Southport prints

Southport Pier opened on 2 August 1860. It was one of the first iron piers ever built and it is generally reckoned to be the first proper pleasure pier, put up not to land cargo but to walk on. At 1,108 metres it is the second longest in Britain, behind Southend.

It is also, at the time of writing, shut. It has been closed since December 2022, when a winter storm made plain how far the decking had gone. Sefton Council has since secured £20 million from the government to put it right, and the work is under way.

Which changes how you photograph it, and not entirely for the worse. You cannot walk out along it, so you shoot it from the sand, from the promenade, from the side. You end up looking at the whole thing rather than the view from halfway down it, and the legs of a pier at low tide are a better subject than most people realise.

Most of the photographs here are of the pier from underneath it, alongside it, or reflected in whatever water the tide has left behind.

There was nothing here to speak of until 1792, when an innkeeper from Churchtown called William Sutton put up a bathing house on the sandhills at South Hawes. He followed it with an inn he called the South Port Hotel. There was no port. The name stuck anyway, and a town grew round it.

Lord Street is what came next: a wide boulevard of a shopping street, set back behind trees and glass verandahs, which is not how English seaside towns usually look. There is a long-told story that Louis Napoleon lived on it during his exile and took the idea back to Paris with him when he rebuilt the city. Nobody has ever proved it. It is a good story and Southport is not about to stop telling it.

The Marine Lake sits between the town and the sea, which tells you something about how far the sea goes out here. At low tide the water is a long walk away across flat wet sand, and the whole beach turns into a mirror. That is the reason half the photographs on this site exist.

Victoria Park holds the Southport Flower Show every August, the largest independent flower show in the country. The Atkinson, the Victorian gallery and library on Lord Street, is worth an hour whatever the weather is doing.

Go south along the coast from Southport and the town gives out into miles of dunes. Ainsdale is a national nature reserve and a Ramsar site, one of the few places in England where natterjack toads and sand lizards still breed. In the marram at dusk it is about as far from a seaside resort as you can get while still being able to see one.

Further on is Formby, where the National Trust looks after the pinewoods and the red squirrels in them. In June 2016 the eroding beach there gave up more than fifty human footprints, left in the mud around seven thousand years ago.

It is a landscape that will not sit still. The dunes move, the tide rearranges the sand every day, and nothing you photographed last month is quite where you left it. You go back to the same spot and get a different picture, which is either maddening or the entire point depending on the morning.

Whichever it is, it means this stretch of coast never runs out. Twenty photographs in and I have barely started on it.