Scarborough is considered Britain's first seaside resort, drawing visitors for sea bathing as early as the 1620s. Four centuries later, many of Britain's coastal towns are among the most deprived communities in the country, with higher-than-average unemployment, lower-than-average life expectancy, and a youth population that leaves in search of opportunities that the town can't provide. Between these two facts lies one of the most dramatic stories in modern social history: a rise built on railways, a fall caused by cheap flights, and a revival that is uneven, complicated, and still in progress.
The making of the British seaside resort
Sea bathing as a fashionable activity began among the upper classes in the late seventeenth century, initially framed as a medical treatment rather than a pleasure. The physician Richard Russell published a treatise in 1752 arguing for the therapeutic properties of seawater, both drunk and bathed in, which proved enormously influential and helped establish Brighton as the resort of choice for the aristocracy and eventually for the Prince of Wales, later George IV. Brighton's royal connection did for the British seaside what Bath's mineral springs had done for inland spa culture: it made it socially acceptable, then desirable, then fashionable.
The railways changed everything. When the first seaside rail connections opened in the 1840s, the coast became accessible to working and middle-class families who had never previously had either the time or the means to travel for pleasure. Seaside resorts multiplied along every accessible stretch of British coastline. Blackpool, Southend, Weston-super-Mare, Whitby, Tenby, Llandudno: each developed its own character and its own economy built around the annual summer migration of inland populations to the sea. By the late Victorian period, the seaside holiday was a mass cultural institution.
The physical legacy of this period is still visible in almost every British coastal town. The grand Victorian hotels facing the seafront, built to accommodate the middle-class visitor. The pier, extending into the sea with its amusements and refreshment rooms. The promenade. The ornate bandstand. These were serious pieces of infrastructure built to serve millions of visitors, and they were built with Victorian confidence that the trade would continue indefinitely.
The collapse
The package holiday changed the calculus completely. When charter flights to Mediterranean resorts became affordable for ordinary British families from the 1960s onwards, the proposition of a week in Rhyl versus a week in Majorca became dramatically unfavourable to Rhyl. The sea was warmer, the sun was more reliable, and the cost, counter-intuitively, was often comparable or lower. British seaside resorts lost their captive market in less than a decade.
What followed was a long and painful contraction. Hotels closed or were converted to bedsits and temporary accommodation. The amusement arcades that replaced the elegant Victorian entertainments drew a different visitor and drove away others. The seasonal nature of the economy, already a structural weakness, became acute as the season shortened. Infrastructure built for millions of visitors required maintenance that declining visitor revenues couldn't support. By the 1990s, many British seaside towns had become what sociologists delicately term "places of last resort": communities with concentrations of vulnerable populations, ageing infrastructure, and very limited economic alternatives.
The revival, and its complications
Something has changed since the early 2000s, though the picture is more complicated than either the "seaside is back" narrative or the "terminal decline" one suggests. Several trends have converged to bring new visitors and new investment to coastal communities. The staycation, driven by the financial crisis of 2008, the pandemic of 2020, and a broader cultural shift towards British domestic travel, has renewed interest in the British coast. Heritage tourism has grown substantially, with the distinctive Victorian infrastructure of seaside towns acquiring cultural value it didn't have during the decades when it was seen as outdated. Contemporary art and culture have colonised some of the emptied seaside spaces: the Turner Contemporary in Margate, Tate St Ives, and the Creative Foundation in Folkestone are all examples of cultural investment that has attracted new audiences.
But the revival is strikingly uneven. Some towns, particularly those within easy reach of London or with distinctive heritage, have gentrified rapidly. Others remain among the most deprived communities in the country, with the additional challenge that rising property prices driven by second-home buying and short-term holiday lets have made housing unaffordable for the local workforce that service industries require. The University of Portsmouth has documented the need for a coherent national strategy to address these structural challenges, which has been consistently absent from government policy across administrations.
What the coast means now
The coast continues to mean something significant to the British imagination that transcends its economic situation. The beach hut, the pier, the promenade walk, the fish and chips eaten outside with the smell of the sea: these remain touchstones of a collective experience that connects across generations and across the social spectrum. Whether the communities that maintain this landscape can be economically sustained is a question that policy has not yet adequately answered.
Curious Rabbit's beach collection, made in Abergavenny, is a small tribute to what the coast represents. The laser-cut beach hut kit, the bathing hut kit, the seahorse bauble, the matchbox anchor: objects for people for whom the coast is not a backdrop but a feeling, a set of specific memories, and a place they carry with them wherever they are. Browse the full range at curiousrabbit.com.
Curious Rabbit makes laser-cut wooden gifts and model kits, designed and made in Wales.
