On why we dig the beach: Tracing the subjects and objects of the bucket and spade for a relational materialist theory of the beach

The problem of the humanist beach

Anderson’s (2012) and Lambert et al.’s (2006) notion of human geography as a ‘landlocked field’ is pertinent to tourist studies, whose central metaphor of landscape demonstrates its antecedence in visualism and land, which, combined, suggest a nature overseen and controllable by humanity. For Anderson, the metaphors of assemblage and convergence are the most useful for his understanding of surfing, where humanity has inserted itself on the very force of the sea. This problematisation of the humanist beach is an insight clearly applicable for most other activities in the littoral zone, the space between the shallow shelf where waves break and the tideline, for this is where all things must respond first to the force and presence of the sea, its tides and its many conditions and moods. This is by definition a turbulent zone. For Stranger’s (2011) thesis on surfing, the human experience is correspondingly not one of human mastery but of flow, a state of mind and body in which human subjectivity dissolves into a wider engagement with kinaesthesia, matter and movement (which unfold on the beach), giving rise to a characteristic ecstatic ‘release’. This is the release from a separable human agency and subjectivity, something only maintained by humanist ontologies, which Pickering (2008) contrasts with an ‘ontology of becoming’:

One entails a dualism of the human and the non-human, a detachment from and domination of the latter by the former, and an erasure of time; the other entails an intermediate symmetrical engagement between the human and the non-human and an intrinsically temporal becoming in that engagement. (p. 3)

Researching these processes of becoming necessarily involves paying attention to what actually happens and to see dialectical forms of agency at play in human worlds, because we are long used to seeing only our own human capacities to shape, form and control the worlds we inhabit. ‘Philosophical thought, social and cultural thought, critical thought has kept its focus firmly on the various achievements and potentialities of human agency … by and large we have left the rest up to the physical sciences to sort out’ (Clark, 2011: xiii). Posthumanist research reunites them.

To relational materialist thinkers, this is not a mere oversight or failure of intellectual balance; it is the audacious arrogance of humanity not to recognise the raw physicality of the earth and its history of dominating rather than being dominated by humanity. Andrew Pickering (2008) showed how vulnerable New Orleans was to hurricane Katarina, in part because of the arrogance of the US Marine Corps of engineers and their belief that they could control the Mississippi. Clark’s (2011) Inhuman Nature reverses the starting point of humanist investigations:

Instead of beginning with what we believe to be our powers and capabilities, I set out from the position of our susceptibility to the earth’s eventfulness, from our all-too-human exposures to forces that exceed our capacity to control or even make full sense of them. (p. xiv)

The danger of not doing this in all cases is one reason for the ‘methodological or generalised symmetry’ insisted on by actor network theory (ANT), which always assumes that all things human and otherwise have potential agency and matter. To ANT analysts, some things in a network such as a beach can be referred to as intermediaries because they only transfer the force of others and make no difference to the overall network. But mediators multiply or create difference and are the proper objects of study. The trouble with humanist analysis in ANT terms is that it has tended to treat everything besides humans as intermediaries. So, in ANT terms, we might propose to study the bucket and spade as a mediator. Despite its name, ANT is not really theory but a methodology for looking more carefully at the world (Law and Hassard, 1999).

We must therefore deploy new concepts to rebuild the posthumanist beach, perhaps after Latour’s (2010) Compositionist Manifesto, by putting together humans and non-humans on the beach as ‘a topic to be carefully studied’ rather than as a scene to be decoded or revealed for its underlying ‘reality’. In Fiske’s (1987) widely regarded (and much reproduced) structuralist account, the beach was presented as a semiotically powerful boundary between nature and culture, which thus rendered what actually happened there as less relevant or formative than its (putative) hidden structures and its underlying representational elements in opposition. In a paper entitled ‘Surfalism and Sandiotics’, Fiske (1983) wrote, ‘People use beaches to seek out certain kinds of meaning for themselves, meanings that help them come to terms with their off-beach normal life style’ (p. 121). Worse, the beach was also rendered as an in-between space, neither nature nor culture and certainly not a promiscuous becoming of the two, as we might want to stress now. The hidden structures of the beach decoded into its constitutive elements became a reality counterposing the delusions of appearance. This is why in such accounts there is so little detail of what nature does, so little detail of what humans actually do with nature, nor what they do together, for they are indeed ‘oppositions’. What they do is less significant than their structural arrangement, as the playing out of universal truths. In structural critiques, the material reality is merely a manifestation of something else and therefore explained away, and this trivialises rather than problematises the bucket and spade.

Representations of the beach can also be deceptive when they are manifested as snapshots of ‘things’ that are properly processes; engagements that are frozen by the technologies of representation and rendered timeless and fixed, rather than ‘becomings’. Paintings or photos, seen individually, or as abstracted visual descriptions (advertising copy, holiday brochures, excerpts from holidays and other bits and scraps from the cultural evidence cupboard) can create the impression that vacationers at the beach are immobile, ideally still and restful. Many key points of Fiske’s work on the semiotic study of the beach rely on the deception of the ‘still’. When seen at, and through, different states of the tide and times of the day, as will been shown below, the opposite is demonstrated, that beaches respond intimately and dialectically to a lively environment. Paintings and photos of the beach also deceive because they are selective rather than representative; they are typically taken for familial and aesthetic rather than documentary reasons. As Urry (2006) argues, they deliberately record happy families together at a place: contrived images of family happiness rather than the typical seaside scenes of individuals absorbed at their various beach activities. In the photos and pictures analysed below, it was therefore important to look beyond or beside the family photo to see the working bodies or use the wider angles of professional beachscape photography to see the pattern they make at different states of the tide.

How human agency, human design and imagination act on and construct a largely inert, passive world around them, largely for human visual consumption, has been the dominant paradigm of a humanist tourist studies (Franklin and Crang, 2001). In recent years, this has been challenged by investigating the consequences, orderings, networks and compositions of tourism as ‘a topic to be studied more carefully’ (Anderson, 2012; Franklin, 2004, 2012; Van der Duim et al., 2012). Occulocentrism not only suggests the humanist/dualist view of the world via the detached human subject, contemplating the world from a distance (thereby gaining ‘perspective’), but also omits the countervailing experiences of attachment, because the observations made by the ever-more-seeing human eye were privileged over experience, participation and embodied presence. Jokinen and Veijola’s (1994: 149, quoted in Davidson et al., 2005’) celebrated critique of the tourist gaze showed its disembodied tourists and pointed out the scale of this omission by considering how much tourist behaviour, experience, performance, time and money on the beach is actually channelled by and through the body, emotions and through senses other than vision (which of course is important, but not defining) (Davidson et al., 2005).

The emergent relational materialism in tourist studies that resulted from sensual and embodied analyses developed connective tissue between human and non-human elements through a range of concepts such as proximities, place, networks, dwelling, inhabiting, mobilities and ordering (Franklin, 2004; Hinchliffe, 2002; Urry, 2006) although how well they removed entirely human-centred perspectives has varied.

Obrador-Pons’ (2012) ‘socio-historical construction of the beach as “sensorium”’ has immediate advantages. Through his ‘focusing on the significance of the haptic sense on the beach’ and how human touch leads us into all kinds of connections with materials and their apprehensions as ‘lively’, ‘textured’, mobile, open, proximate, intersubjective and emergent, we begin to understand how embodied connections open us to the world of the non-human.

Even so, his ‘haptic geographies of sandcastles’ focuses attention first on a human world apprehended and transformed by the human body. We might say it allows us to recognise the materiality of human experience in ways that vision alone cannot, but as the focus of analysis is still directed through the human sensorium, how human apprehension of their world is more roundly organised, it still foregrounds and privileges human experience and agency. This was illustrated in the way Obrador-Pons studied sandcastle building. The focus of analysis was not the wider environment of the beach within which sandcastles were made but more narrowly on individual built projects, successfully completed castles or structures and this directs attention to human narrative, design, and mastery over the material agency of the beach. His account ‘expose(s) the beach as a skilful and technical accomplishment thus confirming that humanity is technical from the start’ (Obrador-Pons, 2012: 9). Although the modelling of the sand ‘facilitates … access to new layers of meaning and experience and enables the invention of other spaces’, this creativity is all human, a human creativity facilitated by, but not partnered by the sand:

Building sandcastles is … about making things present and tangible … a place in which it is literally possible to make virtual worlds actual and touchable. On the beach inert masses of sand are transformed into solid material configurations that evoke a wide range of aspects generally related with childhood play experiences, ideas and fantasies. (Obrador-Pons, 2012: 13)

While haptic geographies are important, their focus on a specifically human experience does run the risk of over-emphasising the human body at the expense of other non-human agencies in the environment. It is a breathtaking simplification to describe the pathways of water and sand that constitute the material for sandcastles as ‘inert’. As we shall see, it is anything but. It is equally important to trace the materialities of the bucket and spade at least over long periods of time and across tidal cycles, and it is significant from Obrador-Pons’ account that the bucket and spade are rarely mentioned as significant objects, something requiring explanation. A haptic approach alone cannot account for or grasp the ways in which the bucket and spade was assembled in a becoming of naturecultures, histories and materials and how the very subjectivity of the ‘human building with sand on the beach’ is, in fact, an artefact of objects such as the bucket and spade.

While it is necessary to observe and record human touch in action, it should never of course be privileged over the action of the world it connects to, and here the symmetrical methodologies of relational materialism offer extension and elaboration. The approach adopted here will focus equally on the human subject and the heterogeneous community of non-humans on the beach, including the bucket and spade. With this more distributed focus, it will be possible to see non-humans and non-human orderings of tide, morphology and material acting on human projects and creating human subjectivity in a dialectical manner and to see how a day at the beach became a co-determined accomplishment.

For Urry (2006), sandcastle making was approached from a mobilities and place-making perspective, and its analytical frame was more distributed and heterogeneous. Despite this heterogeneous and mobile assemblage, the sandcastle was still described in mostly humanist terms: ‘The sandcastle is a social project involving face-to-face body-to-body proximity among the family who both construct it and act as an impressed audience … ’. Or more strongly perhaps

Through the sandcastle, the space and materiality of the beach is domesticated, occupied, inhabited, embodied. The sandcastle transforms the endless mass of white, golden, fine grained or gravelled sand into a habitat; a kingdom imbued with dreams, hopes and pride. Nature is reconstructed as the social space of an embodied family performance. (Urry, 2006: viii–ix)

The perspective usefully shows how, through the articulation of human and non-human worlds, the materiality and mobility of the bucket and spade can be both humble and constitutive of significant places such as the beach. Its brevity as a sketch necessarily limits its scope, and such a view is at odds with most children’s view that whatever they ‘will’ into being on the beach with sand will come to nothing, since it cannot be tamed or domesticated. The 1967 song by Jimi Hendrix, ‘Castles made of sand fall into the sea’, is something that all children know very well. And they do not just fall, they are claimed by the sea.

So, the approach adopted here has been inspired by Pickering (2008) who trace human and non-human genealogies of becoming, a ‘posthumanist’ project to decentre the humanist ontology, avoiding views of the world where humans are only seen as a controlling centre acting on a largely inert substrate. Instead, an effort must be made to understand how vacationers came to dwell by the sea in specific ways and how the accretion of activities-with-objects there interpellated new subjectivities from visitors, who responded to the flows and push of the sea and the beach, to what Latour (1993) referred to as the ‘extended democracy’, a reconstitution of humans and non-humans.

‘And so castles made of sand fall into the sea eventually’: Tracing the subjects and objects of the bucket and spade ¹

In this section, it will be argued that the specificities of the materiality and agency of the bucket and spade originated from a period when the first Romantic travellers and artists began to break down historic attitudes to the beach as a ‘demonized, repugnant, horrific’ social space (Urbain, 2003) shunned by almost everyone apart from the indigenous fishing and gathering communities living there, set apart by this fact from mainstream English society. As a remnant folk tradition, the heroic lives of these people battling the sea for meagre livings appealed to Romantic thinkers and artists who championed them to a growing public through art and writing (Gellner, 1983). However, these Romantics also sought access to their worlds and began to participate in them, through periods of living with them in their communities and eventually through finding ways to inhabit the beach independently. They championed their lives as a struggle against powerful natural forces and sought to place themselves where they too might encounter such non-human agency.

There is a tantalisingly undeveloped hypothesis in Urbain’s account that suggests that the pleasure of the beach derived from participating in the lives of the fishing cultures. Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe found accommodation and satisfaction through demiurgic qualities that life on the beach demanded: he was always busy transforming his beach world, always at work, a creative impulse driven by the practice of multiple ‘craftwork’ dominating his time and energy. However, Crusoe was alone and left to his own devices and ingenuity. By contrast, the Romantic visits became cohabitations with their admired ethnic beach communities, and clearly there was considerable scope for participation, learning skills and putting them into daily practice. Urbain describes how fishermen would often take visitors into their home, as paying guests. We learn of their being taken out in boats, guided on walks and entertained with stories. There is a sketch of visitors collecting fishing ethnographica and even of fishermen becoming retailers of ethnographic curiosities and other souvenirs (dried fish, shells, model boats and seafaring objects) (Urbain, 2003: 57). Yet, there are few accounts of their material and demiurgic engagements with fishing communities nor how these may have translated and transformed into the material engagements with the beach, becoming cultures of occupancy and when fishing cultures themselves began to dwindle and disappear. It is this account that we must find here.

This section of the article therefore seeks to extend Urbain’s analysis, to see whether it is possible in the English case initially, to identify the lost genealogy of material traces of beach culture and somewhere in there the first signs of the bucket and spade. I am going to argue that the bucket and spade were central to transformations of this experience, participating in the work of the foreshore, and the notion of an active beach experience.

The Romantic attraction to a newly ‘discovered’ coastal peasantry of fishermen encompassed their work at sea and on the foreshores, as well as the material cultures of their work: their boats, nets, sails, baskets, rakes, buckets, spades, moorings, beach anchorages, havens and villages. These were apprehended in great detail. These were important subjects for painters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their combined works have been recognised as forming entirely new coastal sensibilities and aesthetics: ‘More than any travel account, the tremendous labour accomplished by artists along the coasts between 1800 and 1840 is proof of the rising prestige of the seashore and the growing interest in all forms of coastal life’ (Corbin, 1994: 173). At first, the beaches were painted as a timeless primordial gaze, ‘a population not only maritime but exotic, at least in the eyes of the discoverers who saw, experienced and described it as such, in the form of pastoral scenes or ethnographic clichés’ (Urbain, 2003: 38). The archetype here is J.M.W. Turner’s Pembroke Castle: Clearing up of a Thunder Storm (1803). Two leather-skinned fishermen prepare their catch on the foreshore beside great anchors and tethering equipment, the prow of their boat, wicker carrying baskets and drying nets. Out at sea in the bay, other fishing vessels provide the evidence for a community of the sea, a community who live in this lively, dangerous and timeless world. The coastal castle, a more or less continuous presence across the length and breadth of the English/Welsh coastlines, became a motif of these paintings, recognising how these places were frontlines with human enemies too. The heroic occupation of fishermen doing daily battle with wind, tide and tempest was a regular theme and was elaborated by Turner’s 1806 painting of The Iveagh Seapiece or Coast Scene of Fisherman Hauling a Boat Ashore. Here, on the shore, a team of fishermen, perhaps an entire fishing community cooperate to land a craft safely on an agitated high sea, with dark storm clouds threatening. It is a muscular struggle. The team and their craft are bathed in the rich light of a stray sunbeam, giving them, and the scene, an intentionally heroic, sacred air. In Scarborough Town and Castle: Morning Boys Catching Crabs (1811), Turner painted a quieter scene, a local fishing culture on the sands at low tide, with women spreading drying laundry on rocks beside a freshwater stream and young boys busy gathering food on the foreshore, some with nets, others appearing to dig the sand for cockles. It is perhaps the first ever scene of children preoccupied on the sands. But they are clearly not holidaymakers. Nearby, their male kinsmen are shrimping with large nets and baskets.

Closer to London, John Constable’s Brighton Beach of 1824 establishes the point that beachfronts of even the busiest towns like Brighton were ethnographically segregated and were more or less exclusively a working place for its indigenous fisher folk. This composition provides a wider angle along the shingle beach to take in more than just the prime subject; a fishing boat and its crew freshly arrived with a catch. It shows an ethnographic context: other fishermen at work and at rest, working women battling against a strong onshore wind and other boats out at sea. What other Romantic travellers there might have been in such locations are invariably bracketed out. However, we know they were there from literature, and we also know that for them the beach was mostly performed by the ‘perambulating body’. There are no accounts of long days spent on the beach performed by the ‘stationed’ body, with parents surrounded by playing children as they became accustomed to being in the twentieth century.The Romantic travellers were often men, but it became fashionable in the early nineteenth century for young men and women to walk along beaches, and it was a good setting for Jane Austen’s Persuasion where a house party might stretch their legs and reshuffle their romantic cards. But the coast offered a frisson too and Jane Austen ([1818] 2006) writes that ‘The young people were all wild to see Lyme’:

… the walk to the Cobb, skirting round the pleasant little bay … the Cobb itself, its old wonders and new improvements, and the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, are what the stranger’s eye will seek; and a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better … these places must be visited and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme understood. (pp. 110–12)

This enthusiasm owes something to the groundswell created by William Daniell’s popular Voyage around Great Britain, a lavishly illustrated eight-volume survey of the British coast, published 2 years earlier in 1813.

Also by J.M.W. Turner, to the east of Brighton, Hastings: Fish Market on the Sands, Early Morning (1824) shows a smaller town beach: it includes Hasting’s East Parade, its Battery and again a coastal castle in the immediate distance. The painting strongly contrasts modern middle-class society making their fish purchases against a more primitive, fishing culture depicted by tan frocked men, basket-carrying fishwives with fish spread out before their boats and top-of-the-beach winching gear.

Such fishing cultures lived in poor ghettoes, sub-villages or ‘lower towns’ of coastal settlements on the beach, and these too were a strong focus of the Romantic gaze on the littoral zone. There was great ethnographic variation in the genre, from affluent Brighton in the East whose homes were captured in paintings such as Mackerel Fisherman by Alfred H. Green in the 1860s or in prose such as Stephen Reynolds’ A Poor Man’s House (1908) and account of his life among fisher folk in the slums of Under Town, close to the beach at Seacombe, Devon. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, we find Captain Harville living in the rustic fishing village in ‘rooms so small that none but those who invite from the heart could think capable of accommodating’.We also discover Captain Harville to have gone native, ‘he fashioned new netting needles and pins … and if everything else was done he sat down to his large fishing net at one corner of the room’ (Austen, [1818] 2006: 115–16).

It is clear from Turner’s painting of Hastings that in 1824 the beach was not yet a middle-class playground, that for the middle-class fish buyers, the beach was merely a place on the social margin, a spontaneous unlicensed market on the commons beyond the respectable precincts of town. Here, the materiality of the paintings as objects exhibited in urban galleries performed a space of imagination and longing, suggesting the appeal of a new landscape and way of life by the sea. This quality qualified the seaside perfectly for the newly constituted flows of middle-class Romantic travellers with their longing for a folk golden age, their discovery and recovery of its dying remnants, material culture, costume, music and song (Gellner, 1983: 53–57).

These pioneering tourists sought to buy everyday objects as the ethnographica associated with local peasant cultures, and in the case of coastal tourism, this later extended to objects that were useful to tourist participation in local fishing, boating and foraging cultures. In addition to the fishing harbours, boats and villages, the coastal Romantic imaginary took in the ‘littoral zone gatherers’. Shrimping nets for adults, and then children, wooden rakes and local designs for fishing tackle (such as mackerel spinners) became tourist objects in this way as did the bucket and spade. In fact, to this day, plastic sets of buckets and spades also commonly include a rake. All around England and Wales, livings were made from gathering cockles, lava bread (sea weed), razorfish, mussels, shrimps, prawns and later lug and rag worm for bait. Gathering tools for these were the spade, the rake and the bucket, and the presence of these on the landscape was very prominent as workers of the sandflats and ‘diggers of sand’. Such tools are still used today among professional cocklers. In paintings, the evocation is decidedly not the pleasure beach, but the working beach of a picturesque folk remnant. Influential here is J.M.W. Turner’s Calais Sands at Low Water: Poissards Gathering Bait, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1830. In this, a reddening evening sun reflected in the sea and wet sand fills the centre, while a number of semi-naked peasants trail off to the right, digging the sand and filling buckets with lug worm. The details of their toil, their tools and posture is clear only for the study of the figure closest to the artist, but the entire group compose a scene of quiet concentration, not unlike cows grazing. Turner’s paintings of the coast between 1803 and 1830 reveal a transition from narrative clichés of fishermen battling nature to the ethnographic detail of their everyday lives.

The desire and longing for spatial and social marginality alongside ethnographic detail continued late into the nineteenth century, particularly in the paintings of the various forms of shellfish gatherers, such as John Crane’s The Cocklers Return of ca 1875 (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

John Crane, The Cocklers Return, ca 1875.

Shellfish gathering, usually by young women, was a frequent Victorian theme for its popular and increasingly sentimental art. The work of William Holyoke, Alfred H. Green and Henry James Johnstone all include a composition called ‘Gathering Mussels’, and Edith Hume did a similar composition called Gathering Cockle Shells. Again, the women were all in peasant costume and often posed as young Britannias, looking out to sea.

Through the mid-nineteenth century, artists began to paint the Crusoe-esque visitors just as readily as the coastal peasantries they emulated. For example, at Pegwell Bay, Kent, an 1859 beach scene at low tide was painted in great detail by William Dyce. We see half the foreshore of the bay beneath the chalk cliffs. In the foreground, the scene is dominated by three women dressed finely and warmly in a rusticated peasant style; it is a mother and her daughters aged 18–25, and they are gathering shells into little baskets. With them, nearer the wet sand there is a younger daughter perhaps 11–13 years old, and she has a wooden spade and a bucket. There are 12 other individuals on the exposed sands stretching out into the distance; there is one older child on his own with a bucket and spade and others in groups, mostly parents with younger children, all similarly equipped. There is a man with four donkeys giving rides at the top of the beach, and there is also the figure of a fisherman just on the very margins of the composition. This is the earliest beachscape in which the bucket and spade has clearly become an essential tool for beach going, and where its deployment arranges beachgoers into wider frames of the beach and new engagements; it shows how holidaymakers had followed the sea down to the lower end of the littoral zone at low tide. These are working bodies, stationed at particular points, both digging and gathering. In compositional terms, it is very similar to Turner’s painting of poissards gathering bait at Calais, and it was echoed in many other places. In Australia, for example, there were cognate paintings such as John Michael Skipper’s Frances Skipper and another woman with collecting buckets on the rocky seashore, of 1840 (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Frances Skipper and another woman with collecting buckets on the rocky seashore, South Australia, by John Michael Skipper (1815–1883) ca. 1840.

The combined effect of these paintings, in conjunction with the arrival of railway links from London (Brighton in 1841; Devon Coast 1849; Cornwall 1859 and Penzance 1867), drew larger numbers of enthusiasts to the coast. But now, it was the spectacle of the crowds that captured the imagination of painters and photographers, rather than the ‘natives’ or the earlier visitor-pioneers. They did not so much displace the natives as mingle with them because most of their beach activities were modelled on their culture and included an expanding range of pursuits such as sailing, rowing and boating, fishing and foraging, and also a diet rich in seafood. And just as the visitors came to the seaside beaches to live there after the manner of the fishermen, so the fishermen became increasingly less reliant on fishing and more reliant on the more numerous tourists. Thus (like the tourists), they become increasingly dependent on the production of goods and services, though still centred on their traditional foreshores. Here, we have the material orderings of an ethnic folkway on a line of flight with the Romantic imaginary, with elements of a declining folkway framing the orderings of an emerging touristic performance and relational materialism.

Jane Maria Bowkett’s painting Folkestone Beach of ca 1865–1870 is significant for its documentary qualities. It shows a beach scene set among the fishing boats and their winch machines, and here the fishermen are interacting with a crowd of tourists and extending their business to take advantage of their own ‘ethnic’ attraction. In this painting, we can see how sails have been adapted to provide an awning for souvenir objects that the fishermen are clearly now making for tourists. Such lives still relied on making a living from the beach, except from henceforth it was increasingly from flows of people coming in with the seasons instead of fish coming in with the tides. One fisherman is clearly leaning against his boat and showing a boy a model of his sailing fishing boat. We are also to imagine that the boy and girl vigorously digging and making a castle bought their wooden spades from the fishermen too and that the little girls behind them are lifting locally made buckets for sale from the trestle table set up on the beach. This is a significant and rare record of fishermen selling buckets from the beach as well as their use by visiting children.

It is the scene that these groups make together that provides the new subject, and it is this mutual attraction and how both are changed by it that is of interest. The public who first viewed such paintings and such scenes in real life are not imagining a disappearing world of peasant beauty and simplicity but an emergent world that interpellates them (Law, 2002). This is a scene that hails them, already contains the suggestion that this is now part of their world and that their world has expanded and now includes new places and ethnographic experiences such as this. Nationalisms of this kind suggested belonging in terms of its folk pasts and traditions and thus insisted on retaining them in ritual and ceremonial forms (hence the widespread practice in Europe of wearing of peasant costumes on national holidays). It also opened the public’s eyes to participation and performance in such worlds.

These spades were cut and shaped by the fishermen (highly skilled in woodwork from ship building and repair) and their source of raw material came from the plentiful supply of driftwood, marine planking being perfect for the purpose. There are many men obviously dressed as fishermen in this crowd scene and each one has tourists clamouring for things they have made. At Brighton, Jefferies (1885) lists other items that were commonly made by their wives, notably shell-covered souvenirs such as pin cushions and so on: ‘… sellers of wretched needlework and singular baskets covered in shells thrust their rubbish into people’s laps’.

There are other ‘entertainers’ present in the Bowkett’s painting, a black minstrel singer in a check and striped suit is handing out performance leaflets. The beach has now become a spectacle in its own right, a self-propelled social effervescence. Richard Jefferies’ description of life on the beach in 1885 shows how children were very involved in the social ferment, clearly excited by it and armed with buckets and spades:

… the boats and small yachts are filled; some of the children pour pebbles into the boats, some carefully throw them out; wooden spades are busy, sometimes they knock each other on the head with them, sometimes they empty pails of sea-water onto a sister’s frock.

Here now is a recognisably modern beach.

Also from around 1860 onwards, the first images come to light of holidaymakers fishing themselves, using very basic rods and lines or handlines. Piers and promenades built through the nineteenth century gave anglers access to deeper water, meaning that they did not need to go out in boats, although fishermen also began to take trippers out fishing for mackerel or for days fishing in party groups. Smelt fishing was a big attraction on the piers in San Francisco, and a photograph shows large crowds assembled in 1869. A lithograph by A.L. Rossi titled Little Anglers of ca 1880 shows children fishing and sailing toy boats from a groyne. By the turn of the century and through the Edwardian period, sea fishing became an extremely popular holiday activity. A cartoon by S.T. Dadd in The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News of July 1901 shows two boys fishing with handlines from a promenade, and after the founding of the British Sea Anglers Society in 1893, there were soon sea fishing clubs appearing everywhere which created their own specialist flow of tourists to the beach (Figures 3 and 4).

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Figure 3.

‘The King of the Castle’. The Illustrate London News August 29^th 1891.

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Figure 4.

Postcard of fishing on an English Pier ca 1920.

A painting by Samuel S. Carr of Coney Island, New York, of around 1880 (Beach Scene) underlines the essential spectacle of the beach by showing a group of three sisters making a sandcastle with tin buckets and wooden spades and being photographed by a professional photographer as the ideal family look on and wait for a family portrait to be taken. The camera was to take the place of the easel at the beach, but children brandishing buckets and spades in Wunderkammer beach scenes became popular studio portrait themes (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Two little girls with bucket and spades, NSW, 1890.

From 1900 onwards, when photography begins to dominate the visual record of beach life, we can see that the perambulating body on the beach gave way to a more sedentary body. Now, families were predominantly stationed on the dry sand at the top of the beach seemingly in order to provide a base for children’s play with the bucket and spade, but it might be better expressed the other way that the expanded activities of the beach, predominantly those of children with buckets and spades, provided the basis for the seated adult. It seems almost certain that the constant changes of engagements children had with the beach laid the foundations for long summer days there. Photos of children in these top-of-the-beach locations are invariably busy, working children and, seemingly, from the time they are on the beach until they leave they are never parted from their bucket and spade for very long. However, the photos also show how adults are now moving in relation to the tide and their children’s engagement with the beach.

Photos clearly show a choreography of children’s interaction with the beach mediated by the bucket and spade. Depending on the state of the tide on their arrival, children may have raced into the sea immediately or waited for a low tide to turn and provide more depth, but children were not in the sea for very long periods (see Cross, 1990). They were, however, engaged with the sand and the beach more generally in a multitude of ways and over a much longer period of time.

To summarise the evidence from many photographs, it is possible to offer the following stylisation of children’s play with their buckets and spades, if we assume a family group arriving on the out-going tide, close to low tide, with most of the foreshore now exposed:

As a common construction, motif sandcastles cannot be taken for granted here. As Obrador-Pons (2012) and Urry (2007) emphasise (with no apparent curiosity to know why), it is the castle (or variants thereof) that dominate this sand play. However, a strong explanatory case can be made that links castles to beaches and especially to representations of the beaches first encountered by pioneering vacationers. As the early works by J.M.W. Turner and John Constable clearly show, at the time the beach was first encountered by visitors, there was practically no coastal architecture to be seen other than the defensive coastal castles of England and Wales. A considerable period elapsed before coastal suburbs or resort ‘fronts’ were added to most coastal places other than those of ports (Walton, 2000). Turner’s coastal seascapes typically included a castle and his compositions (and the many others that followed his style) invariably placed the castle overlooking beaches, at the centre of the painting. These would have been how most people first viewed the seaside as a place of visitation prior to visiting it, for the viewing of exhibitions was extremely popular and influential in the extension of the Romantic gaze and oceanic consciousness (Isham, 2004). Turner was not fabricating the centrality of castles to the British coasts in these paintings, though there was compositional licence taken in the placing of the castle at the centre of almost all of his beach scenes (at least 65 major paintings of coastal castles and many more sketches). Castles were built as a ring of defences by a wealthy island nation; they were part of the all important panoptic defence of the English coast and they were situated on headlands between beaches or overlooking important ports, as at Dover. The castle thus became associated with beach sand play through its ubiquitous, powerful, longstanding domination of views from almost every beach (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Dover Castle overlooking many beaches below.

At the point where this stylised family day begins, paintings and photographs often showed low tide to be a time of scattering across the sandflats, rockpools and out to rocky headlands. Paintings from the nineteenth century (e.g. of Pegwell Bay in 1859 described above) showed low tide to be no less compelling for want of sufficient depth of water for bathing/swimming. Here again, the children continue with a working body, an exploring, collecting and gathering body and the foreshore and headlands, rockpools, shallow waters and mudflats provide a very rich engagement with the marine world. The bucket and spade are their universal tools, the equivalent of the inland hunter-gatherer’s digging stick and collecting basket. Marine nature is encountered close-up and intimately at all stages of the tide, but it is particularly the case at low tide when children use their buckets and spades to explore. The spade provides a safe tool to prod and provoke wildlife which can be poisonous or aggressive, and the bucket is both a collecting pot and aquarium.

As Payne and Riddell (1999) argued, such ‘play’ makes serious and lasting impressions on children and is foundational for building knowledge of environments: ‘I spent much of my childhood at the “Sorrento back beach”. I knew it as an infant explorer where, with bucket and spade, I waded through, dug up and splashed in every rockpool and sand dune’. It was only one step removed from a diving experience, and the sharpness of the focus on entire ecologies was another unusually intense experience of the beach. Organised natural history and children’s beach encounters produced the ‘knowable beach’, a literature of guides and observers manuals, often written for localities, which linked the child to a specific place, not the universal beach but the particular beach. Beach ecologies are refreshed with every tide creating unique episodes of discovery and leaving traces of memory and personal connections to place. Because the bucket and spade enact work (the builder, the gatherer, the explorer, the collector), it traces what Ingold (1993) called taskscapes through the littoral landscapes. The ‘work’ can, in many versions of bucket and spade holidays, extend to fishing and cooking, as well as camping, and often involves entire families (Figure 7):

The term ‘bucket-and-spade break’ denigrates the fact that, to a child, this classic bucket-and-spade combo is the stuff of dreams. It is a symbolic gateway to a parallel universe, a Narnia without the snow, … I would leave daddy to cook supper while we rockpooled, gathering starfish, shrimps in a bucket to observe and admire before releasing them… (Woods, 2011)

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Figure 7.

Queens Beach, Bellerive, Tasmania ca 1911—1915 (at low tide), held at the National Library of Australia (nla.pic-vn5891397).

Photos show how once the tide turns and begins to come in again family groups concentrate in lines along the mid-tide position. Children are invariably hard at work on the damp sand, most usually making some kind of castle complex. The work required is both intellectual and physical. Since beaches are dynamic systems, the sand is not always of the right consistency for building and moulding, it is always an experimental exercise and children can feel the beach working against their plans, foiling whatever designs they may have for it. In the photographs of two very young children taken at Sydney in 1910 (see Figure 8 below), a series of failed attempts to mould sandcastle shapes with a bucket can be seen alongside more successful outcomes.

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Figure 8.

‘Jean and Rainbow at the beach, Sydney 1910’ by Harold Cazneaux (1878–1953).

It is the opposite of a toy (or a school sandpit) that has been supplied ‘fit for purpose’ by a controlling adult or human. As the tide recedes, children are confronted with a range of problems to do with understanding (a) when this particular sand is neither too wet nor too dry to hold shape and (b) where the correct sand can be found relative to their family station. Other problems/opportunities might be encountered such as outcrops of clay, shale or shingle, each of which offers challenges and opportunities for building.

In a photo of Greenmount Beach in Queensland by Frank Hurley (1955) (see Figure 9 below), the approaching tide is creating the need for engineering responses from sandcastle builders, by creating defensive ditches, or canalling the seawater away from, or through, the fortresses. It is an animated, urgent world in which unpredictable and unstoppable orderings of nature collide with human orderings: enchanted narratives and fantasy buildings. Here, we might say that the child is engaged in a dialectical dance of agency with water, sand, structure and engineering. It is a place where clear lines between the human and non-human world do not exist, where sensual, muscular and mental engagements are mediated by extensions of the body, the spade and the bucket. It is a choreography of failure for humanity, in which nature, the sea, triumphs every time, even though the child has an opportunity to struggle against it and to reimagine such relationships anew.

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Figure 9.

Greenmount Beach in Queensland by Frank Hurley (1955), held at the National Library of Australia (nla.pic-vn5871398).

The retreat up the beach before the oncoming tide usually sees new parental encampments made above the high tide mark, and children faced with the new challenge of engineering and building with dry sand. Young children learn that sand at the top of the beach will defy all of their efforts to make it a slave to their will, at least, in the way the mid-tide sand was. Whereas water had the last word at the bottom of the beach, sand is master at the top. All efforts to build sandcastles here are ruled out by nature and children soon learn that their efforts are redirected to where they may find sand that is damp enough for construction. Whereas they built up at the bottom of the beach, at the top they may only go down. Here sand requires a new human response and technology: digging deeper into the sand to find moist malleable material has them tunnelling, chamber building, burying bodies or, in the case of two young boys captured in a 1950s photo from England, constructing a World War II trench, their buckets doubling up as tommy helmets (see Figure 10 below). A photo from around 1920 taken of the Heard family at Blackpool (http://www.heardfamilyhistory.org.uk/family%20secrets.htm) shows the family group pressed up against the promenade on the dry sand. Groups of 4 and 5 boys were digging deep down into the sand creating massive pyramid-like spoils. In the foreground, two much smaller girls are clearly struggling undeterred to get down to the malleable sand.

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Figure 10.

Boys with buckets on head, United Kingdom, location unknown, 1950s.

Urbain (2003) concluded that the seaside holiday had transformed the tourist from a mobile to an immobile body, and to a degree it is true, most seaside holidays are located in one place. However, as we have seen, the images of immobility that holiday snaps often suggest must be contrasted with the working and active body on the beach, stationed at various locations through what amounts to a busy and often working timetable. Seascapes were just as muscular and active engagements with the landscape as any other romantic forms of tourism (e.g. see Morrell, 1963).