Wind-whipped sand, grey sea, people sitting in beach huts under blankets with hot-water bottles, ring doughnuts, bare trees, hot chocolate, empty pier rides: there is a particular tang to a British seaside town out of season that few places can rival. A specific mushy peas and condom wrapper bleakness that, personally, I love.
But the news that coastal areas now have three times the number of Airbnb listings per dwelling as non-coastal areas threatens the very future of these places, not to mention the lives of their residents. Housing campaigners point out that the huge number of “entire places” listed on the website show how landlords have been drawn towards short-term holiday rentals precisely at the time when people need affordable homes. They’d rather rent their spare house – you know, just that other house they have – to 50 well-off families for weekends than a local family for the year.
Last weekend, my partner and I went to Bournemouth to stay in the sort of hotel in which you hope there may be at least one semi-aristocratic murder, to be solved by a squat little European fusspot or a nosy knitter from St Mary Mead. Just a little something dastardly in the billiard lounge. In fact, we arrived to find a sixth form freshers’ party happening in one of the conference rooms, meaning the place was ablaze with local teenagers in neon Lycra and plastic sunglasses, furiously vaping in a cold, salty wind. I saw more goosepimples than in my previous six months of outdoor swimming.
Which is precisely as it should be. Towns and cities that are lucky enough to be blasted by that particular British combination of ferocious weather, chip fat and portable speakers need, primarily, to be homes for their year-round residents. I may not have spent my childhood by the sea, but I did grow up in a city where about 20% of the population is made up of students and in the summer, tourists pour into town like sugar on to cornflakes. I know what it’s like to live somewhere where the local population is pushed off pavements by transient visitors. I have seen what it can do to houses, to councils, to leisure centres, schools and high streets.
A city needs long-term citizens in order to maintain the kind of infrastructure that makes it a city, rather than an unloved collection of empty houses, phone accessory shops and novelty bins in the shape of penguins. You need locals to maintain bus services, libraries, chip shops, cafes, dentists, playgroups and football pitches during the off season, in order for there to be anything worth visiting in the sun.
Nobody is saying that seaside towns should close off tourism; rather that tourism should only ever be one of several local industries instead of swallowing a location whole. And one very direct, extremely effective way of ensuring this would be to simply ban second-home ownership. I know, it sounds wild, but just imagine: you could have one home and you’d live in it. All the time. And someone else could buy and live in the spare house that you use as a money-generating storage facility. If I were in charge (and we’re probably all lucky I’m not) I would make it illegal to own more than one property. I would have to arrest my own mother, of course, but hey ho.
During an absolutely soaking scuttle into town, past Bournemouth’s Court Royal hotel, I was reminded of what it is that makes out-of-season British seaside towns so appealing. A man with a microphone and mobility scooter sang Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All next to a Bible group; the beach – which is well and truly open to dog mess from 1 October to 30 April – was full of people chatting and exercising in waterproof coats; work colleagues ate in restaurants the size of sheds while staring across the road at patios spotted with disco lights. It was fun and it was quiet and it felt like being at a house party after most people have gone home.
Then we rounded things off on Sunday by waiting more than an hour for a rail replacement bus service to Eastleigh because all the trains had been cancelled at short notice. Which is what happens when you put profit before people.
Nell Frizzell is the author of The Panic Years and Square One
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