In 2005 the Economic Regeneration department at the County Council appointed artist Michael Trainor to help with the regeneration of a number of seaside towns and villages on the Lincolnshire coast. Michael created the idea of the Bathing Beauties®.The project’s aim was to create series of dramatic and beautiful seaside structures on a superb but partly forgotten 10 mile stretch of Lincolnshire coastline from Mablethorpe to Chapel St. Leonards. The coastline features award-winning beaches, uninterrupted views of sand, sea, sky and over 500 beach huts. Some of the huts are used and well maintained, many are in disrepair or forgotten and there are a variety of architectural styles from several different decades.

A design competition was launched to ‘Re-imagine the Beach Hut for the 21st Century’ and it elicited one of the most exciting responses to any architectural competition this century.  Over 240 designs, in the form of models, were received from over 15 countries including the UK, USA, Germany, Italy, France, Portugal, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Singapore, India, China, Russia, Japan and Israel.

The four winners of the original competitions were :- Canadian ‘Atelier NU’, for ‘Halcyon Beach Hut‘; Feix&Merlin, from London, ‘Eyes Wide sHut‘
‘i-am’ associates also from London ‘Jabba’ 
‘we made that’, London, with ‘A Hut for Gazing and Canoodling.
In addition Michael Trainor has designed a beach hut entitled ‘Come Up And See Me‘.

And Willett and Patteson, from Lewes, designed a Camera Obscura. The Bathing Beauties project gained an amazing amount of national and international media interest. There have been articles in all the UK’s major national newspapers plus many journals and magazines. Outside the UK it has featured in a diverse range of publications from a Chinese Architectural journal to a Ukranian lifestyle magazine.

The success of the Bathing Beauties competition and the quality of the entries led to 100 of the models forming a touring exhibition, which is still touring the country 4 years later. Alongside the architectural models, the exhibition features a full-scale beach hut, ‘Oyster Pleasance’, designed by The Beach Hut Salon, (which included Architect Will Alsopp) which visitors could sit inside.

In addition in September 2007 the UK’s First Annual Beach Hut Festival took place on the Lincolnshire coast – the ‘Festival of Bathing Beauties’ – and this festival still takes place.

This website was created in July 2006 to promote the project. By June 2007, there had been over 300,000 hits to the website from all over the world.