Shortlisted for the Sir Banister Fletcher Award 2007 * Award * From pavilions and piers (including the scandalous demise of Brightons West Pier), to bungalows, beach huts and bathing machines (the first purpose-designed form of seaside architecture), this is a fine celebration of a very English invention. * The Guardian * Filled with photographs, architectural drawings, guidebooks, postcards and posters, this book explores changing attitudes to holidays and their settings. Taste, fashion and class make an appearance and there is an exploration of how the seaside became a hotbed for issues of morality, where people took their sauce on a postcard as often as with their fish and chips. * Daily Telegraph * This colourful sweep through the history of seaside art and architecture is a perfect blend of the scholarly and the entertaining . . . illustrated with great archive images. * Coast * Fred Grays illuminating study of the history of seaside architecture shows what a profound influence many of the innovations born on British coasts have had on Western holiday ideals . . . his account is enlivened by the wealth of pictorial evidence he has gathered. The fascinating photos of past and present resorts . . . show changing attitudes to holidaymaking and reveal the class and gender splits at work (or play) through the ages. * Metro London * manages to be both scholarly and colourful and offers a timely history of seaside art and architecture, from Brighton Pier and beach huts in Nice to a derelict resort complex in the Baltic, to the bizarre Palm islands of Dubai. * London Evening Standard * an entertaining, thought-provoking book . . . gloriously illustrated book . . . a pleasure both to read and to handle. * Brighton Evening Argus * a fascinating, well written and lavishly illustrated history of seaside architecture taking on board the influence of society and nature from the origins of the seaside holiday in the eighteenth century, to the present day . . . There are so many enthralling nuggets in this book . . . a most thought-provoking, informative and enjoyable read. * Journal of Design History * This is a splendid book, solid, substantial, and beautfully illustrated in a variety of idioms, and a delight to read and peruse . . . It examines what is distinctively seaside about the architecture, design, and ambience of the Western beach resorts, and it does so through themed historical analyses covering the two centuries and half since the invention of the modern seaside holiday. * Annals of Tourism Research * Designing the Seaside is beautifully illustrated, with many of the plates in colour . . . The calibre of the visual material and its variety is striking but it should not be allowed to overshadow the text, which is deeply informed and fluently written . . . Grays book is a tonic, to read and enjoy for pleasure. * Tourism Management Journal * This instructive, enjoyable, and beautifully presented book is a must for anyone interested in the evolution of the material fabric of the seaside resort. The focus is the authors own stamping ground of Brighton and the English south coast, but he uses this as a base from which to explore other resorts in Britain, and to make much more than passing allusions to the development of the seaside throughout the western world. * Modernism/Modernity *
