In place of sandcastles, large pieces of haulage machinery loom, while towels placed on hard cement are the unhappy alternative to deckchairs.

In honour of such a brilliant collaboration, we spoke to Parr to discover the story behind this legendary series.

Some saw it as the finest achievement to date of colour photography in Britain whilst others viewed it as an aberration . Wood and Grant also shot people they knew, at least by sight, by virtue of having lived in the neighbourhood for so long; Wood shot compulsively, all the time – when he went on the bus, while he waited for the ferry, and when he went to the football or to the market. ix] No less significant is how the space between people is articulated and how they are obliged to negotiate these communal areas in a distinctly haphazard fashion, which might well be taken as that traditionally English sense of making do and fair play, but because there is also so often a visible tension here, a sense of constraint emphasized by how the pictures are made, they strongly suggest a real, substantial failure to accommodate the needs of a whole class and a culture, that are then seen as being essentially disposable, the relic of an age now passing into history, with little place in the supposedly bright future to come. i] What I want to revisit here is, in the first instance, the work itself, but also some of the controversy that surrounded its initial release. Other buckets and a spade lie in the foreground of the picture, denoting a family day out at the seaside.

In 1994, Parr became a member of Magnum Photographic Corporation and in 2002, the Barbican in conjunction with the The National Media Museum, initiated a retrospective of Parr's career to date, which toured for the next 5 years.A popular resort in the early 20th century, New Brighton’s fortunes had already started to fade by the 1960s, when most of the sand on its beaches disappeared because of tidal changes – as Parr pointed out in the introduction to his book The Last Resort (1986).

The beach has remained a fruitful testing ground simply because, “people are just lying there waiting to be photographed”. His affection for the surreal and peculiar permeates his beach photography, which often questions or satirises our behaviour in uncomfortably familiar ways.The photographer captured working-class reality with a ‘warts-and-all’ attitude, displaying characters with a truthful, unreserved manner. After I left University, I never lived in Rhyl again, though I visited regularly for much of the following 30 years. A typical review of Last Resort stated that he found people “at their worst, greedily eating and drinking junk food and discarding containers and wrappers with an abandon likely to send a liberal conscience into paroxysms of sanctimony. Instead of golden sands, which disappeared in the 1960s due to the tidal changes of the River Mersey, concrete abounds, making ordinary beach scenes somewhat dystopian. After graduating from Manchester Polytechnic in 1973, Parr emerged onto the scene with a series of black and white photographs heavily inspired by the work of fellow British documentary photographer, Tony Ray-Jones.