O Dreamland and Seaside Change

O Dreamland looked at the seaside as a place where amusement, spectacle and everyday life were held together uneasily. The Rotunda and its fairground edge provided a direct local setting: a public leisure space whose appearance and social use were changing quickly.

The project did not treat the old pleasure beach as a museum piece. It stayed with the compromised present - rides, empty spaces, fading glamour, visitors, workers and the long pressure of redevelopment - and asked what local seaside culture might still be able to do.

The Dreamland strand helped establish the direction of later Club Shepway work: familiar seaside formats could still be used as living public forms. This is the background to the Bathing Beauties, the Leas Lift events and the later folklore programmes, rather than a separate nostalgia project.