The littoral and the metaphorical: psychogeography, liminality and English seaside towns

Taking the Situationist intellectual Guy Debord’s broad characterisation – “The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” – (Debord 1955) as our point of departure, we want to argue that our collaborative research project entitled Coast of Teeth (2023) has revealed some coordinates for a new textual-visual psychogeography of English seaside towns. This multidimensional model of psychogeography includes liminal features of littoral spaces that are distinct from those of “inland England” (Sykes and Netter 2023, p. 3) regions that have typically monopolised the attention of mainstream psychogeographers, in addition to some novel metaphorical lenses through which contemporary English seaside towns can be usefully studied.
Finally, we explain how our coastal psychogeography has been enabled by a somewhat improvisational, flexible and contingent artistic practice-based methodology that pertains to both our disciplines: written reportage (Tom Sykes) and reportage illustration (Louis Netter).