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Ian Trowell: Holidays in the Sun: Sex Pistols, Scarborough and the Seaside
Scarborough Library (2 - 30 May 2026) [1]
'I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom!
Where the punk band plays Tiddely-om-pom-pom!' [2]
I.
In May 1976, the Sex Pistols decided to play their first gigs outside of the Greater London area and take their (nameless) subcultural revolution on the road - unaccompanied by Malcolm who was otherwise engaged - to Barnsley, Middlesbrough, and Scarborough ...
And this month, Scarborough's resident punk scholar, Ian Trowell, is marking the 50th anniversary of the Sex Pistols performing in the North Yorkshire seaside town with an exhibition mounted on half-a-dozen large display boards in the Community Space located at the rear of the main library.
What is known by those within the Punk Scholars Network as archiving anarchy ... [3]
II.
Titled Holidays in the Sun, the exhibition was designed in collaboration with Russ Bestley and gathers materials and testimony from the notorious band's visit to Scarborough in the spring of 1976, as well as their return visit as part of a secret tour in the summer of '77, by which time they had become public enemies number one.
The images and artefacts are accompanied by a detailed and thoughtful narrative which helps create a startling contrast between the everydayness of Scarborough and
the extraordinariness of the Sex Pistols. More broadly, the exhibition also reflects upon the intimate and enduring connections between British coastal towns and youth subcultures.
A series of planned events include a panel discussion on punk as anti-fashion and a talk led by Trowell on how punk has been written about over the last half-century, affording an opportunity to look at the manner in which history and memory are constructed through myth.
III.
So far, so press release-y.
Here, I'll try to say something a wee bit more critical, in the form of an open letter that touches on the inherent friction between punk's chaotic origins and the orderly demands of curation.
Dear Ian,
Firstly, congratulations on the exhibition, in which I know you've invested a good deal of time and effort (not to mention your own money). The boards provide an interesting mix of Sex Pistols lore, local history, and wider cultural context and I applaud most of your aesthetic choices.
Use of Jamie Reid's iconic Never Mind the Bollocks colour scheme, for example, is a nice touch. Not only does it make the display visually stimulating, but it succeeds in tying the exhibition together; i.e., it provides chromatic consistency and creates the intuitive flow between panels you were aiming for.
However, the black lettering works much better on the lemon-yellow background rather than Board 3's bubble-gum pink. I can't say I'm a great fan either of that headache-inducing razor font used for the
main title. Personally, I'd have gone with the more familiar blackmail-style lettering; sometimes, the cliché is best.
I also think your pedagogic will to inform coupled to a writer's love of word play [4] has, unfortunately, hindered rather than helped you here. Phrases such as 'subcultural sartorial markers' create an intellectual barrier as most people not only do not use language like this, but feel intimidated by it. It's a shame, I think, that the texts read less like a punk manifesto and more like something torn from the pages of a museum guide.
Their length as well as their complexity was also an issue. With board word counts doubling the recommended 150-word maximum, the narrative risks losing the casual observer, whose attention span is notoriously fleeting [5].
It's for a similar reason I also wonder if it was the best decision to have a fixed sequence of display boards. For a majority of people like to float freely from one board to another, like butterflies going from flower to flower, depending on whatever catches their eye rather than follow a progressive narrative. And so, whilst you may wish to construct a logical order to their display that allows for a continuous historical narrative, it could be argued you are denying their agency to drift - a quintessentially punk mode of experiencing.
Ultimately, the most anarcho-nihilistic iteration of this project would have been to have erected six entirely black boards à la John McCracken, thereby confounding visitors, referencing your own black square project [6], and suggesting also those imposing alien artefacts that catalyse cultural evolution in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [7].
IV.
Amusingly - and somewhat depressingly - the Sex Pistols (feat. Frank Carter) are due to perform at the Scarborough Open Air Theatre on Sunday 2 August, 2026, supported by The Stranglers and The Undertones: buy your tickets here.
It would be great if they could have Trowell's boards on display in some capacity - and I really hope Ian gets some seaside punk rock confectionary made for sale on the day.
Ian Trowell (2026)
Notes
[1] Readers who wish to know more are encouraged to visit Trowell's Substack - SUB>SUMED - where he discusses his 'Holidays in the Sun' project in a post dated 5 March 2026: click here.
The image used to illustrate this post is a detail from Board Number 1, taken from Ian's Instagram account: click here.
[2] Lyrics (with one minor change) from the popular British music hall song 'I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside', written by John H. Glover-Kind in 1907 and made famous by music hall singer Mark Sheridan, who first recorded it in 1909. It was composed at a time when yearly visits by the British working class to the seaside were booming. Click here to play on YouTube. The Sex Pistols incorporated this song into their act in 2007, as a segue into 'Holidays in the Sun' - click here for their gig at the Brixton Academy (10 November 2007).
[3] I'm not entirely hostile to this process; of the three ways that the spirit of punk is exorcised - commodified by capital; Disneyfied by cunts in the media; absorbed into cultural history by academics - the latter is probably the least objectionable. See the post 'On Torn Edges and the Need to Archive' (25 March 2024): click here.
[4] By his own admission, Trowell keeping text within a tight word count isn't his strong point; "I like to waffle, to draw in interesting tangents, and to play with language". See his Substack post linked to above.
[5] It has been calculated that, on average, a visitor to an exhibition will only spend 10-15 seconds reading, before moving to the next thing on view.
[6] I discuss Trowell's black square project in the post titled 'But Malcolm, They'll Not Be Able to Find It ...' (24 March 2024): click here.
[7] As far as I remember, the featureless black monoliths in 2001 are highly advanced, multi-purpose machines built by an unseen race of aliens with very precise dimensions in a strict 1:4:9 ratio.
