HIP BOOK REVIEW
The Seaside
England’s Love Affair
By Madeleine Bunting
Published by Granta, May 2023
Hardback RRP £20.00, 400pp
REVIEW BY VIOLA VON HARRACH
In The Seaside, author and journalist Madeleine Bunting’s most incisive book to date, she travels round our coastline from Scarborough to Blackpool, visiting more than forty resorts on the way.
Like many of us, Bunting’s love affair with the seaside goes back to childhood holidays. Of golden sands, rock pools, cold water, friends made and forgotten in a day, greedy gulls, sticks of rock, candy floss, donkey rides, fish and chip suppers.
Fond memories. But this book, is not a romantic view, nor is it patronising. Bunting’s is a critical, analytical view, in which she gives the facts as they are, and explains, why despite an English obsession with seaside holidays, coastal resorts have been marginalised when it comes to investment. But also, when investment has been forthcoming why it has not been substantial enough or effectively used to make a difference.
THE HASTINGS STORY IS REPLICATED IN CLACTON, MARGATE, TORBAY ETC.
And here is the rub, our coastal resorts are all too frequently deprived, neglected, decaying; unlike towns inland, resorts are at the edge and easy to marginalise. The Hastings story, for example, is replicated in Clacton, Margate, Torbay, Great Yarmouth, Blackpool and Scarborough. A situation much exacerbated further by the parlous state of the welfare system, the housing crisis, particularly in the rental market, and the seasonality of the tourist trade.
This may all sound rather depressing but Bunting, as always, writes clear engaging prose, interspersed with personal experiences of the places she visits. In Padstow she describes eating a pasty on the harbour wall, with the sea a mile away, and, “all of us funnelled into a postage-stamp-sized corner of Cornwall.” She stays in a caravan, for old times’ sake, at a holiday camp and in hotels shabby and chic. A passionate swimmer, she dips in all weathers, “in coffee coloured water,” researches local lore and politics, and talks to historians, academics, residents, on benches overlooking the sea, in cafes and in their homes.
NEARLY HALF OF THE OLDER PEOPLE OF HASTINGS ARE INCOME-DEPRIVED
“Our boundaries, borders and coastline have moved centre stage in the UK’s recent turbulent history,” she writes. Salutary words. All the more so, because so little has changed in the forty years since the American author, Paul Theroux wrote The Kingdom by the Sea in which he also explored the plight of coastal towns and described their slow inevitable decline. Compare his description of Hastings with that of Bunting and it seems that not much has changed. She writes that two areas of Hastings rank in the most deprived one per cent of the country and “that nearly half of the older people of Hastings are income-deprived.” Shocking statistics. She notes Brighton’s poor mental health record and quotes a 2019 Which report in which Bognor, was rated the joint worst sea resort with Clacton. Yes, Margate has benefitted from the funding of a world-class art gallery, Turner Contemporary, and well-known artists such as Tracy Emin settling there. But away from all that it is still a place of deprivation.
This is an intelligent, sensitive, carefully researched work, benefitting much from Bunting’s wry personal observations on the political and societal stall of our time. She is angry at the parlous state of what she discovers about coastal towns, and critical of over “twenty years of policy neglect, after three decades of decline. Indeed as she suggests in the epilogue, our seaside resorts are a reflection and a microcosm of life in our country post Brexit and the Covid epidemic.”
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