My Favourite Place: By Philippa Burrough
I first went there to meet my parents-in-law as it’s my husband’s old family stomping ground. It’s brilliant for children, so we kept going back. There's a beach for every age group; flat, calm ones for toddlers and the surfing beach at St Ouen is ideal for teenagers. The most beautiful beach of them all is at Beauport, St Aubin, where you can jump off stunning rock formations into the sea!
The island is incredibly relaxed. Getting off the aeroplane, there's a very distinctive smell of rose granite, sea and the local vegetation. I take a deep breath and think: ‘Oh, it’s Jersey! It’s wonderful.’ The landscape is scrubby, with bracken, thrift, wild thyme and gorse, and angular, architectural pine trees that have been sculpted over years by the wind and ocean. Recently the food on Jersey has got so much better. It was stuck in a fish-and-chip time warp, but now you can have Michelin-starred lunches in the Atlantic Hotel. The local delicacies are amazing, there are Jersey Royal new potatoes, lots of fantastic seafood and Jersey black butter, which is made from apples, cider, spices, liquorice and lemons – it’s delicious.
We do a lot of walking along the coast path between the beaches – when the children were small we would pretend that there were bears in the sea caves! We often walk to Plemont Bay, where there's an extraordinary café carved out of a German bunker, overlooking the beach. And at St Ouen’s Bay there's a surfer’s café called El Tico Cantina, serving huge breakfasts in a lovely art deco building. It’s the sunniest place in the UK, quite cool, but largely frost-free. There are lots of tropical plants like agapanthus, canna and dahlias, which are lovely but a bit wind battered! Irises do well there, too, as the granite is very free-draining.
I adore St Brelade which has a flat, safe beach. There's a beautiful Norman fisherman’s chapel overlooking the bay. The inscriptions on the gravestones are in French or Jèrriais, the local dialect, English and German.
The island became part of Britain with William the Conqueror so there's a conjunction of influences, including evidence of German occupation. You can see the layers of history everywhere.