In a summer where — for many, if not most of us — a distant beach seemed like a fading and equally distant memory, the prospect of the Great British Seaside came to feel ever more enticing. But how do you preserve that feeling?

For better or worse, in the end, some of us made it to the coast. But, when even that felt off limits and the mental picture of British beaches became one of overcrowding and under-appreciation, something had to be done. An injustice had to be corrected.

And that’s where we came in.

British perfume house Penhaligons set us up with the task of capturing the nostalgia, the uncanny  and the strange place that – either regardless or because of all that – the British seaside holds within our hearts. Whether we like it or not.

It’s a tricky project as is. After all, how do you capture the intangible? It’s like being a Ghostbuster or something. Which is very cool. But, if you’ve seen any of the films, not necessarily an easy job. And, of course, that holds even more true when location shoots are off the table due to a worldwide lockdown. (Which sounds like another movie altogether, really.)

So, how do you distill the essence of the British seaside without photographing the beach? Simple, really. You build the beach from scratch. Okay, maybe not simple – but definitely a really good idea.

Obviously we didn’t build a whole beach. Although that would probably have made us very popular during the heatwave.

Instead, we went for detail over scale. In another world, perhaps we’d never have thought of bringing in a model-maker to recreate quintessential seaside scenes in painstaking detail. Of handmade ice cream vans and expertly crafted rowboats. And, really, pandemic aside, that would have been in a shame.

In the end, doing things this way helped us capture something unique.

When you think about it, the naive image of the Great British Seaside we somehow all seem to have emblazoned on our collective minds-eye is much bigger and much grander than the reality – which has its own, special kind of janky beauty.

In hindsight, replicating that in miniature really seems like the only fitting tribute. And the only way to really reflect the peculiar scene that Penhaligons so diligently capture in scent.

Whether it’s the memory or the reality, it doesn’t matter. Either way, this summer at least, it’s easy to Wish You Were Here. Wherever that is.

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