Life on the seafront

Text 1: The Parade at Four O’Clock, by Augustus Fenn

An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

At four o’clock every afternoon in the season, the whole population of the town, resident and visiting, turns out upon the Parade for the purpose of looking at itself. The band plays upon the pier; the bath chairs creak along in procession; young ladies walk arm in arm in hats of a size that would be thought alarming in London; and young gentlemen in white trousers lean upon the railings and pretend not to look at the hats.

The noise is considerable. Besides the band there are the cries of the donkey boys, the shrimp women, a Punch and Judy man, and a German who plays the cornet very badly in the hope of being paid to stop. Everything upon the Parade is for sale, from a glass of lemonade to a photograph of oneself in a borrowed sailor’s cap.

I have heard sober persons call the whole spectacle vulgar, and so, no doubt, it is. But I observe that the clerk who is a nobody in Cheapside is here, for one fortnight, a gentleman of leisure, and I do not see that the sea is any the worse for his enjoyment of it.

Text 2: In Praise of the Prom, by Tasha Brennock

An original contemporary article.

On a hot Saturday in August the whole seafront becomes one long catwalk. Families in matching football shirts, hen parties in pink cowboy hats, lads with their tops off and their sunburn on, grandmothers on mobility scooters moving at a stately pace: everybody walks up and down the prom, and everybody watches everybody else doing it.

It is loud. The arcades ring and jingle and flash, the fairground on the pier screams, a busker plays the same three pop songs on a ukulele, and the seagulls are louder than all of them. You can buy anything: candyfloss, a henna tattoo, a plastic bucket, a caricature of yourself with a gigantic head.

People who look down on seaside towns call all this tacky. They have a point. But I grew up watching my dad, who spent fifty weeks a year in a warehouse, put on a ridiculous straw hat and stroll along this prom like a millionaire. If the seaside lets people be somebody else for a week, I am all for it.

Both writers describe a crowded seaside promenade.

What are the similarities between the writers’ views of the seafront and the people on it?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.