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It’s all very well #Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole Council trying to claim that the UK’s first public beach hut is a Trigger’s Broom…and it needs to be swept away for the ‘greater good’ of creating a welfare area for contractors maintaining the pier, but that’s not the whole story I think.

Its about gentrification.

Wiping away the traces of working class social history in the town.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/18/plan-demolish-uk-first-municipal-beach-hut-bournemouth
#bournemouth
Juggling With Eggs
#Bournemouth came to be because Lord Tregonwell was stationed on the then empty bay to keep watch in the Napoleonic Wars. He liked it so much he went back soon after and built a house and some cottages and invited his friends over. Who liked it and invited their friends.

Within a few decades it became a resort with sanatoriums for the well off with TB, but also a retreat for authors who delighted in the pine scented air (Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr Jekyll and Hyde there).
Juggling With Eggs
The introduction of the railways meant more and more people could reach this previously semi-remote spot, further from London than older Brighton or Margate, but still not as far as Devon or Cornwall.

So by 1909 it was a popular holiday for all classes. Beach huts had been for the well off to spare their blushes while getting changed, but the attraction of one was clear for all who wanted to spend whole days on the beach…hence the entrepreneurial decision to create the first public ones.
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