Butlins – Our True Intent is All For Your Delight

Open Eye, Wood Street

Reviewed by Darren Guy

I always wanted to go to Butlins when I was a kid; instead we went to Pontins in Ainsdale a couple of times. But they didn’t have a fairground, Butlins did. In the 1970s Butlins, to me, was the place to go, it seemed to have everything; swimming pools, cool apartments with colour TVs, amusement arcades – a working class kids dream.

This extremely colourful photography exhibition of Butlin’s holidaymakers in the 1970s is great, but the whole exhibition has a sense of stage management about it. But maybe that’s what you get when someone knows they are being photographed – they pose, or put on their best stance and smile – especially in the 1970s, when everyone didn’t have a camera. Well worth a visit, if you’ve never been or heard about Butlins, go and have a look you might see what looks like old photographs of your parents, if you did go then its even more worth a revisit. Oh the memories, such as the cool wallpaper, only ever seen these days in Chinese or Indian restaurants.

Photographs: Elmar Ludwig, Edmund Nagele & David Noble Curated by Martin Par
Produced by Chris Boot