Articles
Kathryn writes for national magazine titles and is often quoted in the press speaking about seaside subjects.
She is a regular contributor to Country Life magazine and wrote their cover story on the 2026 centenary of Portmeirion, as well as a piece on Plas Brondanw, the ancestral home of its architect, Clough Williams-Ellis. Seaside-related features for the magazine include the story of the bathing machine, interwar lidos, the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth and the piers of Eugenius Birch. Kathryn has also written Country Life articles on the 1951 Festival of Britain Pleasure Gardens at Battersea, the world’s first concrete city at the Wembley Empire Exhibition of 1924, the Old Convent at East Grinstead, the design of Victorian drinking fountains and the Queen Anne-style buildings of Newnham College, Cambridge.
Kathryn is a big fan of vintage, so interviewing interiors brand Mini Moderns for Coast magazine was a perfect fit. Her article explores the inspiration behind the redesign of their Dungeness railway carriage getaway, Mini Moderns: railway carriage home in Dungeness (Coast). Highlighting an entirely different aspect of seaside design, Kathryn’s article for The Modernist magazine (issue #56, PLEASURE) looks at the development of 1970s amusement arcades along Blackpool Golden Mile.
Some of the other titles Kathryn has written for include the BBC HistoryExtra magazine (Summer Holiday Revolution: When Were Britons First Allowed To Take Paid Holiday?), BBC Countryfile magazine, Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, Discover Your Ancestors, the Big Issue and the iPaper.
Over the years, Kathryn has lent her expertise to numerous other publications, both in her own right and in her roles at the Seaside Heritage Network and as a past Media Relations Trustee for the National Piers Society. For example:
- Crest of a new wave: Cleethorpes is all set for a seaside revival (Guardian)
- Save our seaside – campaign to give UK beach towns the same status as castles and historic houses (Guardian)
- ‘Going to the beach’ looks very different in Britain (CNN)
- The forgotten European seaside resorts that are enjoying a renaissance (The iPaper)
Kathryn’s work also appears in the Twentieth Century Society/Batsford 100 book series. Her essay about kitchen design for 100 20th-Century Houses was based on research undertaken for her own book, The 1950s Kitchen. For 100 20th-Century Gardens and Landscapes, she wrote about Clacton Seafront Gardens and Great Yarmouth Venetian Waterways; for the book on Sports and Leisure Buildings, she contributed entries on Saltdean Lido and the Arnold Palmer Putting Course at Whitby in Yorkshire. In a variation on the same theme, Kathryn wrote two essays for the book of 100 Piers by artist Paul Tracey.
Whilst working for the Victorian Society, Kathryn organised two conferences on Provincial Powerhouses of Victorian Architecture, 1837–1914. She subsequently edited the book of the same title, to which she contributed an article on John William Cockrill, the Borough Surveyor of Great Yarmouth. Cockrill was one of the many talented yet too-often overlooked practitioners working in local government roles who helped define the character of individual seaside resorts from the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century.
Kathryn has plenty of experience writing book reviews, so please get in touch for that purpose.
