Beautiful Sunday celebrates the dance floors of Folkestone by marking out their size one-to-one on a huge stage set in the middle of the derelict gasworks site. The stage is energised by a huge screen depicting a group of people from 18 years to 84 years of age dancing the Slosh – a legendary line dance, first popular in Glasgow and Wigan in the 1970’s.

Culturally, it was a dance that grew out of venues in the West of Scotland similar to the Gas Works Club in Folkestone; places where workers and their families gathered to relax at weekends. Today it is mostly seen performed by groups of older women in social clubs and at weddings and family -functions. It is a dance that many think they know but few can execute well, the actuality of the dance versus how a crowd of women think it should ‘go’ being one of the great urban myths of social gathering, a vivid memory for anyone who grew up in working class communities in the north. Three or four women with ‘the knowledge’ lead, a group of 20 others, often younger, trail in their wake.

The Slosh acts as a connection from Glasgow to Folkestone, in the spirit of the coaches that still travel up and down the country carrying holidaymakers for party weekends and short breaks. These coach trips are a mainstay of coastal Britain’s fragile tourism economy, providing business for a network of 2 and 3-star hotels in resorts from Skegness to Torquay. In Folkestone, the Grand Burstin is the destination. It sits in the harbour section of the town, very close to the newly regenerated Cultural Quarter; a huge establishment with over 400 rooms that opened in 1984. Previously on the site was the Royal Pavilion Hotel, built in 1843 in the town’s prime as a spa resort, and famed for hosting Queen Victoria, and the Rothschilds. The Burstin now is a more faded affair, though it remains a significant building in the Harbour area, sustained by the arrival of coach parties and local afternoon tea dances.