Lockdown Listening: Moving and Sensing the Urban Seaside Environment through Pandemic Times

The English urban seaside is a distinct landscape that has undergone waves of re-imaginings from gentry resort to mass tourism through decline to nostalgic regeneration. Coastal liquidity (Burdsey, 2016) helps us understand the contested pasts, unfinished presents, and uncertain futures of the seaside. For seaside residents, living through fluctuating covid-induced constraints heightened their sensory environmental relationships. This chapter draws on doctoral research, carried out with urban seaside residents on the UK south coast during 2020, to explore how such disruptions affect temporal experiences of place. Using a socio-sonic-mobile methodology, residents undertook remotely-guided listening walks and listening-at-home activities, capturing their observations and reflections in a variety of media before exploring their changing sense of place in elicitation interviews. Participant-generated material is used to explore how listening practices within an embodied, emplaced and sensory approach can generate observations and reflections about past, present and imagined experiences of seaside neighbourhoods.