When Vera Lynn sang about bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, the whole thing was a nonsense, or at least a colossal projection. The lyrics turn out to be by a New Yorker who had never set eyes on the bared teeth of Kent’s chalk coast, and didn’t realise that bluebirds are never seen outside North America. Still, without quite realising it, he had nailed a crucial point about the way Britain instinctively imagines itself in terms of its edges rather than its heartland, particularly in times of crisis.
In this remarkable book, as bracing as a smack in the face by a stiff sea breeze, Madeleine Bunting tours the English coastline to discover what it reveals about the state of the nation today. The result is far from being a nostalgic wander around seafronts and winter gardens with stories thrown in about the time Frank Sinatra performed in Blackpool or Edward VII got in a round of golf at Frinton. Instead, Bunting, a former Guardian journalist who has written extensively on social affairs, plunges deep into the ugly truth: that for the last two decades at least, England’s seaside towns have experienced among the worst levels of deprivation in the country. Whether reporting from drizzly Lancashire, chilly Essex or the relatively mild south coast, she paints a shocking picture of endemic bad health, high debt and low educational attainment. All the things that go to make up what one local director of public health calls, with admirable candour, “shit life syndrome”.
