Platform 3, Fenchurch Street station in the City of London, a sunlit February morning. Mood: optimistic. Pilgrimage is an odd word to attach to a day at the seaside, but I can think of none better. This will be a journey made in faith – the pursuit of an ideal which, in a rationalist age, will invite the scorn of unbelievers. I travel as a pilgrim should, alone.
Of the few who climb aboard the 10.30 to Shoeburyness, I am the only one who will ride as far as Southend Central (or anywhere else much beyond Basildon). Last time I came this way I was in short trousers and in the care of my grandfather. The Queen was still the radiant Princess Elizabeth, school stopped once a year for Empire Day, and men of my grandfather’s age still observed the pre-war tradition of dressing for the beach in their best blue three-piece, starched collar and tie, watch chain and trilby.
Since then, the seaside has been written off more times than the English novel, and just as often has been reinvented. It is happening again now, though each tweak scrapes off another layer of its historic identity. Southend High Street is an off-the-roll, homogenised slice of Anytown. Relics of the old, classically inspired grandeur survive on the upper floors, but street level is a gallery of corporate liveries, indifferent to their context and lacking even the right kind of bad taste. It is not until you reach the Royal Hotel that you get the first hint of seaside style, the two-fingered salute of cheek against chic. A cut-price menu, and posters in the window offering live entertainment from Shitdisco.
Wherever land meets sea, the pressures are the same. The collapse of the fishing industry was balanced in part by tourism, which grew rapidly after the Holidays with Pay Act in 1938. Hitler put relaxation on hold, but the 1950s, with their stiff mix of austerity and optimism, gathered themselves for a last hurrah. “Summer holidays” still meant a windy week on a pebbly beach. Railway compartments still enticed travellers with muted prints of cliffs and coves. Bank holidays still saw mass migrations of straight-backed, small black cars – Fords, Morrises, Austins – and mackintoshed men piloting their families on motorcycle combinations. Still in their Sunday suits, they rode the dodgems, flew box kites and drove home again sticky with candyfloss and pink peppermint.
The coasts were crusted with resorts, each of which held the promise of escape, if not always romance. The south alone had Ramsgate, Hastings, Eastbourne, Brighton, Worthing, Bognor, Bournemouth, Torquay and Paignton. Round the toe of Cornwall came Newquay; then Minehead, Weston-super-Mare, and on again into Wales – Tenby, Aberystwyth, Barmouth, Bangor, Llandudno, Rhyl.
The northwest had Southport, Blackpool and Morecambe. The long east coast, brutally exposed and crumbling, was glued together by its piers and promenades, all the way from Whitley Bay to Broadstairs. All claimed to be of unique character – sunniest, cheapest, healthiest, poshest – and to be either the pinnacle of good taste (Torquay, say) or fun-on-a-budget (Clacton).
As late as June 1975, domestic holidays were still worth a two-page banner in the News of the World: Don’t Let Them Diddle You by the Seaside. Round the coast the paper’s investigators went, jotting down the prices of roundabout rides, Pepsi-Cola, fish and chips, gin and tonic, jellied eels, buckets and spades, cups of tea. It’s not so much the prices that echo the past (seven pieces of jellied eel at Southend’s Kursaal for 35p; gin and tonic at the Druid’s Head, Brighton, for a penny less); it’s the comparators themselves. Jellied eels! Halves of bitter! This was the year in which Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody topped the charts, yet the seaside was stuck in the age of Gracie Fields, and Britain’s best-selling newspaper raged about watery eel and a 10p hike in the price of Kiss-Me-Slowly hats. Even nostalgia was beginning to show its age. The early 1970s had been a late and cruelly deceptive boom time for the English resorts. Now, from the middle of the decade, they went into free fall.
Cheap and cheerful is a dangerous policy. Not only is chippie culture a bad call against “abroad”, but it’s a shortcut to tawdriness. In targeting holidaymakers on smaller and smaller budgets, the resorts could no longer afford their own upkeep. Like every other kind of Victorian infrastructure, the ageing fabric of the seaside was finding it difficult to resist the assaults of daily life. The most potent emblem of England-on-Sea was the pier, and no pier anywhere was more totemic, or more exposed to disaster, than the object of my pilgrimage.
Even now, you can see why people loved it. The line out of London tells its own story. There is a Hawksmoor spire or two as the train picks up speed east of Tower Bridge, and the metallic towers of Canary Wharf; but then comes West Ham and the heroic ugliness of the East End, its shallow sea of indigenous brick spiked with failed experiments in vertical living. Here and there you see a survivor, or perhaps a revivalist: net-curtained windows screening the kind of modest, wage-earning life that once found relief in a train ride along the estuary. London sprawls without a break deep into Essex, an octopus groping for the sea but finding only transport depots.
Not until Benfleet do you feel confident of escape; and not until Leigh-on-Sea do your eyes meet the gleam of water.
“Regeneration” is a big word in seaside circles, and on Southend’s Pier Hill we see what it means. The “gateway” between High Street and sea has gone all glass and steel, as if some design-conscious department store has spilt its guts out onto the grass. There are walkways, viewing platforms and a “scenic lift” down to the esplanade, where the world’s longest pleasure pier begins its 1.34-mile journey out to sea. Tucked into the slope, a fish-and-chip restaurant offers “colossal cod”. It looks inviting, but I wonder if this is what the borough council meant when it predicted that this new “open, fluid and attractive area” would “encourage a cultural shift towards a ‘cafe society’ ”.
The pier itself just makes me sad. Sad in a nostalgic way to have lost the child’s capacity for wonder. Sad, too, having paid my 50p, to be the only person on the mile-long walkway. But sad most of all for the pier itself. Not many landmark buildings have suffered so much injury. Its
first assailant was a barge in 1891, followed by a ketch (1898), a Thames conservancy vessel (1908), a “concrete vessel” (1921) and another barge (1933). In 1939 the pier itself became a kind of honorary vessel when it was requisitioned by the navy as HMS Leigh.
The historic peak for visitors – 7m in 1949 – came shortly afterwards, when post-war belts were tightest. Thereafter the fortunes of the seaside would decline as fast as the nation’s spending power grew. Oddly, visitors could often – and still do – look more like a liability than an asset. To local authorities who have to maintain the “public realm” of clifftop shelters, sea walls, floral displays, lavatories and car parks, more visitors mean only more expense. The pier itself seemed jinxed. In 1959 the wooden pavilion at the landward end, a former dance hall turned roller-skating rink, was destroyed by fire. Nobody doubted that the phoenix would rise again, but in what form? The answer was the most perfect emblem of the age. People were looking forward now, not back, and forward meant surfing the wave of all things American. The future chewed gum and wore sneakers. The pier would have a bowling alley.
As the tenpins tumbled, so did profit tip into loss. In 1974, faced with rebuilding the walkway, the corporation seemed ready to abandon the thing altogether. John Betjeman wrote to The Times, London dockers signed a petition, and the Shah of Persia was (probably falsely) rumoured to have lent £200m to a company that wanted to dress the pier with hotels, conference centres, exhibition halls, theatres, a casino and a North Sea ferry terminal. Facing an alliance of East End sentimentalists and connoisseurs of Victoriana, the corporation rediscovered its nerve and decided to spend another £3m on renovation. Its reward, yet again, was the unkind prick of fate.
On June 29, 1976, the amusement arcade, restaurant, bars and theatre dematerialised in a fireball. The disaster itself had novelty value – “disaster trips” to view the wreckage were a popular attraction – but, though Southend corporation voted to rebuild, councillors and ratepayers were muttering about the cost. It was all very well for Betjeman to bang on about the pier’s “national importance”, but its loss-making habit was a local liability that looked incapable of getting anything but worse. Piece by piece, the British seaside was coming apart. Other piers were in trouble too. The National Piers Society now lists 36 losses in all, with the very loveliest of them – Brighton’s incomparable West Pier – suffering prolonged death agonies that are almost too harrowing to watch. No child, let alone teenager, in the late 1970s would think wistfully of Clacton. In the age of sangria and sex-in-the-sun, it would take more than tenpin bowling to fill the vacuum left by the whelk stalls, halls of mirrors, donkey rides and Lobby Lud. As Donald McGill had always known, the British seaside stood for a kind of apple-cheeked innocence that was underlined, not challenged, by saucy innuendo. Young people did not want the suggestion of sex any more than they wanted the suggestion of sunshine. They wanted the real thing. If it was to survive, the seaside would have to find other ways to fill its beds.
And so it did. Cheap and cheerful went on down through the floors to the deep subbasement of cheap and cheerless. Hotels, bed and breakfasts and seaside landlords all too literally went for bums in beds. “Costa del Dole” became the headline writers’ shorthand for what the seaside was now becoming. As MPs, councillors and shopkeepers fulminated, the Department of Social Security (as it then was) funded a seaward migration of job seekers, single-parent families and others who had fallen through holes in the working economy. A latter-day Dickens would have sketched human tragedy not through the Bridewell but through a Hastings bed and breakfast.
Unemployment at the seaside was suddenly worse even than in the wrecked industrial cities from which the newcomers had escaped. Some of the claimants obliged reporters by confirming how happy they were, swigging lager on the beach at public expense. Hoteliers complained that their guests had to run a gauntlet of beggars, drunks, drug addicts and thieves, while the charity Crisis protested that people in run-down hostels were being pressed into a new underclass of hidden homeless from which there was no way out. Brighton alone had 80 rough sleepers, and a population that shifted with the tide.
The collapse of the seaside felt like a ram raid on the national shop window. Who could have believed that Ilfracombe, Clacton, Weymouth, Dover, Hastings, Great Yarmouth, the Isle of Wight – even palmy Torbay on the fabled “English Riviera” – would head the queue for economic aid? In 1994 the News of the World once again sent out its price-checkers. But this time there was no interest in afternoon cuppas or jellied eels. The rates being compared were those of Young Lady Chatterley, Lotta from Roedean and the Happy Hooker. “One old man pays me to stand naked in a dustbin while he throws cream cakes at me,” confided the Slave Mistress of Whitley Bay. Echoes of Regency and Edwardian England may have been there, but they were not exactly what the English Tourist Board had in mind when it talked of a return to traditional values.
To the surprise of some and the delight of many, Southend Pier was still open. It had survived threats to sell or close it; had healed its wounds after a sludge boat sliced through it in August 1986; and in June 1995 had emerged from the smoke of yet another fire. Now it was bowling’s turn for the ashes. To the south and west, smarter resorts were representing themselves less as holiday playgrounds than as commercial centres by the sea.
It was at Bournemouth, in 1999, that Labour delegates heard the chairman of the English Tourism Council tell them what they already knew: that bucket-and-spade resorts had become ghettos for the dispossessed.
By the turn of the millennium, even Radio 1 had pulled the plug on its long-running seaside roadshow, and the arts journal Cultural Trends reported that, with the noble exception of Cromer’s indefatigable end-of-the-pier show, traditional seaside entertainment had died on its feet and popular entertainers were following their audiences to Spain. Even cinema cannot be guaranteed to deliver. The misbegotten Imax, opened on Bournemouth seafront in 2002 and closed in 2005, has saddled the town not with an economic asset but with an architectural disfigurement that has earned its place as one of the nation’s most hated buildings.
The luckier towns were now entering a post-tourism phase in which middle-class trippers came to enjoy landscape and heritage rather than old-fashioned kiss-me-quickery.
The grandes dames – Brighton, Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Scarborough – had strong enough identities to cling on and adapt, while the smaller bijou resorts – places like Southwold and Aldeburgh – continued to cream the arty, upper end of the carriage trade. Worthing announced its intention to “reposition [itself] as an attractive town by the sea, on the edge of the Sussex Downs. It is no longer a seaside resort”. Other places with less seductive hinterlands found it harder to brush the sand out of their hair, and looked for help. What they got was the Resort Regeneration Task Force, whose 2001 report, Sea Changes, disgorged the same old truths that everyone had known for 30 years. Ancient infrastructure, lack of new investment, failure to “evolve into a product that meets modern expectations of quality in entertainment experience, accommodation and service delivery”.
The language had changed but not the message, so what might have been urgency came across as fatalism. “One thing is certain… procrastination and continued inactivity will… mean the demise of almost all resorts as they currently stand.” It was like telling a rough sleeper to pull his socks up. Not only had tourism lost the roof over its head, so had all the other industries – fishing, manufacturing, agriculture – on which coastal economies had depended. A survey by Sheffield Hallam University in 2002 found that 35 of the 43 largest resorts in England and Wales had worse unemployment than their inland neighbours.
You get the same message from the “indices of multiple deprivation” – the measurements of income, employment, health, education, housing, housing, environment and crime that the government uses to assess the quality of people’s lives. Many of the most deprived areas are exactly where you’d expect, in the writhing bowels of the very inner cities from which factory workers once dreamt of escaping to the beach. But many others are in the resorts themselves, where the elegant villas of the Edwardian seaside have crossed the Styx into a moribund netherworld of “older housing stock” whose occupants have neither the will nor the means to banish the rats, never mind restore the architecture.
Even Blackpool is on the rack. It remains Britain’s most popular seaside resort, with tens of millions of pounds being pumped into regeneration schemes by the Northwest Development Agency. The airport is expanding to receive the anticipated hordes of businessmen and tourists. The regional development agency is lobbying hard for Blackpool to receive Tessa Jowell’s gift to probity, prudence and economic uplift: the regional casino. True to the gambler’s instinct, Blackpool college is already running a Regional Gaming Academy to teach “table game skills” and “coin-slot technology”. And yet, on the most recent index of deprivation published by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), Blackpool is the 24th most deprived of England’s 354 local-authority districts. Other resorts are as bad or worse. Like the inner cities before them, they are plugged into a multiplicity of financial drip feeds. The ODPM’s dispensary alone includes Neighbourhood Renewal Funding, the Safer Stronger Community Fund, New Deal for Communities partnerships, Neighbourhood Management Pathfinders and the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative. The regional development agencies, too, are squirting money into their neediest neighbourhoods. But none of these funds is exclusively for the seaside. All are life-support systems supplying basic needs rather than rolling out the carpet for tourists. As the British Resorts Association’s chief executive, Peter Hampson, says, “Nobody wants to regenerate coastal towns just as tourist destinations. They have to be made nice places to live and work before anyone would want to visit them.” This explains the almost manic preoccupation with house prices. A better class of resident brings a better class of business brings a better class of visitor. There was excitement verging upon hysteria last summer when the Halifax reported average 10-year price increases in the 20 most popular seaside towns of between 224.7 and 311.5%.
It is not easy to see where all this is leading; how far the aid will stretch; what will be the long-term effect on markets. As Paul Hudson, executive director of the South East England Development Agency (Seeda), says, “There is no common template. These towns all have different functions and they need to find the essential spark that makes them desirable.” On Hudson’s patch the principal beneficiary is Hastings, which, with its joined-at-the-hip sibling, Bexhill, has had £38m of government money pumped into it as seedcorn from which the town hopes to harvest £400m in public and private investment over 10 years. Hastings needs all the help it can get.
Riddled with run-down, bottom-of-the-heap rented accommodation, with little or no employment in the town centre and with a cross-me-quick seafront carrying the A259 between Ashford and Brighton, it is officially the most deprived town in the southeast. It needs jobs, homes, better education, a stable population, an architectural face-lift, traffic management and a deep-cleaned environment. No town better exemplifies the dislocation between old and new. Here in 1066 was laid the foundation of modern England. Here in 2006 – and not just in terms of the castle – lies its ruin.
Hudson, who leaves Seeda in June to become John Prescott’s chief planner at the ODPM, echoes the conventional wisdom that resorts need to “reinvent themselves”. For much of the south coast, this means reversing the daily flow from inward to out. “Commuting will be the salvation of southeast resorts such as Margate and Hastings,” says Peter Hampson. The cross-Channel rail link will bring Folkestone within an hour of London, and the £8.6m redevelopment of Hastings railway station is not just serendipity. But it is all very well for Hudson to reflect that a revitalised Hastings will keep “the vestiges of a resort function”, or that Margate, brutalised as it is by time and neglect, “is a breathtaking place potentially”. Their good fortune is to lie within the gravitational field of London and all the fast-buck expansion that Prescott is hellbent on cramming into this most overcrowded corner of the country. It might not be pretty, but it will put bread on the table.
More distant places will have a harder time of it. Ilfracombe, on the north Devon coast, is the kind of England that expats dream about. With Exmoor at its back, clustered around an ancient harbour, it clings to a notch in one of Britain’s most beautiful coastlines. And yet it suffers just like its greyer and uglier cousins in the east. Frank Pearson, a retired businessman who chairs the Ilfracombe Community Alliance, informs me it contains the two most deprived wards in the whole of Devon, “worse even than Plymouth”. Same problem, same solution: “The bed-and-breakfast brigade on social security. The town went through the floor. It became really a vigilante town. People would take pickaxes to other people in the community.” As regeneration initiatives went, it was on the wild side of unorthodox, but at least it was a start. The “other people” driven out, he says, were drug barons.
Here, as everywhere, the traditional beach holiday is fading in the family album. “It’s not bucket and spade now,” he says. “It’s Zimmer frame.” Even the blue-rinse coach tour is not delivering. “People who take these holidays are either dying out or going to Spain.” So where lies hope? There is nothing on the scale of Hastings, but enough money is filtering in from the ODPM and the regional development agency to at least stop “moribund” from turning into “dead”. The badly run-down 1930s town hall is being refurbished, and a derelict red-brick Victorian pub, the White Hart on the harbourside, has metamorphosed into 11 The Quay, an up-market restaurant owned by the adoptive Devonian Damien Hirst. The fishing fleet is doing seriously good business selling lobsters to the French. In June this year – for the first time in at least 30 years, Pearson thinks – the harbour will receive a cruise liner. Oh, and Tesco
is opening an edge-of-town superstore.
This raises the thorniest question of all. Do “regeneration” and “character” ride the same horse? Bitter experience from towns all over the country tells us what happens when a big-league supermarket hits the margins. The high street flaps and dies like a mackerel on a rock. “I fear we may lose 30% of our shops,” says Pearson. The larger resorts have all passed this stage and are living with the consequences. English Heritage worries that the character of the seaside – the very “essential spark” that Paul Hudson wants to kindle – is being extinguished by the wrong kind of redevelopment. Seafront villas are coming down, making way for pseudo-vernacular blocks that replace the real thing with pastiche and turn the town into a simpering fancy-dress parody of itself. The English seaside was once a test-bed for bold new ideas in architecture: Brighton Pavilion, the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill, Blackpool Tower, Taylor and Seddon’s first bungalows at Westgate-on-Sea in the 1880s, Stuart Ogilvie’s garden-suburb-on-sea at Thorpeness, Clough Williams-Ellis’s Portmeirion.
Not much of this happens now. Yes, Hove can look forward to Frank Gehry’s extravagant vision, like four gigantic squashed Daleks, in the redevelopment of its King Alfred Leisure Centre. If Blackpool gets its longed-for casino, then that, too, should be a landmark building that people will want to see. But spiralling costs mean that Margate is having to abandon the much-heralded sharkfish design for its planned new Turner art gallery. And in the general run of things, new building at the seaside is no more inspiring than anywhere else.
Among the horrors lie a few modest triumphs. Yarmouth, once Britain’s most important fishing port, was described by Charles Dickens as “upon the whole, the finest place in the universe”; its quay lauded by Daniel Defoe as “the finest quay in England and not inferior to Marseilles”. Its decline through the consecutive collapses of fishing and tourism has been awful to see; and yet, having been floored by serial misfortune, it offers a golden nugget of optimism and an example to fellow sufferers. A developer has been encouraged to convert William Pilkington’s fine Royal Naval Hospital into flats. The old herring-curing works will become a museum. With aid from English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund and government funding schemes, fishermen’s cottages, shops and older commercial buildings are being restored. In Lytham St Annes similarly, more than 40 shops have been restored on and around the seafront, with 5,000 metres of office space, six business start-ups, 50 new jobs and 41 home improvements. It’s hard to make such things sound glamorous. Harder still to overstate their importance.
A mile out, the wind ruts the sea and pierces my coat. The narrow-gauge railway stops prematurely outside the pierhead station, blocked by a contractor’s fence. On the other side lies a blackened lamppost. Beyond that are buckled rails, unidentifiable heaps of char and the smudged outline of what had been the station, now framed in charcoal. Beyond that, the coke-coloured void of the pierhead itself. On October 9, 2005, fate returned to its favourite roost. Along with the station, fire engulfed McGinty’s pub, a restaurant, shops and lavatories. Bits of burnt decking were offered on eBay. Southend borough council insists the pierhead will be rebuilt, so the wheel of fortune will take at least one more spin. Piers are all about defiance, surviving the onslaughts of storm tides, rogue sea captains, arsonists and human habit.
The signs are not all bad: Southwold has a new pier, Southport’s has been successfully restored and Hastings’s reopened. But I fear this pilgrimage will be my last.
Turning landward, I step aboard the little train on which I shall be the only passenger. Behind me lies seaside past, burnt at sea like a Viking chieftain. Ahead lies seaside future: the graded flank of Pier Hill, crowned with fortress Debenham’s, gateway to anonymity.
Later, when I ask the Department for Culture, Media and Sport about its vision of the future, it offers a list of six selected “Beacon Councils” – Birmingham, the Broads, Greenwich, New Forest, South Hams and Tynedale – that it says demonstrate “best practice” in sustainable tourism and self-promotion. Total number of traditional seaside resorts represented between them? Zero.
