Between 1983 and 1985, Martin Parr took a medium format camera and a flash to New Brighton on the Merseyside coast and made The Last Resort, among his earliest work in colour.
New Brighton lost its golden sands in the 1960s, when tidal changes in the River Mersey took them away and left the concrete behind. What stayed was a working seaside town on the Wirral: a promenade, an open air lido, arcades, a chip shop, and a public who came out from Liverpool regardless, because a hot Saturday is a hot Saturday. Martin Parr arrived in 1983 and kept returning until 1985.
He shot 6x7 medium format with a flash on the camera, and he shot colour, which in British documentary at the time still carried the smell of advertising. The flash does what flash does. It pins everything at one brightness and lets nothing recede: green ice cream melting over a child's fist at a kiosk hatch, ketchup pooling on a bap at a wooden snack counter, polystyrene trays and lolly sticks spread across the paving outside a chip shop. Litter carries the same weight in the frame as a face.
When the work was shown at the Serpentine in London in 1986, critics called it cruel and voyeuristic, an outsider photographing the working class at its least composed. Parr let the row run. Controversy, he said, “didn't do you any harm”, and he held that his subject was never class but the truisms nobody escapes, screaming children and bad weather included. “The contradictions of British life are everywhere to be seen,” he said. The beach was where they surfaced fastest.
The pictures are not nostalgic either, which is the misreading they attract most. Look at what the frames hold: a woman sunbathing on a towel laid over concrete beside the tracks of an excavator, a baby howling in a pushchair under a pink parasol while its mother covers her eyes, an elderly couple eating chips beneath a wire bin that stopped accepting litter hours ago. Parr had no patience for the Good Old Days. “Well it wasn't,” he said of the belief that everything used to be better. “It just evolves.”
The beach was also where he tested things. New Brighton was the move to 6x7 and the move out of black and white; the macro lens and later the telephoto were each taken to the water first. The reason he gave was flat and practical: on a beach, “people are just lying there waiting to be photographed”. The colour came partly from commercial photography and partly from Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, who between them made the case that colour could be serious.
New Brighton has been tidied and part gentrified since, and Parr, who died in December 2025, said as much himself. The work belongs to a moment, the middle of Thatcherism, just before the lido closed. What survives is less a record of a place than a temperature. The children still queue at the hatch, the ice creams still run over their hands, the light is still hard, and nobody in the frame has been asked to compose themselves first.
