JPG: Stories: Photo Essay: The English Seaside

The English Seaside

By Richard Adams

4 May 2008

The english seaside has been under threat for years...cheap european flights to places with guranteed sun have nearly killed the home resorts.

In the past the English seaside consisted of small towns that provided cheap fun and fresh air and sunshine (sometimes) for the downtrodden masses that lived in poverty and worked in the dark satanic mills. Once a year trainloads of them would head to the seaside to have a good time as a break fomr their dangerous, 18 hour, 6 days a week industrial jobs.

The towns thrived. Whole industries grew up to serve the visitors. Variety and vaudeville became massive in the end of the pier music halls. The beaches became massive teeming enclaves where you coulnt move for old men paddling with their trousers rolled up but still wearing their chest high trousers. Children running wild and donkey rides everywhere. Whatever the weather (usually rainy), the beaches were full and all natural beauty was lost.

But in the post war era, cheap flights began to appear. Workers got rights and statutory holidays of at least 20 days a year and they got richer. They didnt want to go and spend two weeks on a cold beach with cold sea in a town where the entertainment was mired in the 1900's and so the home resorts entered a slow decline.

If however you go round the coast of England you find some amazing things ahppening and the decline has allowed people time to rediscover what the seaside can and should be like. They have started reclaiming it from its victorian template.. Some beaches like West Wittering in Sussex have been taken over by groups of people who want to preserve and recast them as areas of outstanding natural beauty. As a result to visit these places is to visit increasingly unspoiled and restored beaches that offer little other than sand, sea and wildlife. Remnants of the past still exist...ice cream vans and beach huts but these renewed beaches offer a real sense of being at one with nature. People huddle from the wind behind windbreaks but the sense of nature and openness and is palpable.

The weather hasnt changed but the experience is renewed and in these days where travel is becoming too costly for the planet maybe we will see the coasts of England rise again.