The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
How North Norfolk became overrun with UFLs (Up From Londoners)
With Georgian market towns, coastal villages and quaint hamlets, ‘Chelsea by Sea’ is luring well-to-do holidaymakers, says Sally Howard
It’s an autumn day beside the seaside at Cromer, a beach resort in North Norfolk that until recently was best known for its broad sandy beach, good crabbing, and brightly lit amusement arcades.
Today, alongside the timeless fish and chip munching day-trippers, there’s a new crowd: young Londoners wrangling posh buggies across the sands, fragrant 50-somethings in padded jackets, strolling purposefully behind their pedigree dogs. At beachside café The Reef Stop, 70-somethingyear-old proprietor Kathy Lynch tells me that she caters to all.
“We sell cheese and pickle sandwiches and hot dogs and Cromer fridge magnets and all that, but also the vegan Magnums and Pimm’s,” she explains, gesturing towards her diverse stock. Lynch launched her £10 Pimm’s jug for Wimbledon weekend 2023: “and I’ve not taken them off as they sell like anything!”
This summer, Lynch also rented a rank of Cromer’s colourful beach huts for a £263-a-hut day rate. She found these were increasingly colonised by city types, who would settle in for the day with a bottle of champagne and expensive artisan blankets. “We see all sorts these days,” Lynch, who describes herself as “another Cromer landmark”, laughs: “But as long as they’re spending, that’s fine by me!”
A short stroll inland, Rachel Parkin is bagging up small-producer sauerkraut and coffee blends for customers in the Fig and Olive, a fine-food deli she set up in 2022 in the town centre, a shopfront she shares with East Coast Surf, the latter catering to another new Cromer demographic (“surf dads” optimistically chasing an indifferent North Sea swell).
From a family of Cromer amusement arcade owners, Parkin, 45, spied an opportunity to ride a wave of gentrification set in motion by digital worker migrants to North Norfolk, and big-spending staycationers who discovered the region for the first time during Covid. “There’s a few of us in the town that I’d describe as ‘new Cromer’ businesses,” she explains. “There’s specialist coffee shop North Sea Coffee, floral designers Constance & Thyme, and cocktail microbar The Gangway; that one has branches across North Norfolk.”
Today 60 per cent of Parkin’s trade comes from the tourists that she can immediately identify from their flagrant retail habits. “They just pile things in their baskets – coffees, imported sauces and local jams – without bothering to check the price.”
Since the staycation boom of the pandemic years, when grounded Britons discovered new regions in the UK, the axis of posher Norfolk tourism, formerly around second homeowning hotspot Burnham Market, has shifted further east to North Norfolk, or “NoNo”, a region bounded by Wellsnext-the-Sea to the west and Cromer to the east.
The North Norfolk triangle encompasses Georgian market town Holt, coastal village Blakeney, hamlet Cleynext-the-Sea, National Trust estate Felbrigg Hall and the working coastal town of Sheringham (with its prettier radial outpost, Upper Sheringham).
It’s a region that features natural attractions that have long drawn the birding and walking boots brigade, including ornithological mecca Cley Marshes and the spectacular natural vistas of the salt marshes at Stiffkey (pronounced “stew-key”).
Philip Turner is the founder of Chestnut, an East Anglian “posh pubs with rooms” group which has four outposts in North Norfolk, including The Wiveton Bell outside Blakeney and The Globe in Wells-next-the-Sea plus a property that’s under construction at emerging North Norfolk coastal resort, Weybourne.
“The favoured area for well-to-do tourists is definitely moving east,” he agrees. “Ten years ago, Wells was all fish and chips and slot machines, but you walk into our property there now, [The Globe] even out of season, and it’s full of urbane young families and their dogs. It’s like Sunday at a trendy east London pub.”
Turner attributes Norfolk’s rising popularity with higher-spending visitors to William and Kate establishing a country retreat at Georgian Anmer Hall from 2013, the extensive and tourist-friendly renovations of the Crown village at Sandringham and The Gunton Arms, a pub with rooms on an historic deer park outside Cromer that launched in 2011 and is, he says, “a bit like a Babington House east for the media set”.
Holt, a small inland town of picturesque flint-pebble facade houses, is home to public boarding and day school Gresham’s and 75 independent retailers. These include leading gallery
Adrian Hill Fine Art and Natural Norfolk Living, which supplies swank eco products such as natural denim wash and dog shampoo to the Sandringham estate and Harrods.
In Follyology Holt, the clothing and interiors shop Judith West owns alongside a fine-tea themed holiday let, she tells me that the aim of Holt’s retailers is to offer a one-stop shopping ecosystem for the well-to-do.
“All the goods they would have to trail across London to get normally are clustered within a short walk of each other in Holt’s boutiques,” she explains. West proudly shows off flamboyant items by avant-garde “ecouturer” Privatsachen, a brand your correspondent has never heard of, but which is apparently sought-after by the Chelsea-bySea set.
“I make a point of cherry-picking the really fashionable brands,” she adds. “We’re definitely not country bumpkins in Holt!”
At Holt’s “posh B&B café and restaurant” Byfords, waitress Lucy Paine, 26, tells me what it’s like to be a young person in a region that’s in the crosshairs of the posh holidaymaker set. Heading into Holt from Blakeney, I’d driven through Cley-next-the-Sea, a hamlet of flint-fronted cottages where many of the houses have been snapped up by second-homeowners who leave their properties empty through the winter months.
“The good bit of living here is that it’s nice to serve happy people enjoying their holiday,” Paine says. “The downsides are, that I have zero chance of owning my own home as house prices are totally insane, and that there’s no nightlife for young people. The nearest nightclubs are in Norwich and honestly they’re nothing to write home about.”
Such sentiments are behind residents’ growing revolt against the worst aspects of moneyed tourism, with Blakeney residents recently following Burnham Market’s lead in voting to restrict second homes and holiday lets and
Wells-next-the-Sea consulting on similar measures in what’s been billed as “a 30-mile front-line fight against second homes”. Property prices in Blakeney have risen 50 per cent in the past six years, with the average selling price reaching a London-like £747,832. Winterton-on-Sea, a beach resort north of Great Yarmouth, is meanwhile urging dog-owning tourists to stay away, with their four-legged friends standing accused of “terrorising wildlife” and “fouling the beach”. Norfolk County
Council is also set to introduce street parking fees for non-residents in tourist-swamped villages.
Back at Cromer, deli owner Rachel Parkin admits that there are downsides to the posh holidaymakers’ stampede to North Norfolk. A former town planner, Parkin believes that a recent proliferation of holiday lets in Cromer is inflating rental prices for locals, and notes that gourmet offerings aren’t for everyone. She found few takers, for example, for her platters of artisan cheeses and charcuterie at the August Cromer carnival, with its Miss Cromer contest and kids’ fancy dress competitions.
“The locals looked a bit confused,” she laughs. Parkin’s brother James still runs the family amusement arcade Golden Sands a short walk away, which offers fruit machines and twopenny pushers.
“I think the answer is that there has to be something for everyone,” she says. And with that she rings up my £10 bag of Norfolk-blend coffee.