Ross Clark Ross Clark

The outrage over Bournemouth beach contains a grain of deceit

Photo by GLYN KIRK/AFP via Getty Images

The Covidiots are at it again – crowding onto beaches in flagrant breach of lockdown rules, treating the pandemic as if it were an extended bank holiday. Pictures of crowded beaches on Thursday inspired Chris Whitty to tweet that Covid-19 is ‘still in general circulation’, and worked Matt Hancock into such a froth that he threatened to close the beaches.

But are we really suffering a mass outbreak of irresponsibility or just the tyranny of the telephoto lens? Take a quick look at these two photos – and then take a more careful look. 

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Boscombe beach in Bournemouth, southern England, on 25 June (Photo by GLYN KIRK/AFP via Getty Images)

Both were taken on Boscombe beach in Bournemouth on Thursday – and you can see from the shadows that both were taken in the middle of the day. Yet while one appears to show people packed together, showing contempt for the two-metre rule, the other shows almost everyone who is visible clearly respecting it. How come? The clue is in the cliffs. In one shot the bay seems to stretch forever into the distance, while in the other seems much more intimate. The other is taken with a lens that is drawing the background much closer to the foreground, making it look as if people are packed much more closely together than they actually are. Moreover, the shot crops out more of the immediate foreground, where it would be much more difficult to make it appear as if everyone was packed together.

The images of crowded beaches filling the newspapers this morning is as much a result of trickery as irresponsibility on the part of beachgoers. British beaches in the main are pretty large spaces – they are not like bars and nightclubs.

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