Spirit of British seaside remains, but will tides of holiday fashion change?

Even in the depths of Winter, seaside resorts never fail to lift my spirits. For me they are places where, when you face out to sea, your cares are behind you: the promenades and seawalls are the safe divider between the civilized world and the wild. Walking their lengths you have the best of both.

While researching my book Seaside Resorts I visited almost 100 of them, mostly out of season and more often than not in the rain. My visits were as a weekending tourist or a day-tripper, not as a social analyst or academic. I went with the intention of enjoying myself and my first port of call was always the seafront. It was a tough test, but in all the 50 places I finally chose, I genuinely felt uplifted.

That, after all, is the point of a seaside resort. Nearly all of them were purpose-built around a beach and existed to restore the spirit and to engender a sense of gaiety and freedom . Their developers plumped for the very best sites around our 11,000 miles of coastline.

The flamboyance of the architecture along the promenade, the excitement levels of the funfairs, the loveliness of the public gardens, the engineering brilliance of the piers and lifts, the encompassing coziness of the old harbours, and the beauty of the bays and beaches may have been persuasive factors but, combined with the ever-consoling sea, it was the atmosphere which swayed me the most. The spirit of enjoyment left by generations of past holidaymakers must have had something to do with it and in that department Bridlington and Scarborough topped the bill.

Three hundred years ago we were in awe of the sea and did not consider it in any way beautiful; it was the necessary haunt of our sailors, not to mention smugglers and fishermen. Only relatively recently has there been a radical shift of consciousness, from a fear of the sea to a positive desire to be beside it. One of the catalysts for this change of heart was Robert Wittie, the first “doctor” to prescribe bathing in seawater as a curative in the late 1660s.

On his advice a growing group of sickly socialites, rich enough to afford his prices, gathered to face the sea at Scarborough. The first bathing machine was built about 50 years later, and the village expanded to accommodate the influx of visitors. The fad spread like wildfire through the 18th-century, and a host of doctors continued to propagate the amazing healing properties of saltwater. Astute entrepreneurs, often in cahoots with the doctors, were quick to cash in.

By the beginning of the 19th- century the idea of spending time beside the sea had been sold to those with money and time on their hands, and the great seaside property boom took hold. Rather than staying in lodgings or inns as they had done in the past, the new holidaymakers could now buy or rent a villa, or a grand stucco terrace house, or stay in a newfangled “hotel”.

Aristocratic landowners, whose vast acres beside the sea had been languishing as uncommercial farmland, suddenly found themselves sitting on goldmines. Visionary new towns sprang up under their auspices with wide tree-lined boulevards and avenues bearing their names – Devonshire Place in Eastbourne, Lumley Avenue in Skegness, De La Warr Parade in Bexhill or Mostyn Avenue in Llandudno.

But it was the coming of the railways which had the greatest impact of all on our resorts and opened much of the hitherto inaccessible coastline to the general public, as well as to speculative property developers.

By 1850 six thousand miles of track had been laid and the railway companies exploited their coastlines by offering cheap excursions. In June 1841 Skegness only had 44 visitors. The railway arrived in 1873, and on the August Bank Holiday of 1882 it brought an estimated 22,000 day-trippers, 20,000 of whom paid to go onto the newly-built pier. Our seaside resorts became a perfect display cabinet for ever more dazzling Victorian design and engineering genius in the form of palatial winter gardens, pavilions, fanciful balconies and bandstands, ballrooms, theatres, two-tiered promenades, elaborate ornamental pleasure gardens with miniature canals and, perhaps most innovative of all, the seaside pier, developed in the first place as a landing stage for the passenger steamers.

From the outset our resorts were unique. We led the world. One of the first Grand Hotels opened in Scarborough in 1867 and for over a decade was the premier hotel of Europe. Nice and Monte Carlo merely copied us. When Bank Holidays were created in 1871 (the brainchild of cricket-loving Liberal MP John Lubbock), day-trippers arrived in droves and resorts were now no longer the exclusive haunt of the rich. They belonged to the ordinary man whose appetite for oompah bands, music hall, donkey rides, shell souvenirs, rock, dirty postcards, floral clocks and spectacular carpet bedding added still further to the general merriment of the seaside.

After the First World War various unions had negotiated paid, week-long holidays for their workers, the production of the first Austin Seven saw the birth of mass motoring, the notion of sunbathing had been born on the Riviera and the nation was beginning to fall for American culture. Billy Butlin introduced dodgem cars to Skegness and then, in 1936, built the first of his vast holiday camps there. He had noticed how English families kept themselves to themselves and often looked increasingly gloomy as their holiday wore on. His Red Coats changed all that. They took the children off their parents’ hands and marshalled everyone into having a good time.

It was a brilliant and radical concept at just the right moment. In 1937 an estimated 15 million were taking annual holidays and when a fortnight’s paid holiday became statutory in the 1950s British resorts were as popular as they had ever been.

Then everything changed. Cheap air travel and package holidays, coupled with the desire to deepen our tans and have access to cheap wine, meant that most of us forsook the British seaside resort, which had been part of our holiday lives for centuries. Today we seem to have forgotten just how wonderful these places are.

Ours is the most geologically complicated country in the world and its variety of coastline is infinite, from the spectacular setting of Whitby to the exquisite lonely sweep of Bridlington’s South Sands.

My book is an effort to remind us of the glory we have right under our noses and to suggest that the British seaside could be having a renaissance. The addition of a spectacular new art gallery or restaurant, or the presence of a famous resident can, like Dr Wittie did in Scarborough or the Prince Regent in Brighton, bring the fashionable sheep flocking.

So why don’t we stay here for our holidays , particularly now that we are told that sunbathing is bad for us? (Before it was invented, less than 100 years ago, no seaside visitors cared a jot about the weather).

Compared to the Mediterranean, our waves are far bigger and better, our rock pools far superior, so, although the Germans may have made holes in our South Coast promenades, planning committees may have made disastrous decisions, the approach roads through remorseless hinterlands of Asdas and roundabouts may be dispiriting, and the dream-like infinity of the sea’s horizon may be compromised by wind turbines, the terrain remains the same and the tides forever renew the landscape of their beaches.

For my money, ours are still the best seaside resorts in the world.

Candida Lycett Green

Candida Lycett Green is the daughter of poet Sir John Betjeman and author and Himalayan explorer Penelope Chetwode.

She is the author of 16 books including English Cottages, Goodbye London, The Perfect English House, Over the Hills and Far Away and The Dangerous Edge of Things and has written the Unwrecked England column for The Oldie since 1992.

A commissioner of English Heritage for nine years, her latest book Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99) is out now. To order a copy through the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepost.co.uk