The British seaside holiday was created by the railways. Before the 1840s the coast was for fishing and for the wealthy taking sea-bathing cures; once trains could carry factory workers there for a day, whole towns grew up to receive them.
The furniture of a resort
- The pier — an iron structure walking out over the sea, carrying a theatre, an arcade and a café. There were around a hundred; roughly sixty survive, the rest lost to fire, storm and neglect.
- The promenade — the seafront walk, with shelters, railings and benches donated in memory of people who liked the view.
- Deckchairs — striped canvas, hired by the hour, and impossible to erect with dignity.
- The amusement arcade — two-penny push machines, grabbers, and the smell of hot electronics.
- Donkey rides on the sand, licensed and regulated, with each donkey wearing its name on a browband.
- Punch and Judy, in a striped booth.
The food
Fish and chips out of the paper, eaten standing up while a seagull assesses you. Also:
- Rock — a hard peppermint stick with the resort’s name running all the way through. It is made by hand: the letters are formed as huge sugar slabs, assembled into a giant cylinder, and drawn down to stick width without the lettering distorting. Watching it made in a rock shop window is a proper seaside activity.
- Whelks, cockles and jellied eels from a stall, for the traditionalist.
- A 99 — soft-serve ice cream with a Cadbury Flake stuck in it.
- Doughnuts, fried and sugared in front of you, sold by the bag.
The decline
The seaside’s collapse has a precise cause: the cheap package holiday. From the 1960s, jet aircraft and tour operators made Spain no more expensive than Skegness and considerably more reliable in the matter of sunshine.
Resorts lost their trade within a generation. Hotels became bedsits and then housing for people placed there by other councils, which imported deprivation into towns with no work. Several British coastal towns now have among the worst health, income and education outcomes in the country — a well-documented pattern that the government has repeatedly acknowledged and never fixed.
The resorts
- Blackpool — the largest and most defiantly itself. The Tower, the Illuminations, the Pleasure Beach, and three piers.
- Brighton — the one that thrived, by becoming a city with a seaside rather than a resort. The Royal Pavilion is extraordinary, and the burnt skeleton of the West Pier stands offshore.
- Margate — devastated, then partly revived by the Turner Contemporary gallery and the restored Dreamland amusement park.
- Whitby, Scarborough, Llandudno, Tenby, Southwold, Cromer — smaller and, in several cases, in better shape than the giants.
The swim
The water is cold. It is cold in August. British people go in anyway, emerge blue, and declare it lovely once you are in — which is both a lie and, oddly, true. Cold water swimming has become genuinely fashionable in the last decade, and year-round sea swimming groups now exist at most resorts.