You could smell this year’s Seaside of the Year before you’d even taken your coat off.

The annual exhibition returned to the Station’s event hall this month, with entrants once again invited to interpret a theme set by the judges—this year, humanity’s influence upon the coast—through whatever medium struck their fancy. Painters painted. Sculptors sculpted. And, as ever, somebody found a way to make the whole hall smell like low tide.

That would be Crabby, Welston Junior School’s entry: a scale-model crab built entirely from compostable packaging, designed to slowly biodegrade over the course of the exhibition. A clever concept, beautifully explained on the accompanying laminated card. Less beautifully explained, it transpired, to the children who built it, several of whom turned up on opening night expecting to admire their handiwork and instead found a sagging, faintly sweating crustacean several days into visible decline. The resulting tears were not, organisers were quick to clarify, part of the artistic statement.

Nearby—too nearby, as it turned out—sat the Seagull Symphony, a looped soundscape beginning with gentle waves and gull cries before gradually surrendering to traffic, jet skis, and what I’m pretty sure was a drone. Whoever arranged the floor plan placed it directly opposite the video installation submitted by Cecil Napoleon Eggtooth, in which our town’s most committed performance artist has his back tattooed with a bag of fish and chips while yelling “Stop over-fishing me” on a loop of his own. The combined effect, for anyone standing at the midpoint between the two screens, was less art appreciation and more sensory ambush. One visitor was overheard asking, with genuine confusion, whether that was Cecil shouting or just the seagulls. I’m not sure either party would have been flattered by the comparison.

Elsewhere, things were comparatively serene. Lost Sole, a wall-mounted collection of single shoes washed up along the shoreline this past year, drew a steady trickle of visitors quietly reading the handwritten inventory cards beneath each one. And Before and After, a simple side-by-side of an old photograph of the coastline against a present-day shot from the same spot, prompted at least one heated five-minute debate among the judges as to whether it counted as “art” or merely “evidence”—a disagreement I gather remains unresolved.

I attended in my usual capacity: notebook in hand, opinions kept to myself, well clear of both the Seagull Symphony’s worst moments and whatever Crabby was now emitting. By the time the judges retreated to deliberate, the hall had become a genuinely peculiar place to stand.

Whatever wins, I suspect Crabby’s legacy is already secure. Several parents have asked, very firmly, that next year’s school entry be something that does not require a five-day countdown to disintegration.