With the summer holidays in full swing, the Flâneuse is heading to the seaside for this week’s story. In the late 1960s Richard Attenborough filmed parts of Oh! What a Lovely War on the Brighton seafront. When filming was over, he donated a seaside kiosk that had featured in the film to the Brighton Festival. In May 1970 the architect Sir Hugh Casson transformed it into a ‘small folly built – or at least embellished  – in Brighton rock’.

The Brighton Festival was founded in 1970 to ‘stimulate townsfolk and visitors into taking a new look at the arts’. Casson was then head of the Interior Design school at the Royal College of Art, and a member of the festival’s council of management. He was known to be a fan of follies, writing in the foreword to the National Benzole book Follies, which he edited in 1963, that he hoped the tradition would never die out. He was sure that ‘Somebody somewhere is probably nailing crockets on his cycle-shed or building an obelisk of bottle-tops and broken shards’.

Casson’s folly for Brighton was equally unsophisticated: he repurposed the kiosk as a Chinese temple, decorated with bamboo fretwork. But, in homage to one of the resort’s favourite souvenirs, the bamboo was replaced with sticks of bright pink Brighton rock.

This gave the building what the Architects’ Journal called a ‘Cecil Beaton appearance’ (sadly the Flâneuse has failed to find any colour photographs). The roof was a riotous affair with pinnacles of striped rock.

It was reported that 2,500 children aged eight and under had been invited to ‘demolish’ the kiosk in an ‘orgy of eating’. As the Architects’ Journal columnist noted, they stripped the folly in ‘eleven minutes flat’, although ‘not so much by eating, more by harvesting, consumption presumably being done later at leisure’.

No doubt the children loved this sweet treat, and the only sour note came from ‘Mr Manchester’, who wrote a diary column for the Manchester Evening News: ‘it all sounds very unhygienic to me’, he grumbled.

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