Sceptre

Looking to Sea

What Coastal Art Tells Us About Modern Britain

Author:	Lily Le Brun
Published:	2025
Format:	Paperback, 320 pages
Size:	194 × 126 × 24 mm

£14⁹⁹

Tax included

Delivery Information

We dispatch most orders within one working day.

Admiralty charts are printed to order. During the busy season from April to August dispatch may take three to five working days due to print queues. If you'd like to know our current dispatch time or if you're up against a deadline please get in touch and we will do our best to help.

Shipping is free on orders over £50.

We ship to the UK. If you're ordering from outside the UK, get in touch and we'll see what we can do.

Friendly Advice

Got a question or need help finding something? We're a seafarer-run business and we're happy to help.

Fill in the contact form or use the chat button.

We're available seven days a week.

Returns

Not what you were looking for? No problem. We accept returns of items in as-sold condition within 30 days. Just let us know and we'll sort everything out, including the cost of return shipping.

Please note that Admiralty charts are not returnable as they are printed to order. See our returns policy for more information.

If anything arrives faulty or damaged, get in touch and we'll sort it out.

The seaside through artists' eyes

An elegant exploration of how Britain's coastal art reflects our national character and history, from the birth of modernism to contemporary environmental concerns.

An alternative history of modern Britain, Looking to Sea is an exquisite work of cultural, artistic and philosophical storytelling.

Looking to Sea considers ten pivotal artworks, from Vanessa Bell's Studland Beach, one of the first modernist paintings in Britain, to Paul Nash's work bearing the scars of his experience in the trenches and Martin Parr's photographs of seaside resorts in the 1980s, which raised controversial questions of class. Each of the startlingly different pieces, created between 1912 and 2015, opens a window onto big ideas, from modernism and the sublime, the impact of the world wars and colonialism, to issues crucial to our world today like the environment and nationhood.

In this astonishingly perceptive portrait of the twentieth century, art critic Lily Le Brun brings a fresh eye to a vast idea, offering readers an imaginative new way of seeing our island nation.

About the Author

Lily Le Brun is a writer from London. A graduate of Edinburgh University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she has written on art for publications such as Art Quarterly, the Financial Times and the Economist. In 2018 Lily won a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award for the early chapters of Looking to Sea. She lives in Paris, and this is her first book.

Praise for Looking to Sea

"Looking to Sea is a remarkable and compelling book… I loved it."
- Edmund de Waal

"In her first, transporting book, Lily Le Brun sweeps the beaches of the past century of British art, collecting treasures from sea, shingle and shore… A book to pack in your picnic basket for shivering dips, heatwave day trips and ice-cream Sundays"
- The Times

"Le Brun's writing is at once bold and delicate, far-reaching and fine-tuned. Her book explores the inexhaustible variety of human perception."
- Alexandra Harris

"A smart and clear-eyed set of meditations on marine gaze, made with a painterly touch worthy of the chosen artists. Empathy and intelligence lift memoir into cultural history."
- Iain Sinclair

"Elegant and endlessly interesting . . . as much a rich compendium of social history as it is a hard consideration of art itself"
- Critic