Chris picks his best...

Rooms with sea views | Food and drink spots | Beaches

I’m lying on the sun-kissed sands of Spurn Head, counting clouds, but, frankly, it doesn’t take long to count to seven. The air smells of honeysuckle and salt, and, off the tip of the spit, the freighters are queuing to take their cargoes up the Humber to Hull.

Few visit this birders’ paradise, and the slender peninsula is home to a hardy handful of lifeboat men and lighthouse keepers. The beach that starts here curves north for 40 miles, past Withernsea, where cockle-pickers prowl the empty sands, through Skip-sea, where tourists come to straddle the cracks in the collapsing prom and watch the North Sea devour the fragile coast, to Bridlington Bay, where erosion is repelled by the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head.

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Catch of the day

Chris selects his best food and drink tips from his camper van man tour of the British coast

Beach of the week

Chris selects his favourite beaches from his camper van man tour of the British coast

Rooms with sea views

Chris selects his favourite places to stay on his camper van man tour of the British Coast

• Beach of the week

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Stepping from the Mystery Machine – the name my kids have given the VW campervan – onto the prom, I find Bridlington strikes me as pretty much the perfect seaside town. It boasts two splendid beaches – clean, wide and of ideal sandcastle-building consistency – a busy working harbour and a charming prom, let down only by Burger King’s tacky sponsorship of the big wheel.

You won’t find many boutique hotels or sun-dried tomatoes here: what blue-collar Bridlington does best is boat trips. A 15-minute ride on an ersatz pirate galleon costs a quid; a high-speed jaunt in a bright-yellow powerboat costs £4 for adults and £3 for kids.

You can join a sea-fishing trip on the Liberty for £10 or, best of all, take the 90-minute cruise on the genteel Yorkshire Belle to the puffin colonies of Flamborough Head. A family ticket costs £12, and here’s a tip: go early or late, when the birds are active and fellow tourists aren’t. And don’t miss out on the seafood: a platter of fresh mussels, whelks, cockles, prawns and crab, eaten on the harbour wall in the vulture-like shadows of kleptomaniac gulls, costs just £2.50.

Not far up the road, past the screeching sea-bird shanty of Bempton, where hundreds of thousands of wheeling, reeking kittiwakes, gannets, razorbills and puffins fight for air and living space, is Filey. “You must see Filey,” insists reader Heather Forrester, soI do, finding a demure natural beauty that requires no artifice to enhance its loveliness. On the beach, brothers Adam and Aaron have built the Krak des Chevaliers of sandcastles, a sandy redoubt that seems to fancy its chances against the flowing tide. I’d like to stay to see what happens, but I’m on a pilgrimage.

Muslims have Mecca, Jews have the Wailing Wall and the English have Scarborough, where, in 1626, Mrs Eliza-beth Farrow invented the seaside holiday. Her discovery of an effervescent spring of natural Alka-Seltzer, reputed to be a “most Sovereign remedy against Hypondriack, Melancholly and Windiness”, led to the development of the world’s first beach resort, and that very spring is still there. I expect a shrine, or at least a brown tourist-board sign, but find neither.

The fount from which the travel industry sprang is a slimy, neglected dribble from a weathered lion’s mouth in the sea wall. I ignore the sign warning against drinking the metallic-tasting elixir and subsequently suffer a rather startling Windiness combined with a rueful Melancholly. Scarborough is a giant among resorts (readers concerned about coastal samurai-sword availability may rest assured there are at least two outlets here) and here, to corroborate the rumoured resurrection of the British seaside, “no vacancies” notices are up all over town.

What visitors come for, beside the two huge Blue Flag beaches (North Bay is “the quiet bit” and South Bay “the candyfloss bit”, say readers Mike and Janice Murphy), the beguiling harbour and the geological grandeur of Marine Parade (a chunk of the Cape cloned in Yorkshire sandstone) is fish and chips – probably Britain’s finest.

Mother Hubbard’s, the Golden Grid and dozens of other devoted fryers claim the battered crown of best in town, but for my £2.80, it’s the Tunny Club that wins. When Scarborough was a big game-fishing destination, the Tunny Club was the “19th hole”, according to the current owner, John Senior, and the likes of John Wayne, David Niven and Baron Rothschild would meet there to tell tall tales of terrifying tussles with thrashing tuna. Now a fish-and-chip shop, it’s still the stuff of legend.

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