What a Mess

At last — the weather wasn’t actively plotting against us. So naturally, it was time to leave the house before it changed its mind. This weekend’s destination: New Brighton, where — against all odds — the sun showed up and stayed. I’m fairly certain I may even have acquired a faint tan. As a British person, this feels both improbable and mildly suspicious.

We started at Fort Perch Rock, a coastal defence fort that looks like it was built specifically to withstand both invasion and Merseyside weather. What I hadn’t realised until recently was its connection to the late Tony Slattery, who performed his final gig there before his death. As a teenager, I grew up watching him on Who’s Line Is It Anyway? — a show that felt electric at the time, of my teens which seemed an exciting time of my life. Hearing about that connection gave the place an unexpected layer of meaning.

On arrival, however, I did briefly wonder where exactly a comedy performance would fit. The space feels intimate — and by intimate, I mean I wasn’t convinced there was room for both a stage and an audience without someone having to sit on the stage. Still, it makes for a great lunch stop. The bar inside is called The Mess, which is either a charming military pun or what happend when you exist the loo fast when the kitchen shouts service (both the loo and the kitchen are sheds in the fort, whereas the bar is fully inside). Sadly, you can’t freely explore the rest of the fort — much of it is now used as an escape room. Which feels appropriate. Historically accurate, even.

From there, we wandered along the promenade, where the views open up across the River Mersey towards Liverpool. It’s one of those walks where the skyline appears, disappears, improves, and then slightly disappoints again depending on your angle and how much sea haze is feeling cooperative. Photographing a distant skyline is always tricky — the further away it is, the flatter it can look, especially in bright light.

In the end, I decided the best approach was to lean into silhouette. The buildings across the water — including the iconic shapes of the Royal Liver Building and its neighbours — felt stronger as dark forms against the brighter sky. Trying to pull out detail from that distance would only have emphasised the haze and flattened the scene further. Sometimes subtraction creates more impact than detail ever could.

The sun may have been bright, but contrast was the real subject. A clean skyline silhouette felt deliberate, graphic, almost minimalist — which is not a word usually associated with British seaside photography.

All in all, New Brighton delivered: sea air, history, nostalgia, questionable sun exposure, and a skyline that demanded a bit of creative decision-making. Not bad for a weekend when the weather simply decided not to be horrible.