Celebrating the Great British Seaside ride
A great spring break doesn’t have to mean going into the city – not when we have so many miles of brilliant coastline to enjoy
EVERYONE LOVES THE Great British Seaside. Who cares if there’s a risk of sand in your ice cream, gull poo on your bike seat and chips so deep-fried the potato has vaporised and left behind a fossilised exoskeleton of incinerated cooking fat?
The GBS holds a special allure for riders because getting there is at least as good as, if not better than, actually being there. The year’s first run to the seaside is a regular springtime rite of passage, heralding the start of the new riding season.
I’m heading off on BMW’S R1200GS – in this year’s Triple Black special edition colours (which are, predominantly, black). I bomb down from the M20 in north Kent, then veer off the A20 onto Chegworth Road, riding past a road sign warning of forthcoming narrow roads and bends in no fewer than four languages – which suggests there have been recent multinational accidents nearby. Brexit can’t come soon enough for some people.
I’m heading towards Headcorn, then Tenterden and Appledore, to Camber Sands – a three-mile stretch of the golden stuff on the East Sussex coast that has, over the years, doubled on screen for Dunkirk, Normandy, the Sahara desert and the planet Aridius (in a 1965 episode of Dr Who). But I know it better from family trips here as a child; the annual summer adventure from north Kent to the seaside, complete with wicker picnic hamper and cucumber sandwiches. It’s not hard to recall the boyish thrill, even now.
This is the first time I’ve followed the exact route we used to take in 40 years, but
some of it’s eerily familiar already; dad always missing the staggered T-junction in Headcorn and the unexpected fork left at Tenterden. We didn’t have sat nav in those days – I remember when it was all maps round here. Today the BMW is, of course, fully Gps-enabled – and the integration between the rotary dial on the left-hand bar and the sat nav’s zoom function is so useful it’s embarrassing.
This is still early in the year so even though the air temperature hovers around 13°C, the nadgery, bumpy roads – lined with coppiced saplings that look capable of shredding a BMW – are slick with compressed mud and oily slime, but the surefooted GS inspires 360° confidence. The suspension drills the tyres into the road and the electronics back them up with subtle intervention when necessary. Nothing fazes the bike – I’ve never ridden over so many square, mid-corner manhole covers with such abandon. For me, that’s the key with rider aids: you can view them as a safety feature, if you like; or you can use them to go even faster. Come to think of it, our opinion of electronics probably says more about us as riders than it does about them. Remember that, the next time someone dismisses them with a wave of the hand.
It’s mid-week, so the traffic is refreshingly light for the South-east. Kent is habitually on the verge of turning into a vast car park, so as well as picking your route carefully it pays to travel outside rush hour. I’m not bothered by cars loitering painfully behind caravans or white vans hogging the lanes – the GS just boogies on, short-shifting with a smooth, unhurried quickshifter, maintaining a ludicrously high average speed without feeling rushed or stressed.
Thatched Tudor cottages flash past, then the road opens out over the top of the ancient Isle Of Oxney – 8000 years ago it was an island in the Rother estuary, while the submerged lowlands of Romney marsh before it were just open sea. Since then the land has risen and fallen, eventually settling in its current position leaving the high ridge of the ancient shoreline running miles inland between Appledore and Rye.
Just south of Appledore, I visit the most bizarre seaside in the UK. The headland at Dungeness is one of the largest shingle beaches in Europe; a vast stretch of pebbles in front of flooded gravel pits that form part of a nature reserve. A pair of nuclear power stations, one active, one mothballed, dominate the horizon. As the GS ticks over with its characteristic flat twin shudder, I sit and contemplate how we harness nature and have to protect it at the same time. Hot water from the power station pumped into the sea has created its own patch of underwater ecology; meanwhile over 600 plants thrive at Dungeness – a third of the entire species found in the UK.
I make my way back inland past the scattered huts and homes of the eccentrics
“It’s mid-week so the traffic is refreshingly light for Kent”