In the early 1980s, Martin Parr walked New Brighton’s seafront with a medium-format camera and photographed the British seaside in all its colour, contradiction and glorious untidiness.
There were deckchairs and chip forks, sunburn and ice cream, crying children, litter, prams and families attempting to enjoy themselves beneath uncertain skies. Shot between 1983 and 1985 and published as The Last Resort in 1986, the photographs became one of the defining bodies of post-war British documentary photography.
They also ensured that New Brighton would never again be culturally overlooked.
Now, following Parr’s death in December 2025, the town is preparing to place him back on the seafront he photographed.
New Brighton Creative Futures CIC has announced plans for a major permanent mural depicting Parr with his camera. Created in collaboration with the Martin Parr Foundation, it will become part of the resort’s OpenAir Gallery - a walkable collection approaching 40 large-scale works across the town’s Victoria Quarter.
But this is intended to be much more than a famous face painted onto a wall.
The wider project will also invite 200 children from Wallasey and the Wirral to photograph their own town using single-use cameras. Working through the New Brighton Arts Festival, each young participant will be asked to look carefully at the place around them - and produce their own record of ordinary life.
The best image from every child will be printed and exhibited.
There are also plans for an exhibition of Parr’s photography in the Panoramic Room at the Floral Pavilion, presented with the Martin Parr Foundation.
Perhaps most movingly, organisers hope to find some of the people who appeared in The Last Resort four decades ago.
Parr photographed hundreds of children, families and visitors around the beach, cafés and promenade. Some will still live locally; others may recognise parents, friends - or younger versions of themselves. The project will create space for those people to contribute their memories, building a community record alongside Parr’s more famous visual one.
It adds an important new dimension to the tribute. New Brighton won't simply be the subject of somebody else’s celebrated photographs. Its people will be invited to speak back, fill in the gaps and add their own recollections to the frame.
Rory Wilmer, Creative Director and Founder of New Brighton Creative Futures, describes the mural as the town’s thank-you to a photographer who recognised something others had missed.
“Martin Parr saw something in New Brighton that the rest of the world had overlooked,” he said. “This mural is our thank-you - a way to keep him here, on the seafront he loved, for generations to come.”
For Parr himself, the New Brighton photographs retained a particular significance throughout his career. When asked which work he considered his best, according to Martin Parr Foundation Director Jenni Smith, his answer remained the same: The Last Resort.
“New Brighton, its community and the photographs he made there always held a special place in his heart,” she said. The prospect of Parr and his camera looking out over that same seafront for years to come, she added, felt particularly poignant.
Parr’s photographs were never conventional tourism images. They were bright, crowded and unflinching, finding humour and discomfort within the same frame. When the series reached London, some critics regarded its view of working-class leisure as cruel or voyeuristic. In New Brighton, the response was more complicated: people recognised the place, its pleasures and its chaos.
Forty years later, the proposed tribute offers the town an opportunity to continue that conversation - not by polishing New Brighton into something it wasn't, but by recognising the cultural importance of everyday lives lived there.
The mural is being publicly funded, with residents and supporters invited to contribute directly. Local and regional businesses can also support the work through sponsorship.
If successful, it will add another landmark to New Brighton’s growing open-air gallery. More importantly, it will connect three generations of looking: Parr’s photographs of the 1980s; the memories of those who were there; and the pictures made by children encountering their town today.
A permanent portrait of the photographer is set to look out from the seafront. Around it, New Brighton will continue making pictures - and meaning - of its own.
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Images: © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos, supplied courtesy of New Brighton Creative Futures CIC.
