‘I didn’t have a fall. A woman knocked me down outside Kwik-Save.’ Head in the bubble dryer, an elderly customer recounts her story with gossipy relish. After the fall, rather than simply visit the GP to have her stitches removed, the elderly woman visited the salon instead. ‘There’s nothing Hilary can’t turn her hand to.’ This exchange sets the tone for Three Salons at The Seaside, Philippa Lowthorpe’s cult 1994 documentary about life in Blackpool’s backstreet hairdressers.

Today, the film is celebrated for its sharp resilience with a northern accent, evident in both that story and its telling. It’s a seemingly familiar portrait of hard northern matriarchs whose acid tongues are matched by their oversized glasses, the foundational material for then contemporary writers like Victoria Wood and Caroline Aherne.

Yet thirty years on from its broadcast, Three Salons at the Seaside is best seen instead as a neglected piece of experimental film. Instead of a cosy portrait of northern kitsch, Lowthorpe’s documentary articulates the social politics of hair salons, carefully recording care by and for working-class women, and the communities they carve out for themselves.

Philippa Lowthorpe was born in Yorkshire in 1961. She attended a mixed comprehensive school and then (the first in her family to go to university) St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Three years later, she graduated, and would soon return to the north professionally, working as a researcher for Yorkshire Television. Finding no women directors at the broadcaster, Lowthorpe and a colleague launched their own idiosyncratic pitch. ‘We want to make a film about a woman bullfighter, a woman racehorse trainer, and a woman gamekeeper.’ Seemingly to the surprise of all involved, the head of programming said yes (though crucially no trace seems to remain of that particular series). Next came a drama-documentary series based on women’s autobiographical writings, and an episode of the BBC’s Forty Minutes, centered on ageing and intimacy. Women, their voices, and the negotiations they make between the individual and the social, were integral to Lowthorpe’s work from the start.

By the early 1990s Lowthorpe was beginning to carve out a directorial voice of her own. Reflecting an interest within the BBC at the time in what she describes as heavily ‘authored’ documentary work, Three Salons at the Seaside is grounded in personal experience. The women that populated Blackpool’s salons reminded Lowthorpe of her own female working-class relatives and their neglected stories: ‘I knew there was a world of women talking’ Lowthorpe told Francesca Angelini in 2022, ‘that you don’t otherwise see.’

What the viewer sees is that hairdressing is arguably the least important service provided by the salon. Lowthorpe’s camera lingers on permanently clutched handbags and polished patent shoes. Though clients were reportedly unbothered by the presence of a camera crew, concessions might be spotted in their voices, sometimes slipping into spectacular telephone voice territory. When one of the first clients arrives, she is met with complimentary surprise (‘You’re looking very nice this morning Mrs Bell, are you going somewhere?’). But the salon is that somewhere, a place to be seen, in which the politics of respectability are manifested through an unbridled commitment to the weekly shampoo and set. In many ways, Three Salons posits a version of ‘self-care’ not yet given its zeitgeisty 2010s tag, yet it is also a reminder of the enduring relationship between working-class women and the complex rituals of clothing, make-up, and hair. The film’s capacity to communicate such a significance is inseparable from the care that it takes in representing its subjects.  In many ways, Three Salons is a film about social change, and yet it also documents something of an ambiguous historical hinterland: the liminal mid 1990s of Mike Leigh’s Naked and Patrick Kieller’s London between the Thatcher and Blair years, with Cool Britannia happening somewhere else entirely.

The film was originally broadcast on 29 August as part of a special night of BBC 2 programming to mark the centenary of the Blackpool Tower. Unlike the other headline program shown that evening, David Thewlis’ nostalgic Dream Town, it shies away from cliché, offering a portrait of the sides of northern working-class community we less often see. The communities depicted are by no means socio-economically homogenous, nor does this film offer a romantic view of working-class community. There are clear distinctions to be made even between the three salons themselves, and the local gossip mill includes rough judgement doled out to those reportedly content to ‘scrounge off the social.’ These divisions are not stoked by the presence of Lowthorpe or her camera crew, though: there are no pieces-to-camera, no vox pops, nor the imposition of a post-production narrator. The women of the salon are genuinely left to speak for themselves.

The shots that are most often reused are those that emphasise delicacy and softness: wispy white lace curtains, fingers running through silver locks, and the pastel hues of pre-packaged rollers. The result is a film that is both genuinely tender and would in any other context be considered formally avant-garde. This isn’t romanticisation, but a careful recognition of the importance of vulnerability and softness, both to the hairdressers, and to working-class women’s communities more generally. The latter is too often forgotten in depictions of the apparently hard-faced and sharp-tongued. ‘If you can’t cry here, where can you cry?’ says one elderly woman in the film. This reaches highest manifestation with ‘the funeral bag,’ an item provided by the salon (complete with some money and a few mints) to be borrowed for funeral services. Support, even solidarity, is central. Widowed women visit the salon even when they don’t require its services: in the film, you can see them brushing up and making the tea, bolstered by networks of practical and emotional support.

In the 2020s, Three Salons has found a new audience. A VHS rip became a slow-burn hit on YouTube (sample comment: ‘Just to let you know the vanity box is still there with the same owner still doing hair xx’). In 2022, US documentary spoof series Documentary Now released Seth Meyers’ Two Hairdressers in Bagglyport, starring Harriet Walter and Cate Blanchett paying affectionate homage to the film. In last year’s BBC Christmas Day documentary tribute to Caroline Aherne, co-writer Craig Cash posited the film as a key influence on The Royle Family. Today, Three Salons at the Seaside sits on BBC iPlayer for the foreseeable future.

Its resurfacing prompted a spate of UK write-ups, with journalists describing the film as ‘sweet’ and ‘endlessly touching,’ evocative of ‘a way of life that has utterly been lost.’ If Three Salons is evocative of a ‘lost way of life’ it is one where basic infrastructure and social ties still existed such that a failing system of social care might be bolstered by the surprising grassroots support of the Blackpool salon. ‘These salons provided a social service to the community’, Lowthorpe suggested in an interview with Radio 4 in 2022. An implicit addition cannot be ignored, that those services would not elsewhere be on offer, and yet surely should have been.

Yet if these women were supported by their own communities, few comparable spaces present themselves today. Britain’s ageing population is supposedly shielded by the triple lock, yet in towns such as Blackpool, such lives have been heavily degraded by austerity, and the social care system that might support them desperately needs rebuilding. Perhaps Three Salons offers some hope for the meantime, presenting a unique portrait of what care means, how we depict it, and how we respond when its official channels no longer serve us. For one, with different forms of solidarity, carved out with rollers and lacquer.