Bexhill on Sea: languid and surprising

An archetypal English afternoon.  Early July in the last week of Wimbledon.  High white clouds scud across the summer sky revealing lakes of blue periodically.  A gentle Westerly drives them inland and the sun creates sparkle in the gently undulating sea tide washing in.  A dog chases a thrown stick along the seafront panting in the heat and a lone vessel sits on the horizon.  Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex.  Nothing really is happening in a quintessentially Home Counties sort of way. 

A lazy Friday in a pleasant shimmering haze. A coastal resort sandwiched between illustrious neighbors, Eastbourne and Hastings.  Empty Tory blue-and-white striped deckchairs sit symmetrically opposite Romanesque colonnades and an ice cream kiosk.  Straw hats and scooters saunter along promenade.  Seagulls circle and squawk chasing discarded chips on the green by the bandstand and the Union Jack gently flutters.

There is a faded Edwardian elegance here. A town retired, looking out to the waves and reminiscing about lost empire and afternoon tea.  Trying hard to fulfill its role as a healthy retreat and holiday destination. Inland up the hill small shops jostle for the unpassing trade of the bygone 60s and 70s when the working classes had not discovered Spain. 

An ironically named hairdressers’ shop; wedding dresses in wedloc dropping the K for trendy tourists who may have got lost on the way to Brighton, and knitwear and kilts touting tartan to absent Americans.  Fish shops fighting a price and plastic-fork war.  Cod and chips, salt and vinegar Bexhill by the sea. Gentle English conservatism with a small sea.

Actually, Bexhill is as quirky and alternative as you should want to get.  Yes it is English, yes it expresses in its architecture and legacy something quintessential about tolerance and innovation, about leadership, expression and understanding and about freedom and resistance to the ordinary. If you start to dig a little bit under the surface of this genteel picture postcard place you start to find some extraordinary things. 

Television pioneer John Logie Baird spent his last few months on earth in Bexhill.  The great contemporary comedian Eddie Izzard spent much of his childhood there.  British motor racing was spawned in Bexhill with bicycle boulevard polluted with paraffin and petroleum when illustrious competitors including Lord Northcliffe founder of the Daily Mail newspaper competed in the first-ever race on British soil at speeds of over 50 mph.  Ironically it was won by the more eco-friendly steam powered Easter egg driven by the French racer Monsieur Leon Serpollet. 

Beyond all this, however, stands a magnificent piece of architecture, the De La Warr Pavilion (pronounced Delaware) with a provenance and genesis to match its strangely surrealistic interaction with what is around it.

A continental modernist building created by the vision of a Socialist member of the British aristocracy and designed by a German Jew fleeing from the Nazis and a Russian-born and Harrow-educated self-taught architect and tango champion and constructed by another Jewish émigré.  Yes, believe me, in quaint old seaside England.

The De La Warr Pavilion is simply a stunning and simple architectural icon.  It is the first steel welded building in the United Kingdom.  It is officially the second modernist building in the United Kingdom after Hornsey Town Hall in London, although many would claim that its lines and curves and twisting beauty reflect something altogether distinct and different and more art deco.

The shadow of a swooping seagull picked out in the cream concrete façade juxtaposed with the glass and steel curves of the atrium pointing out towards France is testament to the creative vision of Mendelssohn and Sergei Chermayeff, a short-lived architectural partn