While a British summer is never a guarantee of hot weather, there’s one thing you can be sure of: Brits will be going to the beach.

For centuries, and in all kinds of weather, the British have licked ice creams, strolled piers and dropped coins in arcade games at the seaside. The town of Scarborough on England’s North Sea coastline, widely considered Britain’s first seaside resort, has been welcoming tourists to its restorative spa waters for around 400 years.

“The concept of going to the beach for leisure was something that the British invented,” architectural historian Kathryn Ferry, told CNN, in a view shared by many experts. “It’s part of our nation’s story, our island’s story, and there is a sense that it is important for our identity. British people have that need to go to the coast and smell that sea air,” she said.

While affection for the British seaside has, much like the tides, surged and fallen over the 20th century, it has been an enduring source of inspiration for artists including the prolific photographer Martin Parr, whose distinctive and radical portraits explore social class and leisure in the north of England in the 1980s, and multidisciplinary artist Vinca Petersen, whose work depicts youth and subcultures at the beach in the 1990s.

A combination of illustrations and photographs show the grandeur of classical and art deco designs of the interwar years, through to the post war buildings inspired by the 1951 Festival of Britain, and the concrete brutalism of the 1960s and 1970s. “Seaside resorts were competing with each other, and that meant that if one place had a new facility that was going to give them a step up with tourists in terms of attractions, then lots of other places would follow,” said Ferry, referring to architectural features such as lidos, pavilions, bandstands and distinctive roof shapes commonly found at British seasides.

Ferry isn’t the only academic researcher beguiled by these snapshots of another era. A little over a decade ago, Karen Shepherdson, the co-author of a 2019 book on the subject, “Seaside Photographed,” also founded the South East Archive of Seaside Photography, which houses collections of commercial seaside photography dating from 1860 to 1990.