The Amusement Arcades Project

The Amusement Arcades Project creatively and critically explores the contemporary British seaside amusement arcade as a uniquely sensory and affective space. The project sits at the intersection of art and ethnography, opening up ways of considering, creating and communicating under-represented qualities, experiences and atmospheres of seaside amusement arcades in their contemporary contexts. The project moves beyond historical reductive understandings of amusement arcades as dejected commercial spaces primarily constituting sites of deviance and gambling, challenging negative perceptions that situate these sites as places of declining and low commercial culture, and contributing to discourse on seaside amusement arcades as places of cultural significance. Due to their undervalued nature, arcades remain neglected in the arena of research despite persisting as popular sub-holiday destinations throughout the UK. Returned research trips to Blackpool amusement arcades and other selected British seaside resort amusement arcades has been undertaken to collect data via walking, fieldnotes and site-writing, photography, soundwalk recording and litter picking.