Faded glories: photographs of the British seaside While you can still find donkey rides on Scarborough's South Bay beach and Punch and Judy shows on the promenade at Eastbourne, the medium Jon Nicholson used to capture these wistful scenes is a thing of the past. Before last summer's Olympic Games, where Nicholson worked as an official behind-the-scenes photographer (he is best known for his sports coverage, particularly of Formula One racing), he spent two years documenting British seaside resorts with a 1970s Polaroid SX-70 camera. Buying up Britain's last 100 boxes of the SX-70"s Artistic Z film (Polaroid stopped manufacturing it in 2009), Nicholson, 51, set off around the country to capture images of the amusement arcades, piers, beach huts and pavilions in towns from Bournemouth to Blackpool that for many Britons evoke the joy of childhood. The attitude of people I met along the way was fantastic," he says. If I had taken my big Nikon camera, people would have done or said something horrible - I find the general perception of photographers is grim. But the wonderful thing with the Polaroid was that people would smile and come over to talk to me about why I was using this old camera. They all wanted to tell me about their childhood memories captured on Polaroid film. For Nicholson, 'the slightly washed-out and never pin-sharp" quality of Polaroid prints was the perfect way to record the British seaside, which is crumbling away at its edges as a Polaroid might. Polaroids have an odd hue to them that really worked for this project," he says. 'It's a quality that apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram try to mimic, but this is the real deal. When he set off, some of the film Nicholson used was already two years out of date; the chemicals were less effective than he had expected them to be, giving the photographs even more of a worn-out look. He had an added problem that of the eight pictures in each box, only two or three worked at all 'because the batteries had gone flat in some of the film packs. I then asked myself whether I could go out and give myself just one shot at a location to tell the story. I couldn't shoot three boxes on Brighton pier because I didn't have enough film. So I was putting myself under pressure, but it shows you have to have a good eye to take a good picture. Seaside Polaroids (Prestel, £19.99) by Jon Nicholson is available for £17.99 plus £1.35 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1514; books.telegraph.co.uk)