Local residents fight to collect free drinking water from municipal corporation tanker on a hot summer day on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, India June 1, 2016. (Photo by Amit Dave/Reuters)

Waves batter the North Devon coast at Ilfracombe, UK on August 23, 2024, as Storm Lilian hits the UK and the Met Office issues a yellow weather warning. (Photo by Mark Passmore Photography)

While the lido was described as bringing “modernism to the masses” on the British coast it was just the latest example of a trend that had been developing since Victorian times – transforming seaside towns into resorts for leisure and entertainment. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the fashion was for local authorities to build great piers stretching from the promenade out into the sea. The Eastbourne Pier, pictured here in May 1931, was erected between 1866 and 1870 to an ingenious design by Eugenius Birch, which saw the structure sitting on special cups allowing the supporting struts to “move” in bad weather. Arranged on the pier's 1,000-foot length were kiosks, a theatre, a ballroom and a camera obscura. 1931. (Photo by Aerofilms Collection via “A History of Britain From Above”)

English actress Florence Pugh celebrates her 26th birthday in the “best f--king party shoe” on January 3, 2022. (Photo by Instagram/Florence Pugh)

A villager dries chillies on September 1, 2020 in Bijie, Guizhou Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

A garbage collector, with his horse and cart, prepares to unload rubbish at the municipal dump in Nezahualcoyotl, on the outskirts of Mexico City, February 18, 2015. Hundreds of horse or donkey-drawn carts will disappear from the streets of a municipality in the state of Mexico, located on the outskirts of Mexico City, and will be replaced by motorized vehicles, local authorities said. (Photo by Henry Romero/Reuters)

An artiste leads a bear as a child sits on it during the first day of a fair organized by GUM departmental store for the upcoming Christmas and New Year celebrations at Moscow's Red Square, November 29, 2014. (Photo by Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters)

Lindsay Heimbach goes airborne while sledding down a hill on Mt. Lemmon December 27, 2008. (Photo by James Gregg/Arizona Daily Star)