I ask this with genuinely no idea what the answers are going to be. We were at the seaside today (Worthing, about 50 miles south of London) and we were talking about them because, if I had paid £30 000 for, essentially, a garden shed, I would be using it every week end - but virtually none were in use (and yes, a good one in the Worthing area will cost you that much).
A little research suggests that, while they’re not uniquely British, maybe they primarily are. And when I say British, I mean English - and pretty much the south of England, mostly along the south coast. Here are some of the ones we walked past today:
And here’s a wiki page.
They’re a place to change, to make a cup of tea (you’ll need to bring a camping gas ring - there are shared key-access taps/faucets round the back), keep beach furniture, get out of the sun/rain and that’s about it. You get a shed and a (very) small paved area for your money, where you can have a barbecue (no barbecuing on the beach!) but you can’t stay in them overnight. There are public toilets in the area.
So: have you ever seen one? Do they (or something like them) exist in your country?
Beach Clubs here at the Shore always had them. They were generally rentals. They were for changing and storing stuff and whatever. I’m sure some teens used them for whatever indeed.
I was always a public beach kid, but had some friends whose parents had memberships in the Beach Clubs in places like Sea Bright and Monmouth Beach. Here they were usually called cabanas, but so are the temporary pop-up structures. The wooden cabanas were designed to be moved higher off the beach or into the parking lots during the off-season.
I’m in New Jersey, I don’t remember if I saw them in Southern California.
My husband’s uncle used to own a house in the Catskills. He and a dozen other homeowners collectively owned a little patch of beach. There were “beach huts” that looked like those at the beach. No cooking facilities or water (and you could barbeque on the shared lawn, and eat at the shared picnic tables, people did it all the time) but each one had hooks and a bench, and you could store water toys and folding chairs in them, and people changed in them.
I don’t remember them at Asbury Park in the 70s and 80s. Maybe they have them now, no idea. In the Olden Days Asbury Park was basically a summer Protestant Beach Camp with rows of slightly fancy canvas tents and netting. But I’m talking back in the 1800s like 1871 to the late 1890s. A Bishop Bradley (who Bradley Beach is named after) founded Asbury.
I haven’t been at a beach club since 1984 at the latest. So I don’t know the current status.