In the late sixties, a Yorkshire primary school trip could only be to one place: Scarborough. I have vivid memories of the 40-mile coach ride, the donkeys, candy floss and magic of the golden sands and blue sea. Millions of children all over the country were making similar trips to their nearest resort, and no doubt have the same honeyed memories of sandy sandwiches, wet towels and shivering after chilly dips. For many it was followed by the annual family fortnight at the seaside in the summer holidays. In late July my four siblings and I were packed into the car amongst tents, camping beds and sleeping bags to stay in the small village of Runswick 30 miles up the coast from Scarborough. Every day started with my father taking us for a freezing dip in the sea; afterwards we raced across the beach to warm up before sitting down to big bowls of porridge that provided fuel for a day of building sandcastles, damming streams and exploring the rock pools and cliffs of this picturesque bay. We went feral, joining up with a gang of other children who, like us, returned every year. The entertainments were modest – I remember only one trip to the cinema in Whitby and there was no money for the amusement arcades.
In many respects my holiday experiences were identical to those of my parents in the 1930s or even my grandparents in the 1900s – when by a curious coincidence my grandfather had come all the way from Southampton to holiday in Runswick. The seaside holiday represented a remarkable continuity of English middle-class family life over the course of 150 years from the early nineteenth century. With the advent of the railways and rising household incomes the habit spread rapidly, fuelling the growth of major seaside resorts such as Blackpool, Morecambe, Southend and Brighton. By the 1930s, seven million visited Blackpool every year and 5.5 million visited Southend out of a population of 46 million. In the major industrial cities, trade unions, churches and other voluntary organisations encouraged the timid to venture to the coast.
The English still visit the seaside in huge numbers but middle-class tastes have come to dominate
Given that nowhere in England is further than 70 miles from the sea, the seaside trip became a defining feature of English identity; everyone recognised that distinctive combination of fish and chips, hot tea, cowering behind wind shelters and shivering in promenade shelters in the sudden showers. Everyone found some solidarity – and comedy – in the struggle with unreliable weather. The seaside was where the English let down their guard and enjoyed saucy postcards, hints of sexual adventure, and encounters with strangers in the holiday camps, who became lifelong friends. The seafront was a great mixer and leveller; it encouraged our quintessential national stoicism.
For over a century, the seaside was arguably the most powerful common reference point for a sense of Englishness. Scotland and Wales also had deep affection for their coasts but I would suggest it was diluted by their deep attachment to iconic mountain landscapes. By contrast, for much of urban England, links to the land had been comprehensively broken during industrialisation and the seaside became the one escape valve. A place where city dwellers could breathe clean air and find release from crowded streets in the spaces of beach and wide sea horizons.
Inevitably England’s deep class divisions were reflected in its seaside. The paradox of this great unifying experience was that the class segregation was stark. Hovering over my opening two paragraphs was the issue of how as a child I absorbed two very different experiences of the seaside. Scarborough was candy floss and amusement arcades, perhaps even a trip on the Big Wheel, while Runswick was quaint and picturesque. The working classes from industrial Leeds and Bradford went en masse to the former, while the middle classes looked for quiet and charm, and insisted their children entertain themselves. In The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750-1914 the historian John Walton quotes one commentator from the late nineteenth century on how one family’s preference for a “nice, damp, inconvenient habitation that was picturesque” had taken them to the “obscure and cheap North Yorkshire fishing villages of Runswick Bay and Sandsend in 1886 to spend their days in long walks, sketching and earnest argument.” That chimes with what I know of my great-grandmother.
On some parts of the coast, the segregation reached absurd proportions. Middle-class Frinton in Essex was developed with regulations banning all forms of sea-front entertainment or commerce to distinguish it from its boisterous neighbour Clacton-on-Sea. Condescension and irritation have marked the rivalry between many coastal neighbours such as Blackpool and the more genteel Lytham St Annes. The class divides are still acute; while Suffolk’s Southwold and Cornwall’s Padstow pull in the middle classes, Blackpool attracts thirteen million visitors a year looking for a budget holiday in its terraced streets of family-run hotels and huge Pleasure Beach attractions.
But the even bigger issue looming over my childhood holidays was that this great unifying experience of the chilly English seaside was about to abruptly come to an end. By the early seventies, the prosperous middle classes were abandoning England’s resorts and heading for the Continent; by the mid-seventies, the first package holiday flights were taking off from Manchester. The English fell in love with Spain and Greece and sun became the chief requirement for a successful holiday. More than a century of tradition collapsed in less than a decade; by the early eighties, the fading English seaside resort had become a familiar trope in films and novels, a resonant symbol of wider themes of the nation’s decline and struggle to reinvent a future. Sam Mendes’ film Empire of Light, set in a shabby Margate in the early eighties, tugs on these heartstrings with a poignancy that can only be described as a form of pity.
While researching in Blackpool, I interviewed visitors on the promenade. Many were returning with memories of their own childhood holidays, and the repeated lament was that the town had changed. Something had been lost. Old footage of Blackpool’s heyday in the forties and fifties, uploaded to YouTube, have an instructive comment thread below in which viewers say they’re searching the footage for faces they recognise. They add their own nostalgic wistfulness: a yearning for lost innocence that enabled happiness out of modest expectations, and a sense of belonging. It’s a form of nostalgia that tips too quickly into racism, and Nigel Farage’s adverts are a reminder of how far-right politics feed on these emotional undercurrents. The Essex resort of Clacton was pivotal in the run up to the Brexit vote after it voted in Douglas Carswell as the only UKIP MP.
The English still visit the seaside in huge numbers but middle-class tastes have come to dominate. In a recent survey, Bamburgh in Northumberland was voted the top seaside destination in the country. As a child I visited its vast swathes of empty beach and windswept dunes. In 2020 the Sunday Times judged that Runswick was “close to perfection” with the best beach not just in England but in the whole of Britain, a judgement that both the Scots and the Welsh are well entitled to question, not to mention Cornwall and Devon. When the House of Lords Select Committee on coastal towns produced a definitive report on their plight in 2019 the cover was a photograph of picturesque Runswick. The image was irrelevant; the village’s cottages are now some of the most expensive real estate in North Yorkshire. It’s as if the country has become embarrassed by the brash and often tatty exuberance of places like Skegness, Weston-Super-Mare, Morecambe and Bognor. Here the inequality is sharp; walk from one end of the promenade to the other in Morecambe and average life expectancy drops more than a decade.
Coastal resorts have been left to deal with the fall-out of their brutal de-industrialisation largely alone, and their relatively cheap housing pulls in troubled new arrivals often fleeing demons such as drugs, alcoholism and domestic violence. To their inhabitants, they still provoke passionate attachment; and many visitors would dearly love to live by the sea if there were decent jobs available. With investment in digital and public transport connections, it should have been possible to reinvent resorts as beautiful places to live. Instead, a visit is always haunted by the uncomfortable sense of visiting the ruins of former glory, and a disturbing suspicion that it’s not just coastal resorts which are adrift, but also the nation they used to entertain.
“The Seaside, England’s Love Affair” by Madeleine Bunting was published by Granta on 4 May
