The (Amusement) Arcades Project

Lineham, Martha (2025) The (Amusement) Arcades Project. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This PhD project by thesis 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. Due to their undervalued nature, seaside amusement arcades remain neglected in the arena of research despite persisting as popular sub-holiday or daytrip destinations throughout the UK. 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. The project presents a newly termed artist-ethnography research methodology that develops an innovative mix of methods through exchanges of fieldwork and theory. Fieldtrips to selected British seaside resort amusement arcades including returned visits to Blackpool as the project’s primary destination have been undertaken over a 6 year period, gathering extensive original place-based fieldnotes, site writing, photography, soundwalk recordings and litter picking; this data has been analysed via a newly comprised theoretical framework on sensation, affect and atmosphere. The research reveals the uniqueness of experience in these places, sustained through diverse kinds of illumination, eclectic and lively surfaces, and layered, excessive sounds that have developed into a distinctive assemblage over time. The project demonstrates how the effects of illumination, surface and sound combine with bodies, practices and other materials inside a seaside amusement arcade to generate compelling atmospheres. The project evidences British seaside amusement arcades as places that do and mean more than they are commercially designed for, and that stimulate nuanced experiences for visitors that go beyond blatant consumer means. The project goes beyond existing research that explores these places from tourist destination and socio-historical perspectives, demonstrating them as places of distinctive, multi sensory experience and cultural significance.