The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday 25 July 2010
The article below said "the exquisite Saltdean Lido… has closed and will soon be redeveloped into luxury flats". The Lido has not closed and the proposal to replace it with flats has not yet been submitted. The Friends of Saltdean Lido are campaigning to save this listed building.
We do genuinely like to be beside our seaside. After years of cheap flights, when foreign travel became little more taxing (and perhaps not much more exciting) than sending an email halfway round the world, a report from the Office for National Statistics last week confirmed a marked decline in Britons holidaying abroad.
Overseas trips fell by 15% in 2009. Visits to Spain alone declined by 19% as thousands chose to forgo sun and sangría in Benidorm or Lanzarote for the delights of a staycation in Littlehampton or Broadstairs. As Marcus Simmons, managing director of the iknow-uk tourism website said: "Many people have great memories of holidaying by the sea as children, and reports from our customers are showing that more people than ever are heading to relive the retro coastal holidays of their past."
Most of us first encounter the seaside as kids, so perhaps every trip to a British beach as an adult involves some attempt to recapture that lost innocence. Or at least an urge to feel as carefree as a child. And the desire to inflict these charms on our own children is both a baton-handing exercise and a chance to sample those moments again, vicariously.
Arguably few other elements of our landscape are experienced quite as universally or viscerally. Almost everyone has visited the coast at one time or another. Like the weather, there is a lot of it – 19,491 miles – and none of it, as Nicholas Crane on BBC's Coast used to point out, is farther than 72 miles away. But it all boils down to similarly inescapable combinations of predictably unpredictable dampness. Meanwhile, images of deck-chairs, promenades, ice creams and slot machines, and the taste of sand in a sandwich and slosh of rain on an esplanade, are such familiar parts of our folk memory they almost feel implanted in our brains.
Like football and the railways, the seaside holiday is a distinctly English and largely Victorian invention. One that we then exported to the rest of the world. Despite being a seafaring country, the British were surprisingly slow to take to the shore. For centuries the beach existed as a here-be-aquatic-monsters region best avoided if possible. It was a region from which chancing-it, boat-borne rapers and pillagers and land-grabbing alien invaders frequently emerged.
The liveliest emotion it stirred in most right-thinking mortals was fear. It was only after a quack doctor, Dr Robert Wittie of Scarborough, began to tout sea water as a cure for gout in the late 17th century that the affluent unwell started to wash up on the coasts.
Previously undistinguished fishing villages like Brighton and Ramsgate were reborn as fashionable marine spas. Patronised by the Prince Regent and his racy set, such places duly became as much about getting your end away as getting well. Virtually simultaneously, the Romantics were also inventing the sea view by making the ocean aesthetically "sublime". So sublime that Charlotte Brontë was moved to tears when she first clapped eyes on it at Bridlington in 1839. But much of what we think of as the quintessential features of the seaside – from eating oysters and fish and chips, to Punch and Judy shows and paddling in the shallows – really only arrived with the tripping masses and in the wake of the Bank Holiday Act 1871.
If traditional resorts, much like ballroom dancing and TV talent shows, can finally be cast as comfortingly retro today, that status nevertheless comes after decades of being dismissed as anachronistic museum pieces that only the terminally nostalgic, mentally deficient or wilfully perverse could entertain over other options.
With their rickety piers, crumbling music hall theatres, rusting bandstands and rotting beach huts, deliquescing seaside towns have been deployed most readily, and until fairly recently, as potent symbols of national decline by everyone from John Osborne and Harold Pinter to Martin Parr and Morrissey. Writing in 1998, Bill Cormack, in his History of Holidays: 1812-1990, pronounced "the high summer of the English resort… over" and argued that some destinations had "deteriorated so much" that they had become "vulgar, almost squalid".
I grew up on the Sussex coast in the 1970s and 80s, a period when seasonal crowds ebbed away, hotels were left to rot before "spontaneously" burning down, and B&Bs valiantly tried to fill vacancies by providing sanctuaries for the uncared-for in the community. The prevailing atmosphere, which, like salt, hung heavy in the air was certainly one of hopelessness, if not outright despair.
But we only have to turn back the clock to 1951 to find a replica seafront joining such thrusting totems of national ingenuity as the Skylon tower on the South Bank as part of the Festival of Britain. Rather like the NHS, the beach here was presented to the world as a great British egalitarian institution, one that was open to everyone and near enough free at the point of entry.
With virtually full employment, and restrictions on foreign currency making trips outside the UK trickier, our seaside resorts enjoyed their last golden era of prosperity in the 1950s. For most then, a holiday meant a trip to the seaside, plain and simple. The two terms were practically indistinguishable for millions. That association would unravel in the following decades as increased consumer choices and rising car ownership, further exacerbated by foreign package deals, brought a greater promiscuity to holidaying destinations.
If few would wish to return to the limitations of that era, it is our awareness of their subsequent fate that allows us to cherish the seaside resort of yesteryear as a kind of prelapsarian realm of carefree fun. A realm that, admittedly with a smidgen of knowing irony, a keen eye on London property prices, thrift and a poor exchange rate, and some concern over carbon footprints, is being re-imagined now.
From this vantage point, our rapprochement with the seaside has in a sense been bubbling away since at least the turn of the millennium. It was in 2000, after all, that Tracey Emin sold her Whitstable beach hut to Charles Saatchi for £75,000 and the first All Tomorrow's Parties music festival rocked up at a decidedly rundown holiday camp at Camber Sands.
Following patterns of urban renewal, over the past 10 years arts festivals and new contemporary galleries have arrived at Folkestone, Eastbourne and Hastings, and are set for Margate. Long neglected art deco wrecks like the Midland hotel in Morecambe and the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill have been restored.
Deal and Littlehampton (the latter famed in my youth only for possessing the highest concentration of venereal disease for a town of its size, or so it was always, if erroneously, claimed) boast "architecturally interesting" cafes. Such developments mark, in a sense, a return to the refined amusements enjoyed by the upper and middle classes when seaside resorts were in their infancy. That the exquisite Saltdean Lido, however, is fighting closure and redevelopment into "luxury flats" alerts us to the dangers of homogenising gentrification.
I, for one, fear the loss of the more wayward teashops and souvenir emporiums in this Shoreditch-ing of the south coast.
Visiting my parents in Worthing only the other weekend, however, I have to confess I found myself more heartened than alarmed to discover that a seafront shelter that had served mainly as a urinal for incontinent dogs had been reclaimed as a cycle shop. And that a kiosk that had struggled to produce an edible cheese roll 20 years ago could now muster a decent cup of coffee, while sticky rock, bags of shells and big red plastic lobsters remained up for grabs. But that odd mix of the sublime and ridiculous, the gaudy and the elegant Georgian, the mundane and the magical, the melancholy and the jovial, is perhaps ultimately what is most endearing (and on occasions infuriating) about all seaside towns.
With Britons, according to the Office for National Statistics, expected to take five million more holidays at home this year, and Sheffield Hallam University recently calculating that last year the value to the economy of jobs in seaside tourism was £3.6bn, we are evidently willing to be seduced by their sometimes dubious charms all over again.
Travis Elborough's book, Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, was published last week by Sceptre, £14.99
