On 6 December 2025 the photographer Martin Parr died at home in Bristol, aged 73. The obituaries ran around the world, and almost all of them carried, somewhere, the same two words: New Brighton. It was here, on the northern tip of the Wirral, that Parr made The Last Resort — the book of saturated, unsparing colour photographs that, when it was published in 1986, became one of the most argued-over works in British photography and fixed this small Merseyside resort in the national imagination as the very image of the seaside in decline.
It is a heavy thing for one town to carry: to be the country’s shorthand for things falling apart. But New Brighton is older, stranger and more resilient than that single famous reading allows. It was invented to be exclusive and was promptly overrun. It built the tallest tower in Britain and then let it rust away. It drew a million bathers a season and then emptied. And in the years since Parr packed up his camera it has, quietly and unevenly, begun to come back. With Parr gone, it feels like the right moment to tell the whole story.
A resort invented to keep people out
New Brighton was a property speculation before it was a place. In the early 1830s a retired Liverpool merchant named James Atherton looked across the Mersey at the windswept sandhills of Rock Point and saw money. He bought up some 170 acres of the headland — the conveyance was signed in 1832 — and set out to build an elegant watering-place for Liverpool’s prospering merchant class, a refined alternative to the booming, brawling resorts further up the coast. He even borrowed the name of the fashionable south-coast original. This would be the north’s answer to Brighton.
Atherton’s prospectus promised a handsome hotel, villas with sea views, and a steam ferry to carry the right sort of people across from Liverpool. What it could not promise was control over who came. Atherton died in 1838, before his genteel vision had fully taken shape — and well before the thing that undid it. The ferries, and then the railway when it arrived in 1888, did not bring quiet merchant families. They brought everyone. The diarist Francis Kilvert, visiting in 1872, found that “the sands were covered with middle class Liverpool folks and children out for a holiday.” Within a generation the exclusive suburb Atherton had imagined to escape the industrial city had become the industrial city’s favourite playground. It is the founding irony of New Brighton, and in a sense the engine of everything that followed: a place built to keep the crowds out that could only survive by letting them in.
The tallest folly in Britain
If you want one object to stand for New Brighton’s ambition, it is the Tower. Built for the New Brighton Tower & Recreation Company and designed by Maxwell & Tuke — the same architects who had given Blackpool its famous tower — it opened in 1898 and rose to a little over 567 feet. That made it, by some fifty feet, taller than Blackpool’s: the tallest building in the country.
Below the steel lattice sat the real money-maker: the Tower grounds, theatre and a vast ballroom with a sprung floor said to hold more than a thousand couples at once. For a decade or two it was glorious. Then came the First World War. With the country’s attention and labour elsewhere, the great structure was left unmaintained, and the salt air did what salt air does. By the time anyone looked again the steelwork was badly corroded, and the company could not afford to put it right. Between 1919 and 1921 the tallest building in Britain was quietly taken down and sold for scrap. It was a monument lost not to fire or storm or war, but to deferred maintenance — the most ordinary and most British way for a grand thing to end.
The ballroom, oddly, outlived the tower above it by half a century. It became one of the north-west’s great dance halls and, in the early 1960s, a stop on the circuit for a young Liverpool group called the Beatles, who are reckoned to have played the Tower Ballroom some twenty-seven times between 1961 and 1963 — more than any venue except the Cavern. The ballroom finally burned down in 1969, and with it went the last of the resort’s Victorian grandeur.
A million bathers a season
For all that it had lost its tower, New Brighton between the wars was still, by any measure, a roaring success. The pier — designed by the celebrated pier engineer Eugenius Birch and opened in 1867 — threw its ironwork out over the water. Paddle steamers and ferries disgorged day-trippers by the thousand. And in 1934, on the promenade, the resort opened the thing that would come to symbolise its golden age: an enormous open-air bathing pool.
It was a genuine wonder. Opened by Viscount Leverhulme before a crowd of around twelve thousand, the pool measured some 330 feet by 225, held well over a million gallons of filtered sea water, and was promoted, with only a little exaggeration, as the largest in Britain. The numbers from its first years are extraordinary: a hundred thousand people through the turnstiles in the opening week, around a million across the first fifteen-week season, and a record single day of 34,560. It hosted galas, diving displays and, for forty years, the “Miss New Brighton” bathing-beauty contests.
Behind the front, the resort ran on cheerful, slightly disreputable energy. A row of cheap eating-houses near the pier was so dominated by one item on the menu that everyone called it the Ham and Egg Parade — the name was in the local papers by 1880 — a place of oyster stalls, shooting galleries and fortune-tellers that the respectable element regarded with horror, and that was cleared away in 1907. The day-trippers came in organised armies: the Bass brewery’s annual outing alone brought eight or nine thousand employees across on something like fifteen special trains. When Ealing Studios wanted a quintessential English seaside town for its 1950 film The Magnet, it filmed here, among the crowds, the gardens and the fort. This was the New Brighton that a Liverpool childhood meant: the ferry, the pool, the donkey rides, the long, thronged promenade.
The Last Resort
Then it came apart — not all at once, but landmark by landmark, in a sequence that reads almost like a countdown. The Tower had gone in 1921. The Tower Ballroom burned in 1969. The Liverpool ferry made its last regular crossing in September 1971, undercut by the silting of its approach and by the new road tunnel under the Mersey. The pier was demolished in 1978. And the great open-air pool, its structure wrecked by a hurricane-force storm on the night of 26 February 1990, was pulled down that summer.
New Brighton was not uniquely doomed. The same forces — the family car, and above all the cheap package holiday to a Mediterranean coast that could guarantee the sun — were hollowing out day-trip resorts up and down the British coast. New Brighton simply happened to do its declining in front of one of the most influential cameras of the age.
Martin Parr photographed New Brighton between 1983 and 1985, and published the results as The Last Resort in 1986. He shot it in a way that was, at the time, almost shocking: large-format colour, daylight fill-flash, the hues pushed to a hyper-real intensity. His New Brighton was not nostalgic. It was families eating chips amid litter, toddlers bawling, sunbathers laid out on concrete and mud where the golden sands should have been, the whole scene lit with a brightness that felt clinical, even cruel. The book made his name. It also started a fight.
Critics accused Parr of sneering at his subjects. The photographer David Lee wrote that the working-class day-trippers were shown as “fat, simple, styleless… unable to assert any individual identity,” and many read the work as a portrait of Thatcher’s Britain at its bleakest — the poor left to picnic in the ruins. Parr never fully accepted the charge of contempt, but he understood the moment he had caught. “It was a particular moment in the 80s,” he said later, “in the midst of Thatcherism and just before the lido closed.” And, drily: “controversy didn’t do you any harm.” Whatever else it was, The Last Resort was true to a real place at a real time — a resort photographed, as it happened, in the last few summers before its grandest survivor was torn down.
Revisited
Here is the part the famous photographs could not predict. New Brighton did not finish dying. It turned.
The change has been slow and is still incomplete, but it is real. The Floral Pavilion theatre was rebuilt and reopened in 2008. On the site of the lost lido, a regeneration scheme called Marine Point opened in 2011, bringing a multiplex cinema, restaurants and the crowds — and the criticism that comes with a supermarket on hallowed seaside ground. More interesting than the big developers, though, has been what happened a few streets back from the front. From 2018 a local-led outfit, Rockpoint Leisure, started buying up tired buildings in the Victoria Quarter, commissioning huge murals and opening a record shop, bars and a pub named — with a nice sense of history — the James Atherton, after the man who started it all. Out on the beach, the Black Pearl, a pirate ship built from driftwood and salvage, has been rebuilt time and again by volunteers after storms and even an arson attack, becoming a piece of beloved, defiant folk art.
And through all of it — the boom, the collapse, the slow return — the lighthouse has simply stood there. Perch Rock lighthouse and the squat granite fort beside it, built in the late 1820s to guard the mouth of the Mersey, have outlasted the tower, the pier and the pool that all once towered over them. The light was switched off as a working aid in 1973, but the building is still there at the end of the rocks, lit now for affection rather than navigation — the resort’s quiet, surviving sentinel, and the subject of the photograph at the top of this page.
New Brighton has even started to answer Parr in his own medium. In 2018 a project called New Brighton Revisited set his 1980s pictures alongside the warmer, more rooted work of photographers Tom Wood and Ken Grant, who knew the place from the inside — an argument, in pictures, that there had always been more to this town than one outsider’s brilliant, bleak vision. Whether the current revival truly answers Parr or simply tidies away the rough edges he found so compelling is a fair question, and locals will give you both answers. But it is a far better question than the one the obituaries kept implying — that New Brighton was only ever a place where things ended.
It is worth seeing for yourself. The fort and lighthouse are still the finest spot on the Wirral coast to watch the sun go down over the Irish Sea; the beach below them is broad and, on a good tide, magnificent. If you go, our guide to New Brighton beach has the practical detail, and — because this is still the Wirral coast, with all that means — do check the tide times before you walk out onto the sands.
Published 28 June 2026. Header photograph of Perch Rock lighthouse by Mark Warren, via Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence. Historic photograph of New Brighton Tower: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Historical detail draws on contemporary accounts and local-history records; dates and figures for the Tower, the bathing pool and the resort’s landmarks have been cross-checked, but where sources differ we have erred towards the conservative figure. HilbreTides is an independent information site for visitors to Hilbre Island and the wider Wirral coast.
Read more: a guide to the Wirral’s coastal beaches · lighthouses of the Wirral · the Dee Estuary explained.