Only just discovered this forum and already found some fascinating stuff. I thought I'd start by adding my two penn'orth to this thread.
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I was brought up down by the shore (never 'the beach'!) in the 60's, and remember that period quite well.
We used to call what the OP describes as the 'brick beach' the 'coast erosion' or often just the 'coastie'. It extended from Mariners Road to the River Alt near Hightown. The grown ups told us that the rubble that formed the coastie was the remains of the big houses along Burbo Bank Road that had collapsed in the big storm of 1928. When I first was aware of it, this formed a kind of makeshift promenade which I think was tarmaced on a stretch going south from Hall Road, but certainly not as far as Mariners Road. This stretch was also protected from the sea by huge caissons of rubble wrapped in chicken wire. The rest of it was (and still is at the Hightown end) just rubble with a rough unmade top.
At the time of the building of the Seaforth Dock and the Marina, the coastie became part of a real promenade with a parabolic storm-resistant concrete facing, as we can see today.
I didn't know that some of the rubble had come from clearances in Liverpool until I read this thread. Certainly we used to wonder that a few tumbled-down houses could have made so much rubble, but I never saw lorries carrying this rubble and can only imagine that this shifting was all finished by the 60's. I do remember the diggers filling the lorries with sand from the dunes along the front between Mariners Road and the gardens.
I also remember Fort Crosby and the dragon's teeth. The first time we explored as far as Fort Crosby as boys, there was a naked man standing on top of one of the blockhouses, cool as you like, with his arms behind his head, just enjoying the sun! This gave us such a fright we ran off and didn't come back for a year or two. But at this time the only buildings were concrete - there was nothing like you can see in Angus's pictures upthread.
On our expeditions we used to get refreshment from the water fountain at the northern junction of Burbo Bank Road and The Serpentine. The grown ups told us that this fountain was built for the benefit of the 'cockle mollies' who lived in the sand dunes that predated the coastie. I have always been fascinated by the idea of these people, but have not been able to dig up anything about them on the internet. Does anyone here have any memories?
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