happy days spent down on the beach ...

This is such a lovely photo of our beach taken in 1912, I would love to know if the families of these people still live within the local area.

This photo would have been taken close to the stretch known as Bungalow Town. Development of the town started around 1890 and by about 1909 there were 260 bungalows, constructed from redundant railway carriages with roofs of corrugated iron, stretching from Lancing through to Shoreham-by-Sea. Originally they were inhabited by people from the entertainment world but later became weekend and holiday homes. At the beginning of the Second World War most of the bungalows still standing were removed, the beach was cleared, and defences put up for the war effort.

One property was named Dar-es-Salaam in 1913, after a coastal city in south-east Africa, some of the occupants who lived in Bungalow Town were a source of great amusement to the locals of the area, as they would walk about with hardly any, or no, clothes on!

All information taken from Britain in Old Photographs, Lancing and Sompting edition by Philip Fry.