In June 2020, a popular British seaside town was swamped with beachgoers amid a global pandemic. One photographer captured the chaos.
In June 2020, the UK began to swelter amid a summer heatwave.
Normally, Britons would flock to the country’s iconic beach resorts, sunning themselves on pebbly beaches, feeding coins into garish arcade machines on “pleasure piers”, and protecting their rapidly melting ice creams from the ever-present attention of marauding seagulls.
But this year was different. Since March, the UK had been in lockdown. Pubs, clubs and theatres had shut their doors. The UK’s high streets shops were largely closed except for supermarkets and food stores and a handful of other traders deemed essential. Sporting events, from horse racing to the country’s world-famous Premier League football, had been cancelled. Despite stringent lockdowns, the death toll had climbed day after day; by early June, some calculated that 50,000 people had died from the disease in the UK since the outbreak started.
In the middle of June, however, the British government made tentative steps to try and re-open some elements of society. They allowed many shops to re-open (though pubs and restaurants were still shut) and made plans to relax the 2m (6.6ft) social distancing down to 1m (3.3ft).
As the mercury climbed, the Covid restrictions seemed to ease, at least a little. On 25 June, 2020, the UK recorded its highest temperatures of the year so far; as high as 33.3C (92F). In the county of Dorset, the hot, sunny weather resulted in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council, which oversees three of the most popular seaside resorts, declaring a major incident. Britons appeared to have decided, en masse, to have all had the same idea: try and cool off at the beach.
News agency Agent-France Press (AFP) photographer Glyn Kirk would normally have been spending a hot Saturday shooting cricket matches; but this being 2020, all the cricket matches were cancelled. He found himself, instead, with a news assignment: head to Bournemouth and take pictures of the crowds.
The last crowd Kirk had seen of this size had been in March, the Cheltenham Gold Cup. This premiere horse racing event, which drew nearly 250,000 over four days. “And then the following day they announced that, you know, the Covid thing [lockdowns] was coming in,” Kirk says. The Gold Cup was considered by a former UK chief scientific advisor to have been a super-spreader event, sending newly affected racegoers back to their homes across the country. (BBC)
Back on the Dorset beaches. At the time, the BBC reported gridlocked streets, overflowing waste, fights and people camping on the beach because they could not return home. In its coverage, the Daily Telegraph newspaper even described the scene as “Armageddon”.