeted by a liveried doorman. I was greeted by a man looking worse for wear holding a beer glass. On the steps, people were smoking beside a sign saying “No smoking on the steps”. In the magnificent baroque reception hall, the furniture looked time-worn, and a large sign was advertising “the Grand Hotel Wedding Offer: £999, Bucks Fizz Arrival Drink (for 50 guests)”.
The age of the grand hotel has passed. But Scarborough is thriving, with its new boutique hotels (I stayed in the Bike & Boot, for details see panel, left) and trendy conversions. Last summer, a shopkeeper told me, was the busiest he could remember in years. Outside the town hall, by the statue of Queen Victoria, there was a bench with a commemorative plaque: “David Waterhouse of Leeds, died 1993. In Memory of his Love for Cricket and Scarborough.” I could imagine the many happy hours he must have sat there.
An old-fashioned funicular stood nearby, closed for repair in time for the coming season. A McKee painting, entitled Best Part of the Holiday, was hanging on the wall of the booking office, showing a group of holidaymakers crammed together in the funicular. “I used to love that as a kid,” he said, “the wood, the smell and the machinery, and you’re being propelled down the hill to the beach. It was like magic.”
Scarborough, he said, had “everything at your fingertips: you’ve got arcades, a massive beach, donkey rides, the sea. There were entertainments; I remember seeing the Grumbleweeds here, and Freddie Starr.” Freddie Starr! We observed a moment’s respectful silence.
I left McKee and set off into the old town, through the winding streets lined with pretty Georgian and Victorian houses, arriving at the church of St-Martin-on-the Hill, with its beautiful pre-Raphaelite glass designs by William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. I walked back down the hill, taking in the view across the town and out to sea, pausing at the Market Hall, recently restored. There were tables laid out with vegetables, meats and cheeses, and in the café a full English breakfast fry-up for £6.50. At another outlet, a travel agent was offering Caribbean cruises. But seriously, if you’ve got Scarborough, who would think of such a thing?
Pete McKee’s latest exhibition,
Adjust Your Mindset, is on at London’s Hoxton Arches from April 22May 1, before heading to his home town of Sheffield from May 13-May 22. For more information, see petemckee.com