Oh, we do like to be beside the seaside. The moment the sun comes out, we
British tear off our wrappings and rush for the coast. Last week’s sudden
burst of spring was accompanied by the usual newspaper photographs of girls
in bikinis sauntering past pastel-coloured beach huts, and crowds squeezing
onto Brighton beach. Superimpose a few knotted handkerchiefs and a bathing
machine and you might think we were back in the glory days of the Victorian
pleasure resort.
On the golden sands of Jaywick, Essex, however, the mood was rather less
festive. Jaywick was identified last week as the most deprived place in
England, in a report by the Communities Department. A once-bustling holiday
village for working-class Londoners – the site of the first Butlins holiday
camp, and of a curious Fabian experiment in DIY housing – Jaywick is now a
largely desolate place, characterised by peeling paint, unemployment and
creeping pensioners.
There are few places more depressing than a seaside resort with the fun gone
out of it. Britain’s coastal towns have been struggling since the 1970s,
when the masses started taking package holidays abroad. Generations have
grown up expecting two weeks of Mediterranean sun almost as a human right.
They won’t stand for a holiday spent picnicking on a rain-lashed pebble
beach in a cagoule. Not all the blame, however, resides with the
irresistible forces of globalisation. The rest belongs to that ancient enemy
of civic beauty and originality: the town planner.
Until my grandmother died two years ago, most of my holidays were spent in
Seaford, a Sussex town once famous for its prep schools. In my lifetime it
has gone from nothing special to outright hideous. One by one, the Edwardian
schools, with their scalloped tiles and white-painted eaves, have been torn
down to make way for ranks of identikit executive homes. Along the front,
flimsily-built developments spring up and almost instantly collapse,
spending the remainder of their short lives streaked with rust and coated in
scaffolding.
Even the beach has been stripped of its character. Once, you had to scramble
down enormous concrete steps, like a giant’s staircase, to get to the
shingle. Slimy wooden breakwaters divided the sweeping bay into segments, so
that you could feel you had a patch of coastline all to yourself. Then, in
1987, it was decided that a pebble beach would be more attractive to
visitors. Huge machines were brought in to spew out a million tons of
shingle. Slowly, the giant’s steps and the breakwaters disappeared from
view, and Seaford acquired a beach like any other.
“The nice thing about Seaford,” said a friend a few years later, gazing out of
my grandmother’s window, “is that you don’t have to worry about it being
ruined. Because it already is.”
Always chasing the empty promise of “regeneration”, local councils and
planners often seem blind to what people really want in a British town:
history, character and eccentricity. You cannot regenerate a place by
building cardboard houses and shopping malls of the type found everywhere
from Tulsa to Tyneside. You need to work with the grain of history – make
the most of whatever is local and distinct.
Jaywick may be poor, but it has character. It is the largest surviving example
of the “plotlands” phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s – land sold off in
little strips, usually to poor city dwellers longing for a rural bolthole.
Often they built their own dwellings from scrap, old train carriages or
broken down Army huts.
Jaywick Sands was built in 1928 by the Fabian property developer Frank
Stedman. The lack of mains drainage meant that he had to market his houses
as temporary “chalets”, but people always lived in them all year round.
After the war, town planners flattened most plotlands to make way for neat,
unloved new towns. In 1970, they tried to bulldoze Jaywick, but residents
went to the High Court and succeeded in preserving it.
Jaywick has a huge sandy beach, an eccentric history, a defiantly resilient
community and houses that are actually glorified beach huts. Now all it
needs is town planners with a little imagination.
Travel 
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