Under The Pier Show, Southwold

No trip to Southwold would be complete without a stroll around the pier – stretching 623ft over the North Sea, it’s an iconic location that’s a favourite for food and drink, souvenir-shopping, sea views and selfie-snapping. But the real belle of the boardwalk is the unique Under The Pier Show, one of the most eccentric collections of interactive machines in the world. Up to 20 weird and wonderful inventions are housed here, all the work of engineer and cartoonist Tim Hunkin, who was also co-creator of the nearby Pier Waterclock.
From the Bathyscape – sit inside for a fake descent to the seabed beneath the Pier – to the Quick-Fit where you can enjoy all the benefits of an exhausting workout simply by lying on a bed, and the Microbreak which simulates all the joys of a foreign holiday without leaving the comfort of your armchair, the Under the Pier Show is a one-of-a-kind, sometimes politically incorrect, often thought-provoking but always fun experience.

Known to many for his work as writer and presenter of TV series The Secret Life of Machines, and as a cartoonist for The Observer newspaper, Tim says that even as a teenager, he had a recurring fantasy about owning his own amusement arcade. “As a kid in the 1950s I made silly contraptions, struggling to get them to work at all. In the ‘60s as a teenager I had a Saturday job with Ruffler and Walker, a company building coin-operated machines. My own first coin op machine, built a few years after leaving college in 1974, was too successful – the coins completely overfilled the box and shorted the electrics. But I carried on to make others (still too unreliable to be left unattended) which I took to local fairs and fetes.” These inventions gave Tim his first ‘brush with fine art’ – an exhibition at the ICA in 1981 – and three years later he started collaborating with Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, making machines to stand outside their museum in Covent Garden. 
In 1999 Tim made The Instant Eclipse machine for Southwold High Street – originally just a dark shed to simulate a total eclipse, no-one dared used it. With modifications, that machine moved a year later to Southwold Pier and the rest, as the saying goes, is history…
“It was good timing,” says Tim. “I had a few machines at Cabaret Mechanical Theatre but it closed down so I was looking for a place to put them. Chris Iredale had started to rebuild the Pier and we reached an agreement. I only thought of it as a minor thing at first, but I was fed up working for museums and enjoyed early morning trips to the Pier to do the maintenance, so with encouragement from Chris I turned down work and used my savings to start making machines specially for the Pier.”

Inspiration is all around. “The ideas are a mix of stuff in the news (particularly when things are absurdly over-hyped), stuff happening in my personal life and interesting bits of technology I fancy playing with,” Tim explains. “It’s a very physical process. I start by making rough prototypes – sometimes of a whole machine and sometimes just of elements (there are lots of videos of these on my website because I enjoy looking back at when everything was still so open-ended). After a month or two I start building up the final machine – designing the parts in detail as I go (unless the prototypes were so bad that I abandon the idea, which has happened a few times).”

Among Tim’s Under The Pier Show favourites are Mobility Masterclass, where a Zimmer frame-user has to negotiate his way across a busy road. “I'm delighted how nervous people are about crossing each lane – it really does make you feel vulnerable,” he says. “But I'm always more obsessed by the machine I'm working on; right now I'm finishing a new machine for the Pier called The Fulfilment Center – it is a miniature Amazon warehouse where the player is a picker, given limited time to reach the next product.”

Suffolk-based Tim says he loves being in his workshop every day, ‘solving all the innumerable technical problems involved with every new machine’, and is often to be found at the Under The Pier Show. “I often have to go when it’s busy to check everything is working properly. And it’s very important to me to see people enjoying the machines – it’s what motivates me most to keep building new ones. I feel very fortunate to have this readily available feedback. I have no idea how fine artists keep working without it,” he explains.

Living and working in such beautiful surroundings clearly give this creative genius real roots in the region, and no inclination to venture further very far. Asked what his perfect day at the seaside would be, his thoughts take him up the coast and just over the county boundary as he says: “Going to Great Yarmouth. Despite the poverty, it’s a brilliant mix of history, technology (the amazing ships) and fun.”