SEASIDE GLORY

Brian Viner celebrates the revival of our coastal holidays

OH, we never liked to be beside the seaside . . . until a Sussex doctor published a pamphlet with a title that, even in the 1750s, wasn’t especially catchy. But Dr Richard Russell’s A Dissertation on the Use of Sea Water in the Diseases of the Glands, particularly the Scurvy, Jaundice, King’s-Evil, Leprosy and the Glandular Consumption changed everything. His premise, that bathing in the sea was good for the health, caused a sensation. Well-heeled folk started looking beyond spa towns such as Bath to the seaside, and sleepy fishing villages like Brighton expanded accordingly. A century later, thanks largely to the enlightened Bank Holidays Act of 1871, the working classes followed suit. The next 75 years saw the heyday of the British seaside as a holiday destination.

However, places like Brighton and Blackpool, for all their helter-skelters and knickerbocker glories, could never guarantee good weather, even in the height of summer. One of the most dismal summer memories of my childhood is a week in Barnstaple, Devon. I was six years old and it rained so much that, bored and alone one afternoon in our hotel, I gave myself a disastrous lop-sided haircut, which earned me a smack from my mother, to compound my misery.

In May 1950 a resourceful Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz found a solution to the weather. He set up a company called Horizon Holidays, chartered a DC3 Dakota plane and took 11 people to Corsica for £32/10 a head, all-inclusive. That really marked the start of the foreign packageholiday revolution and the beginning of the end for British seaside resorts. By the last few years of the 20th century many were shabby, neglected versions of their former selves.

Twenty years later – if we might briefly overlook the impact of the coronavirus pandemic – they are bouncing back. Bucket-and-spade hols are fashionable again. Yes, there’s still the risk of howling wind and driving rain even in August, but in almost every other respect our seaside towns are a surer bet for a summer holiday than they’ve been for decades.

There are lots of reasons for this. One of them, wherever you stand on Brexit, is that EU bathing-water directives made many British beaches cleaner even than those golden stretches we’ve seen, if only on TV, on Caribbean and Pacific islands.

Food at our seaside has never been as good as it is now. From Rick Stein’s empire in Padstow to The Magpie

Café in Whitby – I know from personal experience that they’re all worthy of pilgrimages. Margate, after years on my must-avoid list, is now a must-visit place. My mum had cherished memories of holidaying there in the 1930s, but it fell on hard times. Not so long ago, hardly anyone went for a weekend in Margate. Now, it seems it’s an epicurean paradise.

Then there are the stylish boutique hotels that have sprung up in these places, not to mention more and more exciting Airbnb options. Sure, there are still some Mr and Mrs Fawltys out there, running establishments stuck in aspic, or congealed baked beans, but they are no longer the norm.

Of course, there’s a price to be paid for all this gentrification. Like everyone who’s been to Southwold or Frinton-on-Sea, I’ve cooed over those colourful beach huts and then chuckled at the crazy sums they fetch, upwards of £40,000 in some cases. Mind you, modern middle-class pretensions can still accommodate old-fashioned seaside traditions – my wife was in Whitstable and found a stick of gin-and-tonic flavoured rock.

So, all things considered, let’s give three cheers for the British seaside, which really has hoiked itself back from the nearly dead. I know there’s plenty to be said for holidays on the Costa Brava or the Greek islands, but really and truly, is there any more cheering sight than that of an English beach on a summer’s day?

It’s a panorama that yields more vignettes of Britishness than any other I can think of: sandwich-making behind striped windbreaks, highly organised games of French cricket, diligent rock-pooling and sandcastlebuilding. For me it’s Constantine Bay in Cornwall that evokes those treasured images. For you it might be another wonderful beach. Either way, it’s a spectacle you won’t find anywhere else in the world: the Great British Seaside in all its glory, more glorious now than it’s been for years and years.

“Is there any more cheering sight than that of an English beach on a summer’s day?”