Modern Bathers

Print description

Two friends at Sea Lanes, a heated outdoor swimming pool for training, enjoy a moment before they start their swim. Bathed in the sun, the seafront city of Brighton shimmers and salutes the light. The protagonists of this part of the city are represented by the Volks Railway, the Royal Crescent, the Marine Parade buildings, the Madeira Terrace Victorian arches and, in the distance, just discernible, the Victorian Palace Pier and the i360 tower.

This print is my expression of my love for swimming, architecture, the depiction of the human form, and the power of love. “All shall be well.” — Julian of Norwich.

This design is the cover for the Artists Open Houses Festival in Brighton 2026.

Print details

To create this print, I start by crafting individual drawings in ink, which collectively form a collage comprising the final piece. I scan my drawings and digitally add colour. The original design solely exists in digital format, and I print it using archival inks and paper. I then release my design as a limited edition print, available in standard ‘A’ sizes, ranging from A0 (84.1 cm x 118.9 cm) to A4 (21 x 29.7 cm).

A few notes on the title of this print: Modern Bathers Brighton

Modern

Then the word ‘Modern’ that immediately echoes a very specific lineage in art history – Modernism. Which in my work I keep referencing such as Cézanne’s Bathers in my print series ‘Beach People’, and more prominently Picasso, as seen in my series ‘ People and Places Revelations of Love’. Also I reference later Modernist UK artists such as John Craxton and John Piper. 

Bathers

Starting with the word ‘bathers’ as I wanted to reference the tradition of bathing by one of the most famous Brighton historic characters, Martha Gunn. For many years I lived at St Nicholas Road, just in front of the churchyard where Martha was buried. I am also a passionate swimmer – In the sea during the summer and all year in the pool training for competitions with my swimming club, Out to Swim Brighton. And then what do you think of the technologies of the swimsuits, this is without doubt a modern invention that takes us also to this word in my title.

Brighton

This print celebrates Brighton’s rich historic building fabric and its setting by the sea. When you look in detail at this print you can spot in the foreground the new beach metal happy meshy ‘Frankgehryesk’ that is the development along Madeira Drive including Sea Lanes. And above it sits the Royal Crescent with its stunning mathematical black tiles. At the beach, the historic Volks, first in the world electric railway,  you can spot the arches of Madeira Drive and above the seafront architecture of bow fronted Georgian and Victorian terraced houses of Marine Parade. On the sea stands the joyous Victorian Palace Pier. Let me admit that you will not be able to find a specific spot where you can see exactly this view with all these landmarks. It is more a collage I put together last summer when for a week I swam in Sea Lanes and recorded all these experiences.

Martha Gunn and the Brighton Dippers

Martha Gunn was the most famous of Brighton’s sea dippers, the women who worked the bathing machines along the beach in the late eighteenth century. At a time when sea bathing was becoming fashionable for its supposed health benefits, a whole new kind of work grew out of the town’s fishing community. Local families began bathing visitors for a living, helping them into the sea using wheeled wooden machines that could be pushed into the water. By around 1790 there were about twenty dippers and bathers (the male equivalent) working on Brighton beach, and the trade continued well into the mid-nineteenth century.

Martha came from the Killicks, a well-known local fishing family, and married Stephen Gunn in 1758. They had eight children, and many of their descendants still live in Brighton today. The Gunns florist on Sydney Street in the North Laine takes its name from the family. Stephen’s sister Abigail married John “Smoaker” Miles, who was the most celebrated bather of the time.

Being a dipper was hard, physical work. The machines had to be hauled in and out of the sea, and bathers often needed firm handling to get fully immersed. Martha was known as a strong, energetic woman with a sharp entrepreneurial streak, and she became a leading figure in managing Brighton’s bathing machines. Her larger-than-life presence made her a popular subject in prints and souvenirs. She appears in John Colley Nixon’s satirical print A French Invasion, or Brighton in a Bustle (1796), where she is shown at the head of a crowd fending off an imagined French attack, and she also features on a toby jug made around 1840.

Over a career that lasted several decades from around 1750, Martha became something of a local celebrity. The success of her bathing business allowed her to buy several machines, providing work for other locals, and to purchase a house for her family in Little East Street. She was said to be a favourite of the Prince of Wales and was reputedly allowed free access to the kitchens at the Royal Pavilion.

Martha Gunn’s portrait, painted in 1796 by John Russell, still hangs in Brighton Museum. She is buried near the south-east corner of St Nicholas’ Church, where her gravestone records that she was “peculiarly distinguished as a bather in this town nearly 70 years”.