An August Bank Holiday is more than just a trip to the seaside; it’s a snapshot of Britishness: ice cream and chips, wind and rain, chaos and myths, and above all, a shared sense of tradition.
Families have been enjoying our seaside towns for generations — from the Victorian vicar who “took in the air” along the promenade, to today’s holidaymakers chasing crabs through rock pools on pebbly beaches.
Jamie’s family descended on Cromer for a long August Bank Holiday Weekend, travelling from points north, south and west. We gathered in an airy house for disorganised breakfasts of marmalade, toast or Rice Krispies, and evening games in the courtyard until it got too cold and we crowded inside the house.
Bank holidays are now such a familiar part of British life that we’ve forgotten where they came from, or why they are called “Bank” holidays at all. In 1871, Sir John Lubbock, a Victorian banker, introduced the Bank Holidays Act. The idea was simple: give workers a small number of fixed days off, during which banks and offices would close, making it easier for everyone to enjoy a proper holiday.
Cromer soon became popular in the Victorian era, with visitors drawn by its high cliffs, long sandy beaches, and famous Cromer crab. Built in 1901, Cromer’s pier is still popular, despite being battered by storms, bombed in the war, and rebuilt — this is one of the last places in Britain you can see a slightly cheesy old-school end-of-pier show that we all secretly love.
If you’re unlucky, you might catch a glimpse of “Black Chuck”, a huge spectral black dog with fiery red eyes. Some say the creature prowls the clifftops, its howls carried on the wind during storms.
The beach along most of the Norfolk coast at low tide is wide and sandy, ideal for building castles, walking dogs, and digging for treasure, the perfect place for kids with buckets. At high tide, the sea swallows most of it, as it did with the medieval village of Shipden. All that remains today is a legend: on calm days, fishermen claim you can still hear the bells of Shipden church ringing beneath the waves…
So here we are, over 150 years since Sir John Lubbock’s Act of Parliament, taking time off as a family among the myths and legends of one of the UK’s most celebrated holiday resorts, the traditional seaside town of Cromer.
For those interested in the technical side of the photographs, many of these images are straight out the camera with no processing. It’s not just Fujifilm that supports certain looks for your jpgs, you can do it with Sony cameras too, and I’ve been working on a recipe for my Sony A7C to bake in a high contrast monochrome effect. I’ve written an extensive blog post on how I achieved this look on my photography blog. All photos were taken with the Sony Zeiss 35mm 2.8, and the night photographs were shot at very high ISOs and have not been denoised, a distinct advantage of full-frame cameras versus cropped sensors.
See the video below to catch all the photos.
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