Hayling Island

My childhood holidays began in Essex caravans. From Southend and Clacton to Walton-on-the-Naze, these summer breaks were all about buckets and spades and digging to Australia. I would start the holiday full of excitement but usually ended it with a foot injury. I either stepped on something sharp or was stung by some evil Essex sea creature. After a week we drove home, windswept and happy, with me in a surgical sock.

Then in the summer of '77 we spent a week on Hayling Island. Hayling is attached to the Sussex mainland by a thin causeway. "We're going abroad!" joked my dad as we sat in the queue to Northney Holiday Camp. I joined the kids group, The Wagtail Club but the pouring rain kept us indoors for most of the week. I have incomplete memories of a visit to a funfair and scrambling for copper coins across wooden boards. My dad recalls a sombre breakfast conversation: Elvis had died! At the evening talent contest, a camper blasted out Blue Suede Shoes and [in Hayling Island at least] the King lived on.

Thirty years on I came back and the sun was out as I crossed the causeway. The holiday camp [Warners very first] is long gone, but others remain in rude health. I returned to Hayling for two reasons: to photograph the island's modernist homes and to run around my childhood memories. I snapped away. Hayling is full of seaside modernism; white cubes with flat roofs and Art Deco flourishes. They sit among older thatch and ornament-clad bungalows, policed by gnomes.

I walked north to the site of the holiday camp, now a nature reserve flanked by blackberry bushes and full of rabbits. Chalet lines are traceable but a 90s housing estate rudely encroaches onto the reserve. Only the boating lake remains, its curve too perfect for nature but the outer wall is gone, reclaimed by the sea. I took some photos but they were mainly of spaces where the camp used to be and were as empty as my memories.

In 1978 my dad moved jobs and we went to Ibiza. Proper abroad! No causeway links the Balearics to the Sussex coast. We flew back [my first flights!] with leathery tans and my annual foot injury was a minor one. At Hayling Island we needed a tractor to tow my dad's Scimitar from the car park. I recall much of the Ibiza holiday but at Hayling Island I remember mostly rain.