The Seaside Heritage Network held ‘The Celtic Seaside’ online seminar on Wednesday 15th May 2024. This seminar explores the rich, yet often overlooked, Celtic seaside heritage of the British Isles. Our first stop takes in the delights of the Isle of Man, with Katie King, Curator of Art and Social History at Manx National Heritage, providing fascinating insights into the origins and development of Manx seaside resorts. Next, we hop over to the Scottish coast with Eric Simpson, author of ‘Going on Holiday’ and ‘Wish You Were Still Here: The Scottish Seaside Holiday’, who considers the distinctive way in which Scotland’s seaside resorts developed. The final destination on our virtual tour of the Celtic seaside is the North Wales Coast, with Avril Wayte, Chair of the Friends of Bangor Garth Pier, who shares with us how the Bangor community led the successful revitalisation of this much-loved pier.
okay right well I’m going to start now um we we’re getting up towards 50 and so I well I’ll start now with a few sort of Parish notices I’ve got a few announcements um some dates for your diary some of you remember last year we did a bucket and Spade list uh where we Nom where people nominated 20 aspects of the seide and we got people to vote for that we’ve done the same again uh this year we’ve got a list of 20 n minations and the voting for that will go live on the 1st of July but there’ll be more information about that in due course second thing to tell you is that the next seminar after this one is on the 10th of July um you can get details from the website it’s on Seaside swimming it looks really interesting session there third event for the diary is 16th of September this year we’re going to have an in-person event at Western super mayare like we did last year at Blackpool and um the the outline of the program is there’ll be a a walk or two but we send out details of all this in due course walk or two around Western super May in the morning and then the main event will be at the Plaza Cinema the former odan where um we’ll be obviously announcing the bucket and Spade list but we’re going to have uh some talks about what’s going on in Western super mayare at the moment a conversation with Paul doe the author of that very good book from called from a bag of chips to Cod coni a tour of 20 English Seaside Resorts a very entertaining book that is and a Punch and Judy show just to finish the event off so if you put the date in your diary that’s the 16th of September um at Western super May uh something else that be of interest that will be launching very soon is that we’ve done a trail of the art deco buildings of Bournemouth Bournemouth has a very rich uh Legacy of s interwar buildings and we’ve done a short sort of hour hour and a half walking trail off uh some of the best art deco buildings in Bournemouth and that will be available as a as a download and some sort of electronic versions we’re just sort of putting the final touches to that so uh just thought I’d give you there a few things to to get you up to date what I’d ask you to do where possible during the talks if you could mute yourself during the talks and and switch off your camera if you want to and what I suggest we do is that um we’ll have questions at the end but if people as we go along if you think of a question you’d like to ask stick it in the chat and I will work my way through them at the end of the the session um which I think is going to be very very interesting and what we’re going to do is I’m going to start with KT King talking about the a of man then Eric Simpson is going to talk to us about the uh Scottish distinctive character of the Scottish Seaside and we’ll end with AAL weight talking about uh Bango GTH Pier which is a very interesting subject indeed so we’ve got I think we’ve got five8 of the people who’ signed up so I think we’ll we’ll start now if you’re ready Katy um yeah Katy um just a little biographical background KY was born on the aisle of man um studied history at the University of Liverpool before completing a masters in museum studies at the University of Leicester she’s worked for Ms National Heritage since 2004 and since 2021 she’s been the curator of Art and social history for the 12 years before that she was community outreach and learning officer for the organization um where she enjoyed engaging with visitors engaging visitors with a collection in Ms Nationals Heritage care while champing championing an access for all ethos across the organization ktie has a passion for audience engagement and delights in using the wonderful collections there to engage and Inspire visitors these collections that she looks after have one thing in common they are about people and it’s through revealing these human stories that connections can be made and through these ordinary connections that the collections themselves become more relevant and engaging to audiences ky’s specialist area of interest is the Island’s tourist history particularly the late Victorian tourist Heyday and today she’ll be talking to us and giving us a short history of the MS tourist Heyday between 1870 19404 so over to you and thank you Katie thank you Alan thanks for that lovely introduction as well um yes so as as Alan said I am the curator of Art and social history for M’s National Heritage on the aisle of man and I’m going to attempt to cram what it’s normally an hour talk into 15 minutes so Alan I won’t be offended if you give me the wind the windmill signal and Chu me off it’ll be fine so um for those of you that don’t know um the reason the a of man’s tourism story is so very interesting is that it came out of nowhere and the reason it came out of nowhere is because in the mid 18th sorry in the mid 19th century the Isis of man was in a a terrible state really um we were and still are an independent country we are not part of the United Kingdom um and we have our own um we have our own Tim wward our own government but um we had a terrible financial situation in the in the um the midth century our fishing industry which had been a big um most people were employed in that way was in Decline the mines were being abandoned on the island and there was a period of mass immigration from the aisle of man where people went to seek their for Fortune elsewhere either in um in in the rest of the UK but often to America or South um South Africa or Australia and because there was no work for young people here on the aisle of man and there was a very real fear that the AIS of man was going to become depopulated like perhaps one of the Scottish um outer islands and that would not do you know we there needed to be something to save the Isle of Man um there was a little inkling of Hope in the 1830s in fact um so some gentle and gentle lady tourists have started to visit the aisle of man um to enjoy our sea bathing our fresh sea waterer and to explore the botony on the island and so there was a sort of feeling that perhaps the Isle of Man could be somewhere people might like to visit but it wasn’t until we got a new governor on the aisle of man we are um governed by or were governed by the leftenant governor who was um the the king or Queen’s representative on the aisle of man so the governor at this time was a man called Governor Henry lck and he was very young when he came here it was 1863 and he immediately recognized that the a of man was staggeringly beautiful and that we should become we should rival um all the other Seaside towns that are popping up all over Britain we could rival those towns but not only that be much better be more dramatic be One Big Holiday Resort um and that’s what he said about doing um he didn’t need to seek permission from anybody to do this he spent millions of pounds um government here timwood government um couldn’t stop him Governors had dictatorial powers they could and they were the chancellor they could do whatever they wanted with with the money um so in just a 10-year period the is of man completely transformed itself from this very small fishing farming Community into one of the liveliest places in Europe and this this happen so fast this explosion that by the end of the period I’m talking about um nearly one in four people on the a of man were entirely dependent on tourism for their livelihood by 1913 and the a of man had completely transformed beyond all recognition so I’m going to hop you through that story now if I can make my slides work yeah um the speed as well meant that the aisle of man developed a very questionable reputation which hopefully I’ll get to at the very end um as well during this period so this is a photograph is actually taken from the 1950s and it was used by the is of man tourism board for many many years to promote this idea that the is of man was a place for Fun friendly family holidays on the beach but in fact the reason the tourist board were doing this is that the a of man had developed a really questionable reputation where large groups of single young men and large groups of single young women were coming to the aisle of man for a drinking holiday I liken it a bit too like magaloff is today it was a really racy place to come and um this was the place that young people wanted to come it was a party a party um party Resort particularly centered around Douglas the capital of the aisle of man so um I’m gon to touch on that now so the very first thing that Governor Lo did was designate somewhere where people could go bathing um designated bathing Creeks natural bathing creeks and this is port skillion in Douglas on the aisle of M he decided that Douglas would be the best place to to begin this Resort um because it was it was the best place for boats to come in to come alongside prior to this time it was um quite a seedy sort of um Port area um where Merchants would trade it wasn’t really a very pleasant place so they they had to really rejuvenate this area um but there was a lot of lot of panic because it was it was 1870 and was it quite right for people to be seab bathing so they had to introduce a lot of legislation very quickly so this is a good example in this Photograph here they introduced a b law where um men and women in suitable bathing drawers had to remain 100 ft away from each other at all times to keep order so in this Photograph this was a male only bathing Creek but at the top on the wall the castellated wall you can see crowds of women peering down at the sort of handsome men below and they weren’t allowed to be naked I hasten to add the women had to swim right the other side of Douglas Bay so that there was no sort of impropriety which I think is marvelous um the biggest problem Governor lock and the a of man had was getting people to the a of man I don’t know if anyone’s traveled here it’s still a challenge today particularly in the winter um at this time when he began his idea in 18 well the late 1860s um the average Crossing time from Liverpool was approximately um 12 hours bordering on 24 hours there are accounts of boats being stuck in the Irish sea for six days on occasion and then once you got to Douglas Bay you had to go down a rope bridge and be road to shore so none of this really lended itself to mass tourism so the first thing the biggest investment was this is what we know is the Victoria Pier you can see it here it’s a deep water landing facility so that steamer ships and later other ships could pull alongside and you could easily disembark and this cost millions of pounds this project um but it did mean that um the boat coming toing and throwing from from England and Scotland um and Wales could could um could dock alongside and you can disembark your visitors much easy much easier there’s a lovely quotation on the top of the screen there it says there was scarcely a person in the hole of steerage not departing over the side which is a lovely phrase for for seasickness that’s I’ve ever noticed really so this really worked the steam packet company which in the 1830s had just begun um still going today um they started investing heavily in the in the in the infrastructure as well and by the 1880s the journey time from um England was being reduced to about six hours and actually they got it down to two hours at one point which meant that it became much more um appealing to come to the is of man um and then the is of man to tourist board worked really closely with all the big Railway companies up and down the country um to say if you just save up a few more Pence you you workingclass tourist can go to the aisle of man on an exotic sea Journey just like rich people do and you don’t have to save much more just a few more pennies look at this boat you could travel on to the aisle of man and did you know that the aisle of man is full of the most beautiful women in the world so this was their like their sales pitch this was an aspirational holiday where you’ll find beautiful women and it’s always sunny always never rains never so that’s what they were telling people um and it really really worked so in 1973 when the um the Victoria Pier had opened we were getting 9,000 visitors a year which is still a huge number considering we were on zero before that and but by 1913 when this Photograph was taken 634 th000 visitors were coming to the island man every summer Just Between the months of May and September and the population of the Isle of Man was something like 30,000 people at this time so you can imagine this huge srl of British people coming to the aisle of man and that completely transformed the island for starters this project was begun this is ENT this whole sea front you see here was constructed in a 10-year period and from started in the 1870s on land reclaim from the sea all these hotels were built at the same time it’s why they were all identical and they were leased to local women so it was for the first time it was completely respectable for a single woman um to run a hotel on her own it was respectable work and because the tourist industry was so important women absolutely dominated life on the aisle of man so much so that women got the vote on the aisle of man um much earlier than um anywhere else in the world because we were Central to the economy of the irand so that was um exciting but other things happened as well so indoor sanitation happened earlier than it ought to have probably um you could get a Daily Post Service there were now 11 ships to chewing and throwing across the aisle of man every single day so you could post a letter in the morning get a response by the afternoon and it was very exciting for Island dwellers it had other impacts as well for example if you wanted to work you needed to speak English because everyone coming here was English so it did have an impact on the decline on the M’s language but basically life was totally transformed on the a of man in just 10 years um the boarding housekeepers on the is man were very formidable they made sure you were in bed by 10:00 orth they right to your parents so um a more fun option opened in the 1890s this is cunning and’s Holiday Camp a male only tented city which could house 10,000 men a week um 10 to a tent and the boarding housekeepers did not like this so they started a smear campaign saying that um this place was full of sinin and alcohol and how on Earth could they police that men that women were not sneaking into these tents of an evening um and all that did was massively increase our visitor figures by2 200,000 so this this Scandal broke 200,000 people sorry this Scandal broke out in 1911 um and the next year of visor figur went through the roof as all these young men came for this what they thought would be an exciting holiday but I believe it was very strict in that camp so perhaps not and we also opened up the whole of the a of Man Too ourselves as well so um Railways Railway companies were invited to come and build the a of mansur Railways so now the aisle of M was completely connected um in the 1870s and a little later the um Ms electric Railway was constructed as well all of those infrastructures are still going today um and then pleasure Resorts started popping up all over the aisle of man so everywhere the steam train or the railway went or the M the me went um there’ be opportunities to spend your money so whether it be pleasure grounds or beautiful Glenns whole Glenns were planted especially in this period it was just unbelievable the amount of money that was invested in this tourism project um you could have the amusement arcades as well this is up on Douglas head which you had to reach by ferry this was a very famous place for courting couple so if you had a holiday romance you would come here and do some smooching on the bay um up in the hillside so much so that they created and built a camera obscurer so that you could pay a few Pence to watch couples courting and and kissing on the bay um so yeah sort of Voyer activity on Douglas head this so infuriated the um po the gamekeeper of Douglas head that in fact shot a couple for um um courting on his land um which landed him in prison but fortunately the couple were okay um and then there was a great need to entertain these tourists as well so beautiful ballrooms and uh Cinemas later on cinemas theaters were established all over the aisle of man this is the first one at the Derby Castle in Douglas um and then it was um joined by the palace ballroom and the palace Ballroom um it got a facelift in 1913 um at which point it had the largest dance floor in the whole of Europe it was absolutely enormous with a 10,000 person capacity um and it was at the palace Ballroom that and another sort of um questionable moral argument came around so in 1893 the reverent Thomas rippen wrote um or delivered a sermon called the morals of Douglas what is the remedy and he was concerned that the pure and simple mans people and the island itself was being desecrated and demoralized by loathsome Libertines praying on our innoc innocent girls he claimed that Douglas’s dancing saloons were nothing more than a public March for prostitution and he himself witnessed 500 prostitutes enter the palace Ballroom on one given evening you can sort of laugh this off now but at the time that was printed in the local newspapers and then it was printed in the British newspapers and before long there was all this talk about Douglas in particular being absolutely sinful and and you should not let your young people go there and the government on the island man was horrified they’ invested all this money in um this tourism project and it was about to die who was going to come to the a of M for a sinful holiday so um they from then on the next season the 1894 season they brought over 100 retired police officers from Britain to keep order the introduced drinking legislation to try and stop people drinking too much but all that really happened was that the visitor figures just continued to rise as people believed there was a Place full of such excitement um on their doorstep and in fact this is my final set bit Allan I’m on time I think um Blackpool Southport morom and R who are some of our nearby rival towns they started putting in their in their literature they they would say that they would State Douglas is flagrantly immoral the whole of its inhabitants o openly encourag frivolity and appeal to the low and sorted tastes of visitors their places of amusements are dens of infamy and the hotels and singing rooms are haunts of wickedness we will never get as bad as Douglas um yeah so they used us as an attack but it really didn’t help them very much and helped us and so I’ll tell you what the Alan finally did in 1912 they did something very sensible they set up the postcard censoring committee um to try and keep order and stop vulgar vulgarity on the aisle of man and this is one we’ve got in our collection of one that was banned in 1912 for very obvious reasons I think thank you very much oh thank you that was absolutely excellent um yes I never quite see the other man in in in in the light that I used to now that I know it’s got this sort of racy background um just on a of on a side note um one of the one of the possible nominations for the bucket and Spade list is the Saucy Seaside postcard so just s of trail that one another um nomination is cruden Bay Golf Club which brings me to my our second speaker tonight which is Eric Simpson um he like me is a native of Scotland he came from Bucky in bampire on the North Coast of Scotland um so it’s obvious that he should be a fan of the C side and he tells me that one of his holiday Jobs when he was a student at abdine University in the’ 40s and he put in Brackets yes 1940s was looking off to the local outdoor pool pool at Bucky uh Eric has taught in schools from orne to the borders and then he went on to teach at Edinburgh University and was a part-time adult education tutor at Edinburgh and at St Andrews as well as doing teaching for the workers educational Association Eric has written many books on the seaside in Scottish tourism including going on holiday wish you were here the Scottish Seaside holiday and Hill calonia his latest book is entitled highways to the highlands from old ways to new ways and they’re all very I’ve got three of them on my desk at the moment they’re great books very engaging Eric has also act as a historical uh consultant for the BBC Grand tours of Scotland programs he lives in F but he’s carefully not given me his address as I might be caught robbing his house of his extensive collection of Scottish Seaside memorabilia so today Eric is going to talk to us about some of the distinctive characteristic of the Scottish Seaside holiday over to you Eric hello Alan H I’m putting this under three headings golf the steam ship uh there’s par parallels with of man there obviously and the Scottish Sabbath starting with Gulf which is H has a long history in Scotland and fact you go back to at least to 1458 when it was so popular that it was banned by the Scottish Parliament because people were playing useless sports like Golf and football instead of practicing archery to essential for whom defends I would say who was defending against and there are numerous references and K session records the church uh uh prosecuted Sabbath Breakers with great assiduity in the 17th 18th and indeed early 19th century and they were offenders breaking a Sabbath very often playing golf on on the links might be at places like mro is that there certainly documented cases at Fraser and danar of people being fined by the church for 1617 for H breaking this Scottish Sabbath uh golf here is a this is one of the early places of golf St Andrews rather obviously two gents I think you recognize which ones are gents by the the she SI under apparel playing against two of the Scottish professionals uh number of amateurs or sorry caddies car carrying the golf clubs no golf bags ofly and this is H these are the kind of people that played golf at St Andrew elsewhere a mixture of uh Jet and uh working people people who worked as professionals making golf clubs making golf balls and they they would also play they would also take up golf as uh and take H and very very often use to beat the the amateurs there was a there were various societies clubs formed one of the earliest was at St Andrews not not the earliest and they were to obliged to wear a red jacket a kind of uniform and this was noted by some of the early guide books uh you see these golfers h on the links with a red jackets so they’re a kind of tourist attraction G spread throughout Scotland uh to the West Coast where it was mainly the East Coast where Gulf was most popular but it spread to the West Coast including here the AIS of Aon at one of the small Resorts there and Aon in early 1900s had no fewer than seven golf courses for a population of around 5,000 at that time quite extraordinary most of the golfers probably like these you young women there were visitors so the golf clubs uh comprised uh locals but a very high proportion of visitors in fact uh the gulf Club Gulf Club at milport and the island of M cumber was formed in Glasgow not on the island itself H Gulf then spread elsewhere into England and then across the Atlantic to America uh Scottish professionals helping to spread the game it became immensely popular in the 1890s and there was a great boom in the 1890s lots of new courses and lots of new courses in England as well I I wonder which English seasid Resort or well seide Resort had the first Golf Course built the first Golf Course was a bit thing to find out so from Gulf I’m turning now to the other distinctive feature of the Scottish Seaside holiday this this popularity of the steamboat the steamboat was invented as well not invented but the [Music] first productive Steamboat to be built in Britain was built on the C comet in 1812 and it was built for a helensburgh businessman a man called Bell and significantly the comet was to carry tourists to his hotel in hansboro so there a very early connection between the steamboat and as a means of transporting visitors to places on uh on the cide and then elsewhere indeed the number of Steamboats on the CDE boomed H very considerably in a very short speed of time H this particular vessel sketched here is was a Columba The Prestige Ste steamer of the mcbrain company carrying passengers down the water do the water uh but Al was serving as a first link and what MC bra called The Royal route to the highlands the steam ships columia sailed to andic and then the passengers going to the highlands the West Coast were transported by a small steamer to the to the Atlantic side and then another steamer took them to balish for William and then another Ste yet took them through the calan canal to in vaness and that was a very common way of getting to in vaness rather roundabout but it was all part of the steamer boom of the 19th century obviously the steamer was invaluable for tourist development elsewhere places like Rosy however on the first of Clyde was being an on an island island of but was dependent on steamer access and without without that H the this particular Resort which is probably the most popular Resort on the first of Glide would never have developed to extent it did you can see something of the how busy it could be uh with SE SE Steamers and at the same time one leave one one leaving so like Douglas the steamer and steamer peers were very were very very important and not only for places like rosi which were on an island but also some of the Mainland places a place a popular Resort like Lars wasn’t reach by the railway until the 1890s on the East Coast it was a similar situation uh particularly on the first and fourth uh the small Resort of abarda which is just three miles from where I stay became immensely popular with visitors from Edinburgh short a short trip uh boat sailing from Le or Granton harbst on the Edinburgh Coast slide uh this particular day was possibly a regata day with the people lining up at one side to see the uh the yachts and the distance uh and all the different activities that were typical of a small seaside resort in the in the 19th and the early 20th century but the steamboat access was was invaluable here and as elsewhere it had its disadvantages H they brought excursionists who were only interested in having a a boozy time in fact there were Steamers started on all sudden the First of cide and similarly on the first of fourth that were called booze Cruisers that they car passengers just for where they could have a drink aboard and where where they were couldn’t have drink at home in say Glasgow or in Edinburgh then they could be get drink to the fill in Ros Denon or in in ABA so this was raised a conflict between the what we called the resident uh visit permanent visitors that were there for a week or longer and the day Trippers es coming especially on the Sabbath and breaking this breaking breaking the Sabbath as you can see the peers we’ve shown so far are functional that they are stable peers that they are meant for all sorts of purposes there was only one Pier built in Scotland that could be called a prominade pier and that was PTO Bell pier in 1871 uh sadly it had a lot mixed mix fortunes that was destroyed by Gil in 1917 and never never never rebuilt the building of portabello Pier caused controversy however at the time that it construction had to get an approval from Parliament and This Town Council of PTO Bello it was a separate bur at that time it’s now included part of Edinburgh went hot fot to London to go before the Parliamentary committee that was discussing the rules and regul ations from this new bill and he wanted the rules to be include restrictions on Sunday access this was turned down by the committee the chairman of the committee remarking you are very peculiar people in PTO Bello to desire such a holy atmosphere and this takes me not to the dominance of the Scottish churches they mainly Presbyterian they were very strong on the Sabbath I’m well aware that there were people and churches elsewhere in the British Isles that were promulgating extension [Music] from joyful or even sinful practices on the on this on the Sunday but the this influence I think was particularly strong strong in Scotland there was a a lot of controversy with said town councils they were very strongly influenced by the churches and St Andrews for example in 195 they built a new Bandstand but local Town Council decreed to be no performances on the Sunday and Sunday of course for working people was really only completely free day they had uh similarly in Theon during the first world war an Army Band started playing on Council property in Denon uh the Town Council put its foot down no no h the Army bandsmen could not play on the Sabbath mind you at the time the troops were slaughtering uh each other and the teaches in the first world war but uh the on a Sunday or a Saturday it doesn’t matter but uh no music in the no not in the Sabbath in various places uh both tennis and golf was discouraged forbidden in on on Sundays I can remember as a student at abine in the 40s early 50s being chased off the links uh for playing football this is an an older picture of of the beach at abine and it rather oddly a visitor described it he was writing tourist guide books Aberdine with its tourist holiday facilities was the nearest place in Scotland to Blackpool that he’d ever seen I doubt if he’d ever be near Blackpool in that case abine nevertheless nevertheless the East Coast wind that Alan mentioned was very popular with visitors and Scottish visitors and and others the attractions included tours out to Royal D side as well as sitting on sitting on the on the beach uh this I think might also point to one of the reasons why when cheap flights to warmer climbs became available uh that the British holiday makers were abandoning the seaside holiday that you didn’t need a overcoat and a Broly when you went to benor by the way the chap on the left of the picture seem to be all in white looks if there’s a just about to say anyone for tennis um a question question could be raised where there was very strict Sabbath observers did it restrict development because there was no major really major Resort in Scotland n developed even on Clyde places like G dun or or rosi was a huge population in Glasgow and the west of Scotland that h no considerable seaside resort developed perhaps was it did Sabbath restrictions have have a have an effect there there were mind you were other reasons especially for rosi which had the potential to be like Douglas but there was whereas seem to be encouragement for tourist development in Douglas this is far from the case at Russy where the theb estate were dominant land owners within the town itself the Town Council could encourage development but beyond that the but State very strictly kept the lid on development they didn’t want any any Seaside uh developments to have a miniature glas go anywhere near the island of but so I think uh just todle off here at this point in this uh postcard comic postcard from Theon be a suitable point for me to sign off thank you well thank you very much Eric um I was very used by the the thing about Abad I once came across an article in the local D Falin paper in the 1860s called Abad versus the steamer and the the author said that um his experience of visiting England was that uh all that people would do when the steamer arrived was go drinking in Blackpool instead of just drinking in Preston that was all he thought that happened as a result of the steamer so if you’ve got questions from from for ktie uh or or for Eric do stick them in the chat some nice comments appearing but some questions would be good um and I want to come on to AAL wait who’s going to talk about uh Bango G Pier um ao’s been the chair of the friends of Bango G Pier since the Char foundation in 2020 since retiring from a role as consultant biochemist in the NHS in 2023 she can devote her time to this wonderful charity and its critical role in working with the city council to protect the amazing peer for the future for this aval cheered various NHS committees and was a trustee of a number of Charities previously including CIS a local drug and alcohol charity and the Royal College of pathologist where she served as chair of the Welsh Regional Council and as an assistant registar for some years uh she notes that nothing however has given her greater pleasure than working day by day with a wonderful team of dedicated volunteers who give so generously of their time in support of the wonderful peer and she feels honored to lead such a great team so what she’s going to talk about today a um over to you to talk about the community-led rejuven Rejuvenation of the peer well thank you very much Alan for that I’d actually forgotten what was in my bio because it’s been read a while back um it sounds very Grand but um we just uh a group of people who love the pier in banga and work really hard on keeping it going keeping it alive making it a destination which I think we have actually somehow succeeded in doing over the last few years [Music] um it’s a bit um strange during this talk because we haven’t got a beach and we haven’t actually got a Seaside so when Ana asked me I thought well I can’t really say say no but um the pier isn’t a beach so I thought I’d start off by talking about what we actually do have as beaches in Wales as I am the Welsh representative and um so this is the map of Wales and you can see that we have um we have a large Coastline 15% of that of the UK um we have a large area and the population of over three million people which is quite small compared to the rest of the UK obviously um and we have a coastal path that goes all the way around it and you can see from these pictures that we have um a number of highlights we have canavan Castle which is close to us we have hollyhead which is where all the boats come in from Ireland uh we have Hill which is like the Welsh um you know when I was a child our only holiday was going for a Sunday school trip on a Sunday afternoon to Hill for the afternoon that that was our holiday and then cardigan Bay down the West Coast we have it’s a very beautiful area and there’s lots of um boats that take you out to see the dolphins you have the pmri Pembrook Coast Southwest which is very pretty and of course we have Cardiff as a um a capital so even though Banger doesn’t have a pier we do have lot lots of beautiful beaches and the four beaches you’ve got on the screen here are all within 20 miles of of Banger so we are really spoiled for Choice huin Beach is the famous one where dwiw um is a saint and in January we have our Welsh Valentine’s Day in memory of dwiw uh who was the patron saint of lovers in uh we also have din which is just the other side of canavan which is a a really beautiful beach porin shine is the one that’s famous for having um a pub on the beach um called the Red House the red in the lion in or something like that um and then crith is also very beautiful and also has a castle so we are very lucky that we do have lots of beautiful beaches so banga have any of you been to banga I maybe some of you have Dan has wonderful Eric has um banga is a fantastic place I probably say that because it’s my home partly uh it isn’t um always seen as the as a tourist destination but it’s a place where you really feel you belong it has a wonderful Pier as you know know it has an University which is amazing is where I studied and did my degree it was built initially by the um Quarry men of the local Quarry where my dad worked when I was a child because I lived up in snon when I was little and the Quarry men paid to get the the the university built so their children like me could have an education and people are very proud of living in Banger um it really does feel like home I think to everybody who lives here and of course we have the university so we have lots of students who love living in banga and also so many of them stay on after they’ve graduated and stay on to live here but we don’t have a beach at all but we do have a pier and it was built as a promenading pier in the first place so people could walk along it instead of walking along a normal prominade and that’s what people still do of course you know I I met some people today from Australia who’ come to to Banger this came to stay in angle SE and they were in Banger today and they SP every day they’ve been on a holiday they they’ve loved the peer so much they came every day and they say so peaceful and every day is different and we seen all these birds and we can see the mountains and we can see Angley and you know we can see cido and we can see all these things and they just love this and so many many people say the same thing they can just relax when they walk along it um now it is one of seven peers in Wales so these are the seven peers that we have in Wales so we have Banger in the top we have abest to the left of it which abest is a lovely place again the university town and that does have AER it doesn’t quite have the appeal of Banger in my opinion because you have to walk through Amusement arcade before you actually get to the pier itself but it does have his own magic b Maris is just across the water from us and is a nice Pier it’s quite a functional Pier it doesn’t have the same M I don’t know doesn’t have the same atmosphere as ours I don’t think colwin Bay has worked really hard to make the most of their shortened pier and I believe that last weekend they actually screen theis song contest from their pier and it was a hugely successful event which is a really nice novel way of doing things uh then we have clid no here which is just along along the coast from us and actually we have a festival in our peer this weekend and yesterday I met uh two of the stall holders who will be coming with um coffee and smoo and um slush drinks for us and the gentleman’s nephew is the man who owns clid up here so that’s a nice sort of link and then we have the mumbles and penar in South Wales and I have never been to any of those I have to say I don’t think I even been to penard or the mumbles let alone their peer because South Wales you know is all the way down there and North Wales is all the way up here so Banger it was opened in 1896 so it was opened on May the 14th so yesterday we were 128 years old which is brilliant and I put this fact on Facebook yesterday morning and so many people said oh hooray happy birthday oh isn’t that wonderful and of course every year um for the last four years now we have a birthday celebration for the year in for the beer in May so this coming Sunday we will have our birthday party 120 8 years and for some of you who may be coming to the National peer society’s AGM and um various meetings this weekend in Banger then you will see our appear in all his Festival glory and I hope some of you can join us now it’s owned by banga city council it’s effectively run day by day by our charity and we started in 2020 with four members so looking back I think think oh my God how the hell did we do this I have no idea we just put one foot in front of the other and it grew and grew and grew and two years ago we were registered as a charity and we’re now obviously in our fourth year and we are actually open 365 days a year which is quite an achievement for us we’re even open on Christmas Day and boxing day and at the end of the pier we have a pavilion where it’s always open and I think that’s part of our was success is that the entrance kiosk is always manned the shop that we have where we sell our crafts is always manned The Pavilion at the end of the pier is always open and I think that certainty is what makes it successful if the pier has to be closed because of adverse weather fair enough it’s closed but if it’s open we are there and I think that’s what people like so many different people come for so many different reasons and they always enjoy it and they enjoy walking they enjoy crabbing they enjoying meeting their friends they enjoy going to the shop they enjoy going to the end they enjoy looking at the snow in the mountains as you can see in that bottom photo there uh and it’s it’s it’s great you know our volunteers they are awesome I’ll come to them in a minute okay so our Constitution which we got for the the um charity commission said that we are supporting the preservation protection restoration and importance of the structure structure of the buildings on Banger pi and engaging the public in all this which is um a lot of words to say we’re looking after it and we want people to come and enjoy it and they do and we love it when people say how much they love it so on a summer’s day we can easily say see 1,000 visitors which is quite a lot really uh for you know a little pier in North Wales our last year we had we had 110,000 visitors in the year uh and as I’ve just said it’s loved by the locals is loved by visitors there’s things for the kids to do there’s things to chat if if you live in banga you don’t chat to your friends you jungle okay just a word for you so a new word for your vocabulary so people love like that picture there people love jungling on the pier people love crabing we have um cycling groups that come they can’t cycle on the beer but they can meet and leave their bikes at the entrance uh we have this huge deck chair which um looks great but it’s awful if you try if you get in it and try to get out it’s really embarrassing uh we have um students who graduate who come down to the pier and have all their photos taken in the graduation the graduation gowns and I think the third third picture along is our Festival last year and you can see the fire engine so the kids can all have a have a go and that’s what we’ll be doing this coming weekend of course so how did we do it well we’ve got over 80 volunteers uh we we charged 50p to come on when I was there today we had a couple who said oh can we have two pensioners rates please and we said oh we don’t have any pensioners rates anymore and they said well are you used to a long time ago it was only 20p I said well it’s only 50p now and they said oh okay then so we do get a few people who moan and groan and say oh I don’t want to pay and it takes all my powers of patience to be quiet and not have a go because the majority of people really enjoy you paying and they give more than the set amount but I suppose you’d always get always get some awkward but last year we collected over £80,000 you know it all goes to help the council with maintaining the peer um in our shop on the bottom there the little green shop we have over 40 suppliers all local uh we man like I say every day seven days a week and the so the group we have in the entrance kiosk the group we have in the shop that is some overlap some people volunteer for both but people just love it you know we’ve got a new lady now volunteering in the shop she’s quite recently bereaved and um she she would take all the shifts she had a chance you know it gives her something to do it gives her meaning it gives her a feeling of belonging and that’s the thing for all our volunteers it’s their peer they belong they’re doing something for their peer which so many years was going downhill and they could all they could do was mourn and say this peer is going downhill nobody’s doing anything about this now they’re doing something about it and that is is priceless really okay so the future so we want to build on this Foundation at all it’s only been four years we’ve got a long time to go uh we are just about to form a community interest company which will help us with applications for funding for um Heritage Lottery fund monies and things um and you can see that roof that do like roof in the top picture well that used to belong to a look house kiosk at the end of the pier the kiosk had disintegrated and the roof was taken off now today I actually filmed a video of the roof going back down the pier with a huge great crane lifting it up and the local joiners are currently in the process of rebuilding that kiosk and then the roof will go go on and our funds from our shop are paying for all our work to be done so it gives us a really good feeling that we are contributing to something concrete we’re not just paying for things that nobody can see we’re paying to build that Kiosk for example and other things afterwards so we’re protecting our peer supporting a structure for the public for for the future and engaging our public as well and finally um thank you for listening to me our little Coastal Welsh City A Place With No sand with a beautiful peer and a community that is proud of belonging to Banger I’m proud of his peer diamando thank you for listening and there’s a picture of Banger and thank you very much for inviting me oh thank you very much that was a really interesting talk and and quite an achievement to be able to to get that peer so busy and so active that’s I know tremendous achievement very very impressive um we’re just about out of time but there are one or two questions um that I’ve seen popped up in the chat and the first one or two were for Katie before you have to disappear when will the peer on the aisle of man be open again to visitors I don’t know so the a bit a bit like um The Banger it’s well actually it’s completely Community Leed so it’s not it’s owned by the community it’s owned by this really amazing volunteer Group Company so they are it is open you can um you can they’re doing it in phases so the first phase is open I don’t think it’s open all the time I think it’s by on special days or you can book an appointment and it takes you so far so at the moment you can um you can invest in the pier you can buy a plank or you can do things like that so but it’s um um I know I was saying that it’s owned by Banger city council this is is this is owned by by this amazing unteer um group so yeah I mean so you can see it now and if you’re on the island and you want to go on to the pier because you’re interested um definitely you can make contact with the with the group because they’re there nearly everyday working so you could certainly get on the peer at any point now if you’ve got an interest and there was another one for you as well Katie um Can parallels be made between the history of the island man and the chadel islands regarding popular tourism and tax Haven status well I would we no tax jurisdiction we are not tax Haven knew um the pro that so I used to live in Jersey actually so I’ve got quite a lot of sympathy with with both with with Islands um but unfortunately for um the is of man we do not have the climate of the Channel Islands so um for a long time the Channel Islands were sort of a little bit Rivals for us because they were they had the same exoticism they had the sea Crossing but they had a far better climate and it felt a bit like France so they were we were big rivals um but but now we’re great friends so um all the China Lions Jersey gy and and the and the smaller Islands as well we’re big friends because we’re all crown dependencies and um we look to each other and in fact during lockdown um gery and the Isle of Man we had zero cases of covid for a long time and we were totally closed to visitors and we opened a bridge between gery and the a of Mansa you could holiday between it Islands because we both had a zero case so um yeah there are definitely parallels but they’ve got the sunshine hours that we don’t have um there’s another question um from from laa and I think I’m going to be like a school Master say I think Lor should be kept in after class and I will give it a one hour lecture in answering the question what ignited the fashion for prominade peers and did they evolve from working peers and were they separate development um but I don’t think we can answer that one in under an hour so I think might pass on that one and there’s one I wanted to ask you about Eric because Katy brought up about the um the sauciness of of at least one part of the is man was were there any um I can’t I don’t remember this but were there any resorts in Scotland that had that particular reputation for being the the naughty Resort not really well perhaps at different times uh that young people would congregate at at one particular Resort but no I not nothing really on that scale the I think there were too canny they might be Saucy but they wouldn’t but they wouldn’t advertise it of course I think to the church every seaside resort was probably a naughty place can I add something that about Banger Pier one of my sons who was resident in Angelia at the time H paid for a plank to for the Improvement Banger Pier that’s right it was when the pier was rebuilt he was closed in the early 70s because it was dangerous and then in the in the 80s it was sold to Aron bur Council which was the Forerunner of um Banger city council for a penny and Banger city council then rebuilt it all and as part of the rebuilding process they were getting money from wherever they could and one of the things they did was um sell planks for10 and if you actually go onto the pier you’ll see um a whole r a whole row of um oh God like boards on the side where people’s names are written and they the names of the people who bought planks for £10 and so that that would have been what it was so people paid £10 for a plank or they paid £1 to sponsor a kiosk and that was part of the rebuilding process I don’t think Eric was going to ask for the plank back by the way and just thought oh good we do actually in our shop if any of you ever come to Banger we do have a local wood turner called jwes tatas who bought a lot of the wood from the original pier and makes um wooden out items out of it so we have clocks and uh candle holders and bottle openers and key rings and all sorts of things and the wood came originally from Mala my husband SS me all right um it’s a particular kind of hardwood so we have you know gifts that are made from the wood that was originally on the pier in 1896 okay well I’m going to there I think s of covered the some of the main questions I saw in the chat I just want to end by saying thank you to the the three speakers thank you to AAL thank you to Eric and thank you to Katie absolutely excellent we give them the virtual sort of Round of Applause so to speak so thank you very much and again dates for your diary 1 of July the bucket and Spade list will open and the next seminar 10th of July um on Seaside swimming so go on the website and sign up for that and 16th September I hope we’ll all get to meet up in Western super mayor show you the joys of it and um hoping for lots of visitors to come to Western super mayor including perhaps the sea on this occasion which would be a a welcome rare treat but thank you for all for coming and um hope you have a good rest of the evening thank you thank you very much bye Everybody by by