Sea, a paddle and an ice cream on the prom: Celebrating the golden age of the great British seaside

On a sunny summer weekend, the British seaside is a buzzing place to be. Thousands of us follow an instinctive path to the country’s edge for a sniff of the sea, a paddle and an ice cream on the prom. For all the well-rehearsed problems of our coastal towns it’s still an ingrained habit to go for a day trip; we did invent the seaside after all.

The first recognisably modern resort in the world was Scarborough, which first began to attract visitors way back in 1626. Over time, the infrastructure of pleasure turned the built-up seaside into a very different place to the untrammelled open coast with highly distinctive types of buildings, entertainments and foods. Think piers, promenade shelters, pavilions, Punch and Judy, donkey rides, potted shrimp and sticks of rock. There’s a lot to love in our seaside heritage, we’re just not very good at acknowledging it.

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According to journalistic convention the ‘death’ of the British seaside occurred as we all took cheap package deals to reliable foreign sunshine in the 1970s and ’80s. American travel writer Paul Theroux made a tour of the coast in 1982 for his book TheKingdom by the Sea and wrote of pensioners sitting in beach huts staring out at the waves, waiting to die. On television, popular shows like Fawlty Towers and Hi-de-Hi poked fun at the seaside, amplifying shared experiences that people could easily recognise. The glamour of the nation’s former holiday hotspots was well and truly fading as resort economies tried to survive on business from coach parties and families who couldn’t afford to go abroad.  

Despite this narrative there is still a lot of nostalgia for the seaside, some of it informed by an imagined golden age in the 1930s that seems to sing out from railway posters that made Southend look like the south of France and Margate appear as sun soaked as the Med. Our collective memory is also shaped by that ‘never-had-it-so-good’ era of the late ’50s and early ’60s when there was full employment and workers won the right to increased holidays with pay.

Baby Boomers were sporting the sagging swimsuits knitted by their mums and the British seaside was still THE place to go. What happened next was not just about foreign competition, but it did lead to a massive loss of confidence that deserves to be understood if we want to rebuild our coastal resort economies.  

Although it was in the 18th century that wealthy Georgians established the fashionable cachet of the seaside escape, the mass holiday experience was a product of the Industrial Revolution. Paddle steamers and trains took more people more quickly to more destinations. Factory owners and entrepreneurs were among the new rich who spent their leisure time in seafront grand hotels while their workers increasingly took cheap day excursions or, in northern manufacturing towns, longer breaks when the machines had their annual shutdown.

Blackpool grew on the Wakes Weeks that saw whole towns like Oldham, Burnley and Blackburn decamp. Morecambe was known as Bradford-by-the-Sea, the Welsh coal fields sustained the South Wales resorts and when Glasgow Fair came around it was boom time for resorts along the River Clyde.

The seismic shifts that hit traditional industries in the late-20th century also hit the seaside industry, leaving similar problems of unemployment, dislocation and loss of identity. Seaside resorts that previously thrived on novelty could not meet the rising expectations of a more upwardly mobile population. Rising car ownership was just as significant as rising air travel because it meant people could go to the ‘unspoilt’ fishing villages of the West Country and pull a caravan or pack a tent instead of staying in a seaside boarding house.  

Today it is the most successful seaside resorts of the past that suffer some of the worst social deprivation. Shockingly, Blackpool has the lowest life expectancy of any local authority in England. Some people choose to live on the margin but others have been pushed there, shunted into cheap housing that was once revenue-generating holiday accommodation.

In the recent general election three out of five Reform UK MPs were returned for seaside constituencies at Clacton, Great Yarmouth and Boston and Skegness. Nigel Farage may claim this was not a protest vote but, as with Brexit, it should be taken as a signal that mainstream political discourse is still not engaging with the specific concerns of people living at the seaside. Add to reports of sewage being dumped onto beaches and it’s easy to see why the staycation trend enforced by the Covid pandemic has not continued in the way resorts had hoped.  

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Smaller seaside towns have often fared better but gentrification brings its own problems, in particular a rise in second-home ownership that prices locals out of the market. This issue can be seen in miniature in the world of beach huts. In the late 1990s the first stirring of renewed interest in British seaside destinations was visible in places like Southwold, where a desirable beach hut could cost the same as a terraced house just along the Suffolk coast at Lowestoft.

The ideal would be to spread the economic benefits of seaside nostalgia much more widely, and investing in heritage is a step towards this. Projects like Morecambe Winter Gardens, Paignton Picture House and Rothesay Pavilion are current examples that show how communities can rediscover a pride in place through restoring key buildings that also have the power to attract new visitors.

At Great Yarmouth the Victorian iron and glass Winter Gardens is being brought back to life and at Weston-super-Mare the long-derelict Birnbeck Pier finally has funding in place to secure its future. These historic structures cannot fix the bigger systemic problems but they can challenge the perception of faded grandeur that makes us unfairly ashamed of our coastal resorts.  

The newly formed Seaside Heritage Network exists to champion seaside places and the heritage of mass tourism that has left an important, if often overlooked, legacy. If we now accept that cotton mills and coal mines can be visitor attractions with the potential to teach us about the working lives of our ancestors, can we not also accept that the places where they let their hair down have similar value?

That doesn’t mean turning the seaside into a museum, it means cherishing what survives and adding to it in a spirit that recognises what makes it special. Over the summer the Seaside Heritage Network is asking the public to vote for a top 10 Bucket and Spade List of favourite seaside places and experiences. 

It’s an eclectic mix that includes a boating lake at Cleethorpes, goats on the Great Orme at Llandudno, Blackpool Rock, the art deco New Palace amusements at New Brighton and the restored Saltdean Lido near Brighton. What it proves is the variety and geographical spread of our seaside heritage and, in a period of climate emergency when we need UK destinations to offer a compelling alternative to getting on a plane, it can perhaps suggest some new places to visit or old places to re-visit. The way we think about and treat our traditional seaside resorts needs to change to benefit the people that live there but, in the end, choosing to explore our own coastline has to be a good thing for all of us.  

Vote for the Bucket and Spade List at Seaside Heritage.

Kathryn Ferry is an author, historian specialising in architecture, design and seaside culture, and founder member of the Seaside Heritage Network.

Picture postcard

These photographs feature in a suitably seasonal exhibition, By The Seaside, from the Print Sales Gallery, which is on at The Photographers’ Gallery in London until 8 September. Entry is free. Celebrated photographers including Martin Parr, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and John Hinde capture the British seaside in all its eccentric splendour, from the heyday of the 1960s and ’70s to more recent times. Prints are available to purchase with profits supporting The Photographers’ Gallery public programme.

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