This shabby looking shelter stands on the promenade at Whitley Bay. There are three or four of them, and for as long as I can remember, they've been sad, under-used spaces. They stare blankly out to sea. On sunny days they seem cold and forbidding, and when it's actually sunny on Whitley Bay seafront the last place anybody wants to be is undercover. On wet days they're so open that unless the rain is coming down at a perfect vertical you're likely to get soaked anyway, and on dull days they absorb the oppressive inertia of heavy clouds and steely grey seas and sit there, stagnating.
As I recall from my teenage years, they came to life at night. When there was nothing else to do or nowhere else to go, and when as a teenager it felt crucial that you were out doing something at night, they provided dark corners for hanging around, sometimes drinking, occasionally fighting and often fumbling with the opposite sex. They were so damp and cold and smelly that a girlfriend to cuddle up to was a necessity, and paradoxically our parents didn't need to worry about things going too far because anything more than cuddling would in all likelihood lead to hypothermia. Ah, the romance of it all.
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