ton-on-Sea (or Southwold as I believe it
is known). The entire country seemingly
migrated abroad. With a few exceptions —
financial crises and the like, especially 2007/
— this trend continued, perhaps until now.
In 2018 the number of Brits travelling
abroad fell by one million, and the number
of nights they spent abroad also reduced.
The aforementioned annoyance of fly-
ing may have something to do with this. In
fact the only thing that makes me want to
travel abroad is the sanctimony and hypoc-
risy of the flight-shaming middle-class eco
puffins. Sometimes I think I should book a
long-distance trip just to annoy them. But
the rejuvenation of our seaside towns is
another factor.
You now need to search long and hard to
find a seaside town without a food festival
or a chic art gallery. The promenades have
been prettified and gentrified, the amuse-
ment arcades tucked away, the piers (often
through lottery funding) repaired to an
approximation of Victorian splendour, the
gourmet ice-cream parlours and tapas bars
moved in. There are still those places which
buck the trend — Jaywick in Essex has
a good claim to be the most impoverished
and desolate town in England, while Leys-
down on the Isle of Sheppey and good old
Blackpool still possess what we might call
rough edges. But in most of the rest, there
are cornucopias of delight, each town tai-
lored to meet a new market.
Middle-class day trip to the south coast?
Whitstable, oysters, lobster, pleasant clap-
board houses. Something a bit edgier?
Dungeness, with its weirdness, its nuke plant,
its wildlife reserve. Gently faded glamour?
Herne Bay. Spruced-up art-house stuff?
Margate. Margate without the bolt-on cul-
ture? Ramsgate. And that’s just the south-
east coast, which is now thriving, prices
rising swiftly — not least because the high-
speed train from St Pancras can reach Mar-
gate in an hour and a half.
Warmer summers mean we don’t all
have to flock to the west country, where the
embittered natives sometimes leave razor
blades buried in the sands and feed you stuff
called stargazy pie. Although plenty, mysti-
fyingly (in my opinion) still do, despite the
crowds and the prices.
The northern resorts have become much
more palatable, from beautiful, Hanseatic
Berwick, through the Georgian Balamo-
ry façade and endless sands of Alnmouth,
down past Victorian Saltburn with its
magnificent pier, surfing community and
unspoiled inland valleys, to Hornsea with its
mere full of rare wading birds.
In Norfolk and Suffolk you are spoiled
for choice, between chi-chi writers’ retreats,
You now need to search long and
hard to fi nd a seaside town without
a food festival or a chic art galleryT
he real secret behind Margate’s
revival isn’t so much the restored
Dreamland amusement park, but the
trains. A decade ago, it gained high-
speed, InterCity-like trains to St Pancras,
putting it within 90 minutes of London.
Before the trains get to Margate they
stop in Whitstable, which I remember as
a bit of a hole in the 1970s. I went back
recently and couldn’t believe how horrible
the beach is — black sludge, sharp stones
and shells. But then I got to the quayside
and it was all posh seafood restaurants.
Accessibility as much as native charm
has made Whitstable one of the most
remarkable turnaround stories of any
seaside town over the past 20 years. It is
close enough to London to have become
a weekend destination for the middle
classes who can slurp their oysters while
sending Barnaby and Chloe to run around
on the black sludge in their wetsuits. A fast
train to London is the facility that Hast-
ings — more attractive than Whitstable
in many respects — lacks, which is why
regeneration there lags some way behind.
The secret behind Brighton, too, lies
in its trains. Why of all seaside resorts has
it seen a boom in house prices? It can’t be
because of its beach, which is just a steep
pile of pebbles. But it is commutable to
London. If you really want lasting regen-
eration it isn’t just day-trippers you need
— but high-spending residents, and pref-
erably some business investment.
Brighton and Bournemouth are not
especially popular among tourists — they
are a lowly 12th and 13th respectively in
the list of towns most visited by British
holidaymakers. But no one worries about
their economies because they have a
commercial life of their own, and attract
wealthy residents from elsewhere. On theother hand, those resorts which attract
the most day-trippers are among the most
depressed. The top three seaside resorts
in terms of visitors are Scarborough
(1.28 million holiday visits in 2018), Black-
pool (1.05 million) and Skegness (633,000).
They are followed by Torbay (574,000)
and Newquay (521,000). These are all
figures for UK-based holidaymakers.
It is remarkable how few internation-
al tourists, by contrast, seem to be attract-
ed by our seaside towns. Among the top
20 British destinations visited by foreign
tourists, only Brighton (at number ten)
makes it into the top 20.
From all this, a picture emerges of
just what it takes to create a successful
seaside town. It helps either to be too
small to have attracted benefit-claimants
to its lodging houses, or large enough to
act as a regional centre — like Brighton
and Bournemouth. But if your seaside
town is not in that category? You don’t
need day-trippers, and there is little point
in trying to attract international tourists
because they are not interested in cold,
grey English tidal waters. You don’t nec-
essarily need much of a beach, either —
indeed, some might see the lack of sand
as a good thing, in that it helps deter
grockles. An art gallery might help, but
better still are fancy restaurants serving
local seafood.
On top of that, you want a fast train
connection to London. Over the next
few years the real growth in UK tourism
is likely to be from high-income, envi-
ronmentally aware people embarrassed
about flying and looking to take breaks
in Britain, preferably by rail. Then again,
if you are especially concerned about
climate change, you might be a little shy
about investing in coastal property.The towns making waves
ROSS CLARK
windswept sand dunes for the ornithologists,
Cromer for the crab and Great Yarmouth
for people who rather wish this gentrifica-
tion stuff had never happened.
Back in Yorkshire, there’s Whitby, which
with great skill re-invented itself as a place
for the goths to come and immerse them-
selves in Draculiana — which cleverly led,
a little later, to this thriving town being the
centre of the ‘steampunk’ craze. I avoid
Whitby, these days — not because it isn’t
delightful, but because it is so frantically
busy. And good though the fish and chips atthe Magpie Cafe is, it’s not a patch on Seav-
iew at Saltburn.
People want more from their holidays
and day trips than just sea and sand, which
is why the British seaside town is back in
fashion. That and the fact that travelling
abroad, to widen one’s horizons and meet
different kinds of folk, is beginning to lose
a little of its allure.SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RADIO
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