The Promenade, Blackpool, Lancashire by Wayne Hemingway, designer

I was born in Morecambe and lived there till I was seven. Later, I returned, every school holiday, from the dark satanic mills of Blackburn to the seaside kitsch that adorned my nan's bungalow, a stone's throw from the promenade, funfairs and piers.

Over the past few decades Morecambe has lost its piers and funfairs and realised that there can only be one King of Kitsch in Lancashire: Blackpool.

Growing up among sangria decanters and velvet Spanish bulls, flamenco dolls artfully positioned on home bars in the shape of a ship's bow, with walls adorned with prints of crying boys and dogs with oversized sad eyes, has impregnated me with a healthy (some would say unhealthy) appreciation of kitsch.

I get excited when I see the "giant mouth" to Luna Park in St Kilda, Melbourne. A startling sight it is … a kitsch icon in a sea of urban cool. But Jeff Koons, as hard and as skilfully as he may try, will never trump Blackpool prom in its full illuminated autumn evening glory. Dozens of trams, lit up as trains, planes and cruise ships, rattle underneath miles of garish light bulbs, dozens of arcades playing every kitsch anthem there has ever been, from Agadoo to the Nolans, while families in daft hats eat candy in the shape of giant penises. Las Vegas seems like a minimalist's dream by comparison.
• blackpoolpier.co.uk
Wayne Hemingway runs Hemingway Design and the Vintage at Goodwood festival (vintageatgoodwood.com, 13-15 August)

Treasure Island park, Eastbourne, Sussex by Travis Elborough, author

As a nation whose empire was forged by the dubious activities of maritime privateers, it is not so surprising the British continue to find the pirate an object of romantic if kitsch fascination, commemorated in pub names, restaurants, fairground rides and theme parks in seaside towns around the country.

I was hooked early. My grandparents ran a pirate-themed eatery in Polperro in Cornwall, which we visited every summer. Called the Jolly Roger, its walls were lined with real cutlasses and its leatherette-bound menus were decorated with compass points and written in an indecipherable copperplate script that made ordering an ice-cream float feel like a hunt for buried treasure. The cutlasses, as I learned much later, had been picked up as a job lot in some auction in the 1950s by the ever-canny Great-Uncle Bob. They were of questionable vintage but against a backdrop of spongy-white plaster and dark wood beams, their buccaneering credentials appeared unimpeachable. To an impressionable child, anyway.

That restaurant is long gone. But another piratical place that was aanother mainstay of my childhood is still going strong. The Treasure Island family adventure park is just off the Royal Parade on the seafront at Eastbourne. And while in the 18th century, the local beach and isolated coves of nearby Pevensey Bay were a particular favourite of smugglers, it is perhaps the slight incongruity of this location that makes it so endearing.

Eastbourne, a comparative latecomer as a resort, was developed by the Duke of Devonshire and to this day retains much of the elegance its autocratic, aristocratic landowner originally insisted upon. Thrillingly, this only enhances the sense that the Treasure Island complex, with its ship-shaped climbing frames and timbered crazy golf course, was some kind of marauding vessel that had simply grapple-hooked itself to the front one stormy night, never to set sail again. Or at least, that is what I liked to imagine, when I was small.

Back then, pirates were more like swivelly eyed Robert Newton or Captain Pugwash than Johnny Depp. And Treasure Island has naturally enough moved with the times, with ahoy there face-painting and a fan page on Facebook. But, essentially, it persists by glorying in the fantastic, if basic, idea that a batch of old barrels, an outdoor paddling pool, a sand pit and some strategically arranged planks and ropes can successfully transport kids to a world of larceny on the high seas.

• 01323 411077, treasure-island.info; children £5, adults £2.50, half price after 3pm

Travis Elborough is author of Wish You Were Here: England on Sea

Handpainted signs in Norfolk by Teena Vallerine, blogger on kitsch

All along the Norfolk coast – from Hunstanton through Wells and Cromer, all the way around to Great Yarmouth – there are seaside towns that bring out the child in me. Towns where I am inexplicably drawn to buy unnecessary plastic objects. Towns spattered with advertising graphics that fill me with the urge to eat things I would not normally feed to the dog. The excitement of garish neon lights, giant plastic ice-creams and – my favourites – the hand-painted signs that demand that I buy shocking-pink candyfloss, acid-green ice-cream or giant sugary dummies.

Hand-painted signs that say to hell with 21st-century computer-generated graphics – no room for tidy fonts here. Barmy scale, wonky lines, clashing colours, misspelt words (well, it makes them fit) all put together to create an irresistible command to buy, eat or do everything that the seaside has to offer.

"Candy floss £1.00 a bag" on Hunstanton Cliffs, "Seal Boat Trips" at Blakeney Point, "Award winning Chips" to throw to the gulls off the quay at Wells, "Crabbing Bait" on Cromer Pier, and "5 do-nuts for a Quid" on Great Yarmouth's prom. They're an invitation to become a part of all that is happy and kitsch about the great British seaside.
Teena Vallerine blogs on kitschenpink.blogspot.com

Pett Level, East Sussex by Stephen Bayley, design critic

All Manhattanites who can afford it, and plenty who cannot, go to the Hamptons to suffer the polished cruelty of top-end American leisure. The south coast of England is to London what Long Island is to New York – a fine littoral in easy access – but the capital does not have a Hamptons.

In fact, the south coast seems almost repellent to discretionary spending: for the disdaining, the continent, or even the West Country are more alluring.

This gives the Sussex coast a peculiar, almost renegade, value. Maybe it is a racial memory of the humiliations of 1066 but Hastings – despite the good buildings, fine environment and lots of fish – has been specially blighted.

But then there is Pett Level, five miles north-east of Hastings: a hinterland of a hinterland of a dump. Here, on what was once marsh, is a fine collector's piece of English eccentricity, a genuine curiosity. Pett Level is where the Royal Military Canal, a defence against Napoleon, exhausts into the sea. It is scarcely a village, more a concept, and the conceptual centre is called Cliff End. That "end" bit has a peculiar resonance. A caravan park competes with a small handful of masterpiece houses along the shifting, mountainous shingle strip with its crashing waves and howling blasts.

There is a sense of determination about these houses, the architectural equivalent of putting a brave face on bad holiday weather. People go to the Hamptons to be seen but surely people come to Pett Level to become invisible. Perhaps they go to the pub to eat the same local turbot and drink the same contraband Hollands gin that Byron enjoyed hereabouts.

Outside The Smuggler inn a man with one leg once told me – somewhat awed – about a telly celebrity who owned one of the houses on the shingle. I think it had a red and yellow plastic slide in the drive, the Pett Level equivalent, perhaps, of a Cadillac Escalade. It's what you might call bottom-end British leisure.
• The Smuggler, Pett Level Road

Mumbles Pier, Swansea, Amanda Baillieu, architecture journalist

Built in the 1880s to encourage more passengers onto the Swansea and Mumbles railway, Mumbles Pier boasted a one-legged diver, an ornamental swimmer, fireworks displays, choral competitions and concerts. When the railway closed in 1960, the pier tried to reinvent itself as a funfair (a move that led pier historians to dismiss it as "really a fairground built on water"). But even that failed to work, and these days its only amusement is a very real-looking electric chair next to a head-through-the-hole "executioner".

And if it's architecture you're after, don't bother. Mumbles Pier is not blessed with ornate pavilions like St-Annes-on-Sea, and it's also on the short side – just 255m compared with Llandudno's 700.

Neither is it falling down in spectacular style, as piers are meant to do. The lacy steelwork is rusting away, but slowly. And although the decking feels so loose you can become seasick simply watching the water rise and fall beneath you, locals still fish off the side below polite signs telling visitors to "take care".

The pier is best appreciated from the town – a brisk 10-minute walk away – when the mist is thick enough to disguise the rust, and the red-roofed lifeboat station linked to one end of the structure by a rickety walkway looks like a tiny Arts and Crafts house.

But it's for the views of Swansea Bay that keep people coming back. The majestic sweep of water – best seen from the pier's sea end – is often compared to the Bay of Naples. This might seem like wishful thinking: the town lacks chic seaside tavernas and boutiques, or even a decent pub.

This could change. The pier's owners say they can't afford the repairs, and have just unveiled a £36m redevelopment that includes a hotel and "luxury" holiday apartments, cafes and restaurants.

Supporters say the town where Dylan Thomas used to party and where Catherine Zeta-Jones grew up, is struggling and the proposed "leisure and entertainment centre" is Mumbles' last chance. But when the pier finally goes, some of the town's fragile charm will go with it.

• 01792 365220, mumbles-pier.co.uk)

Amanda Baillieu is editor of Building Design (bdonline.co.uk)

Beach huts, Whitstable, Kent, Michael Smith, novelist

The beauty of beach hut life is the way it reduces everything to its simplest terms. I hang out there until it gets dark or come very early, just as it's getting light. The first half hour after waking up follows a familiar ritual: set a coffee pot up on the stove, hook the doors open, fold out a beach chair, and survey the sea and sky.

The strange thing about this Whitstable seascape is that it looks equally fascinating in good or bad weather, and all the weather in between. It is often in between, never quite making up its mind, and I can lose whole days watching the many mood swings of sky and sea.

I say good morning to my favourite lesbian neighbours. Half of them are lesbians on my stretch; the seaside is a site for sexual liberty, just as it always was. It was also the site of the first flush of love between me and the missus – this little bit of coast is part of us and our story, it played the role of midwife in our early romance. She brought me to a similar hut a few doors down on date number three; there were storms all weekend, and you couldn't go outside without getting drenched – we didn't, all weekend, and it was heaven . . . when I told this story to my granny she chuckled with a cheeky glint in her eye and said, "Aah, memories! Eh, son?"

I bought the hut when I was flush, over-reaching myself as one always does in those circumstances. Now all the cash is spent, it's still the grand romantic gesture, in another kind of way: dangling a line off the wall at high tide and waiting for a crab, taking him home in my bucket, cooking him on the Campingaz stove, cracking him open and eating him – one of the sea's great bounteous luxuries for nowt. In this way beach hut life transforms poverty into something glorious. The hut was the glory of my flashy times, and now it's the glory of the lean ones.

I have no electricity: the emails remain unread, the mobile phone stays off. Candlelight is fine. Night time is the most magical. The wind howls, the walls creak like they might cave in, the candlelight flickers, I write this down, and I am happy. I thank my lucky stars for this seaside retreat – the lucky stars that line up in the vast, sprawling marine sky and stand guard above my tiny weatherbeaten hut.
Michael Smith is author of The Giro Playboy

Caravan parks, St Osyth, Essex, Jonathan Glancey, Guardian architecture correspondent

When I first came to St Osyth, or "Toosey" as it's known locally, it wasn't for the delights of the "Essex Sunshine Coast"; this is the driest recorded place in Britain. No, it was to see the magnificent 15th-century gatehouse and ruins of St Osyth's Priory, one of the great religious settlements of medieval Europe.

What caught my eye and drained my senses, though, wasn't the priory but the biggest settlement of caravans I'd ever seen. Between the priory and the North Sea sprawls a gor'blimey of caravan parks, all net curtains, half-naked Brits and an underlying feeling that foreign holidays are for idiots.

The caravan parks of St Osyth won't be to everyone's taste, and certainly not if your idea of a proper family holiday at home is a Cornish beach and Swallows and Amazons-style pottering about in boats. St Osyth is earthier than this, even though you'll find Rollers parked next to the fanciest caravans. Even the beach is something of a challenge, with its particular stretches for nudists, gays, couples-at-it and peeping Toms.

Somehow, though, this Carry On, if slightly punchy, seaside resort is as rock-solidly English as a jaw-jutting bloke in a pub who might just grunt "You looking at my caravan?"

Llandudno cable car, Wales, Claire Gogerty, editor, Coast magazine

Clamber aboard Llandudno's cable car, feel it lurch into space, and for one breath-holding moment, your confidence may falter. Will this brightly coloured, comical vehicle constructed in the 60s make the one-mile journey from the Happy Valley park to the summit of the Great Orme?

Its silent glide begins and as it gains altitude, gardens and fields roll by beneath its thin, tin floor. The wind whistles in through the open sides and passengers clutch the grab rail a little too tightly.

But then on it swings, over sleepy cows and determined ramblers, and views of the ragged Welsh coastline to Anglesey and the Conway estuary open up all around. There are panoramas of Llandudno's ornate cast-iron pier and the town's handsome Victorian promenade to enjoy and any doubts about personal safety recede with its sedate progress toward the summit.

This is the longest passenger cable car system in Britain, and although the ride was overhauled in 2006, the four-seater cars have kept their original Toytown character.

Some passengers alight at the summit for refreshments and mini golf, but the lacklustre food and tired cafe dilute the day's pleasure. Best to stay on and come straight back down.
• Happy Valley, Great Orme, Llandudno (01492 877205, greatorme.org.uk/cablecar). Adults £7, Under 14s £5, family £19. Open 10am-5pm, Easter-October depending on the weather