This ought to be a new golden age for the British seaside, since we have somehow managed to recreate the conditions of its last golden age, the late 1940s, and nobody can afford to go abroad. Take a plane almost anywhere, and you’re flying closer to a climate crisis and will find it hard not to ruminate on your own contribution to it. Take a boat and you’ll spend most of your holiday in Dover. These are the ideal circumstances in which to rediscover the beauty of, say, Weymouth or Scarborough.
But you have to wonder how charming it would be to go to a Dorset beach when the area is mainly in the news because of the Bibby Stockholm, the giant refugee barge that has just taken delivery of its first residents. Even if you couldn’t see it from your beach hut – it is modestly moored in a non-beauty spot – you couldn’t help but wonder what life is like on this cramped seaborne accommodation, where the walls are bare, the hours untenanted and the TVs have no plugs. Is it at all like a cruise? Or is it more like a prison hulk? Sure, we all live in the shadow of inhumanity, but it’s difficult to imagine a mini-break there.
OK, fine, choose a different county, but anywhere you go, the immense and awesome pleasure of the sea is offset by the fact that so much of it is full of sewage and poses a real and present danger to health. I remember the pre-Maastricht years, heady days, before European bureaucrats stuck their beaks in and we were allowed to have beaches as dirty as we liked. It definitely wasn’t salubrious, the sea, but you didn’t come out of it with E coli. Surfers used to boast about the waves they had vanquished, not the size of the turd they avoided through sheer agility.
This is the unfortunate thing about rampant rightwing nationalism and extractive capitalism, especially when they operate in concert, as they often do: their long game might be to destroy the fabric of society, but along the way they destroy all this other stuff we used to like to be beside.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
