Frinton-on-Sea

This was my first visit to Frinton since childhood and I headed straight to the beach. I lay my towel by a groyne and propped my Agatha Christie book in the sand. Groups of lads arrived around midday, drinking Red Bull and playing keepy-uppy. Plastic footballs soon homed-in on me [“sorry mate”] and once the barbecues began to fire up, I surrendered and took my pinking limbs into town.

A tiny low church sat on the headland, the smallest in Essex and the first-built of many in the town. At the back stood a small remembrance garden cloaked in shadow and buzzing with bumble bees; a sunken haven of plaques on benches and respite from the May sunshine.

Frinton was the scene of an interesting modernist architectural experiment in the 1930s. It was never fully realized and so the remaining houses stand out amid the bungalows and bricks. Its legacy is a microcosm of the English attitude to housing. Some owners have bought-in to the wider idea, adding art-deco furnishings and striking ornaments. Others seem to have reacted against the whole movement, attaching porches and slate roofs. Why buy a striking white-cube box and then plonk a pitched roof on top? Why not just buy a house with a pitched roof?

Frinton's chip shop & pub are no longer seen as proof of the apocalypse. I stopped at a cafe promoting herbal teas and asked what they had. “Calamine” said the young waitress but luckily it turned out to be Camomile.

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.