Last resorts: The seaside towns fighting to show they’re more than just relics

Once hotspots for British holidaymakers, seaside towns fell out of favour when affordable package holidays took over. With staycations set to rise in popularity, there’s much work to do, writes Sean Smith

The ONS designated Skegness the country’s most deprived seaside town in 2013 (PA)

From the Victorian era to the 1950s, seaside resorts prospered by attracting trainloads of holidaymakers looking for respite from mines, mills and factories. In their heyday, 5 million Britons surged to the coast, before Beeching’s notorious axing of rural railways started to stem that tide in the 1960s. But it was the affordability of package holidays abroad that really did it for our seaside resorts, slowly mothballing them into stranded relics of Britain’s industrial past.

If you want to understand the challenges faced by the country’s 169 coastal towns and villages today, try to visualise the UK’s political economy as a single human body with London as its beating heart pumping its lifeblood through arterial routes to the vital organs of its major towns and cities. Even when the economy booms, little of the new wealth created circulates out as far as the coastal communities, only tenuously connected by the capillaries of seasonal tourism and outdated transport infrastructure.

Hypothermia directs blood away from the body’s outer extremities to help its inner organs survive trauma and after a decade buffeted by the chill winds of austerity, frostbite has set in to the UK’s coastal economies.