In Waterlog,
an account of his wild swimmer’s journey through Britain, the late Roger Deakin
observes the “hairless apes squealing with pleasure in the sea” at Porthcurno
in Cornwall, and wonders why people are so playful and carefree on the beach. He
concludes that our species emerged from the sea and our dry-land existence is a
recent phenomenon, so we simply feel more at home on the shore.
The resurgent
interest in “wildness,” among contemporary nature writers like Deakin, Robert
Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie, has often gravitated towards the beach. This is
partly because many of our beaches, on the Jurassic Coast of Devon and Dorset or the great shingle peninsulas in the southeast, are
such strange, otherworldly places. But it’s also because the beach is a point
of accommodation between humans and nature. Deakin may have felt the call of
the wild but he was also a dedicated beach anthropologist, wandering Monsieur
Hulot-like among the tame holidaymakers with their windbreakers and Primus
stoves.
The ideal of the beach in western culture is of a beautiful
tabula rasa, a preferably deserted landscape of virgin sand and translucent sea
where you can escape from the stresses of modern life – which is presumably why
you can now buy a “beach in a box” for your office desktop, with a miniature deckchair, sea
shells and sand. But as the BBC series Coast
showed - once you got beyond its self-consciously stirring music and sweeping
aerial views of our shoreline - the British beach is really a case study in cultural
history. Our beaches have gone through all sorts of uses, including land speed record
attempts at Pendine Sands in Carmarthen
Bay , improvised airstrips at Southport
and D-day landing dummy runs at Slapton Sands in Devon .
More recently, beaches have become highly artificial environments, as tidal
changes and coastal erosion force resorts like Minehead and Lyme Regis to
import sand or dredge it from the sea bed.
The beach
is a frontier not only between water and solid ground, but also between the wild
and the domestic. It is where sandyachters and kite buggyers share space with
picnickers and sunbathers, in states of proximity and
undress they would never tolerate in their ordinary lives. As a self-policing
community, the beach also condones a certain amount of low-level lawlessness,
from nicking boulders for garden water features to scavenging for Nike trainers in the cargo ship
containers that occasionally wash
up on the southwest coast. Even Ian McEwan admitted to liberating a few
pebbles from Chesil Beach , although he later returned them at the
invitation of Weymouth
and Portland Borough Council.
Deakin
admired beaches as places where social hierarchies and arcane rules are temporarily
suspended. So I imagine he would have disliked the current fashion, in
newspaper travel supplements, for listing our “best” beaches. This trend for
grading beaches began with conservation societies worrying about sea pollution.
But it has become a beauty contest, as resorts compete over things like wave
size and sandcastle build-ability. Some of this is less to do with the beaches
themselves than the accident of location. Resorts that are within second-home
distance of London ’s
middle classes tend to emphasise the clean minimalism of their beaches, because
that is what appeals to busy professionals and downshifters. A side-effect has
been the decade-long property boom in beach huts, which are disproportionately
on the south and east coasts, and are now undergoing their own version of the house-price
crash. The struggling seaside resorts in my own area of the northwest, like
Blackpool, Morecambe and New Brighton ,
rely instead on council-led regeneration plans for casinos, outdoor lidos and
refurbished Art Deco hotels, and don’t go on about their beaches so much.
Contrary
to some reports, the recent Policy Exchange publication, Cities Unlimited, does
not write off all the regeneration schemes in the north. It is fairly
optimistic about inland cities like Manchester
and Leeds, and gloomiest about coastal towns like Liverpool, Hull
and Blackpool . In a motorway-based economy, it
argues, these places are literally at the end of the road. Cities Unlimited is
an anti-coast manifesto. All the places it commends for being well-connected, like
Corby, Daventry and Oxford ,
are miles from a beach.
Fortunately,
the beach has no truck with neo-liberal economics, or indeed beauty contests.
Almost everywhere on the coast has a serviceable beach nearby, assuming you can
refrain from giving the sand a star rating. And I will happily trade living in
a motorway hub for living as I do within 10 minutes’ drive of Crosby
beach. On late summer evenings when the day-trippers have gone, there is no one
else about except some naked, cast-iron men staring out across Liverpool Bay . Anthony Gormley’s rusty artwork,
Another Place, is a reminder that, even on a deserted beach, people have left
their mark.
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