In May this year 36 small rooms went on sale in Boscombe, on England’s south coast. In a renovated 1950s concrete building, these so-called “pods”, priced from £64,995, are designed for day-use only, not for overnight accommodation. They have no bedroom, private toilet or bathroom facilities. All you get for your money is a kitchen, a living room and a balcony with a sea view. Yet the interest they have generated has been “phenomenal”, says Glynn Evans of estate agency Savills. All of the double units (£90,000) have sold.
Would any other country consider developing a building for such a use? “The pods are a reminder of the typical British family holiday from times past,” says Evans. “It’s somewhere to be by the sea but not open to the elements. You don’t need to carry your wind-break with you.”
Britain has more than 20,000 beach huts dotted along its coasts. Usually nothing more than a wooden shed – albeit sometimes brightly painted – huts in sought-after areas can change hands for tens of thousands of pounds.
They evolved from Victorian “bathing machines”, changing-rooms on wheels that were pulled down to the water’s edge by a horse while the occupant undressed in privacy. As times changed and the sight of people in wet costumes was no longer viewed as indecent, these wheeled contraptions became redundant. Many were abandoned on beaches. And so the culture of the beach hut was born.
“When purpose-built beach huts were first put up in the 1890s and 1900s they were designed as a home-from-home” says Kathryn Ferry, an expert in Victorian architecture. “This is still the role they fulfil today: a place to brew a cup of tea and hide from the vagaries of the British summertime.” Ferry should know; she has spent months travelling the UK’s coastline researching her latest book, Sheds on the Seashore: A Tour through Beach Hut History. She discovered that huts had their heyday in the 1950s but Britons’ taste for overseas holidays soon led to thousands of them being abandoned. Today, with concerns about climate change and the recession, “staycations” are back and the market for beach huts is booming. And although the the beach hut seems to be widely regarded as a marker of British quirkiness, the concept was taken up widely. The rest of 19th century Europe and white Australia also adopted the modesty-preserving bathing machines, in various guises. Australian ones had a shark net at the end. In France, in the 1820s, there were tent-like constructions on the beaches in which to undress. Canvas shelters still feature on French beaches, available to rent by the day as a place to retreat from the sun’s rays.
The wooden beach hut evolved concurrently across the western world in the 1800s. Australians call their tin-roofed versions “bathing boxes”. On Brighton Beach in Melbourne 82 of them stand like sentries, painted in different colours. They change hands for up to A$200,000 (£98,044).
In the US, perhaps the most famous beach huts – known as cabanas – are to be found at Bailey’s Beach in Newport, Rhode Island, which dubs itself “America’s First Resort”. Here, grey- and yellow-painted wooden huts provide a small retreat for sundowners. Their owners constitute an exclusive club and sightseeing day-trippers are not welcome.
Scandinavians meanwhile are famed for their social egalitarianism and love of the outdoors. Many families have a simple wooden cabin in the mountains or on the coast of a flat, rocky island. Some of these huts have come about as a result of economic and environmental change. As cod fishing has waned and leisure time increased, fishermen’s cabins, known as rorbu, have become popular retreats for city-dwellers or tourists.
But cultural attitudes to the sea differ. In some tropical countries palm tree-lined beaches are still, primarily, a workplace or refuse dump and inhabitants would rather have a view inland. The sea, after all, is dangerous: a source of tsunamis, sharks and storms. One tropical country where no-frills beach huts are part of everyday culture, however, is Samoa. Most families live just a walk away from a beachside fale – an open-sided, palm-thatched shelter with a crushed coral floor – where they relax, eat, sleep and enjoy the breeze. This beachside lifestyle has morphed into a thriving small industry of basic, family-owned tourism lodges, where guests sleep on mattresses on the floor of a purpose-built fale.
In temperate climates beach huts mostly offer protection from biting winds and cold rain. Brits huddle inside them, seated in a deckchair, a flask of tea to hand, along with a daily newspaper. On tropical beaches, shelters provide a cool retreat from the blazing sun. It’s too hot to sit upright; you sprawl, languorously, in a hammock, nodding off to the sound of the sea and the rustle of palm-leaf thatch. Colombian architect Símon Velez captured all this perfectly in a large basic seaside cabin, Piedras de Barlovento, in Santa Marta, where overnight stays (for six) are possible. The front aspect of the weather-beaten house is open to the elements. The beds, on ledges under thatched eaves, are reached by steep stair-ladders. Below, hammocks swing over expansive decking that juts out over the booming surf.
But most beach huts aren’t big and certainly not flashy. The very ethos of a beachside shelter is that it is somewhere puritanical in its simplicity, temporary and in keeping with its surroundings. It is about staring out at an empty horizon and sparkling water, getting back to basics and nature. As Henry David Thoreau wrote, giving his reasons for spending two years in a rustic cabin by the water at Walden Pond: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” If you can’t spare two years, you can visit a beach hut for the day.
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Garden gear: Algae fighters
The algae that transforms ponds and lakes into lurid green swamps has no respect for botanical know-how or status. Its latest victim is the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, west London, writes Jane Owen.
Blanket weed has infested the lake in front of the Palm House and so the man in charge, Ray Townsend, is planting the common reed Phragmites to destroy it. This method is highly effective but it presents two problems. Like its victim, Phragmites is invasive. Also, birds love it so much that in 2007, when Townsend first introduced it, it was all eaten up. (The reeds are now under the protective cover of plastic baskets.)
For smaller volumes of water, barley straw is the classic solution and I’ve tried this with varying success over the years. Greenways, based in Hampshire, south England, sells it in handy cotton-net pads and strips in various sizes and ships to North America and Europe. Some come with lavender straw, which encourages the treatment to persist; others come with bacterial pellets to speed the process.
Nobody knows why barley straw works but it certainly stops regrowth. Treatments can take days in the case of unicellular algae (which creates the pea-green soup effect) or weeks for multi-cellular algae, such as blanket weed.
Last year I had a serious pea-green-soup attack that eventually succumbed to a combination of aeration (fountain) plus barley straw. This year I am trying a different, cheaper and less messy approach using Fresha Tank industrial silver discs, which sit in the water, last for ever and claim to be able to clear the water of algae and bacteria.
Each disc costs £9.95 from Aqua Midas and delivery is free. I have high hopes for Fresha Tank because similar discs keep my cut flower water fresh and sweet without having to add sachets of flower food.
