The Seaside by Madeleine Bunting review – postcards from the edge

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”.

Bunting’s methodology is to arrive in a town and then go for a swim, even when the sea is the colour of tea. Only after changing stickily in her car does she start on a deep dive into the cultural landscape, talking to locals, interviewing Citizens Advice Bureau managers and consulting academics who supply her with the facts and figures she requires to test her gut instincts. It is this blend of personal reportage and rigorous detail that works so well and stops The Seaside turning into just one more slice of beautifully written psycho-geography.

Bunting begins in Scarborough, a place she remembers from her 1960s childhood as a delightful dream of donkey rides and 99 Flake ice-creams. The resort was founded, as all England’s smarter spas were, in the mid-18th century as a place of medical marvels, where the terminally ill mixed with the worried well as they strolled along the elegant promenade or flirted mildly in the assembly rooms. In 1849 the painfully ill Anne Brontë elected to go to Scarborough because, if the sea breezes didn’t cure her consumptive lungs, it would at least be a spectacularly picturesque place to die.

So it is ironic that a resort founded on a reputation for putting the roses back into people’s cheeks is now languishing permanently on the sick list. Scarborough’s streets may still be quaint, but all that loveliness disguises a tragic set of health statistics. Rates of what Bunting calls “diseases of despair” exceed the national average, and not by a little: for suicide it’s by 61%, for alcohol-related conditions 30%. Hospital admissions for self-harm are 60% higher. There is also obesity, the consequence of food poverty and a local economy in which sugar is cheaper than protein. In Clacton, 180 miles to the south, Bunting reports that a quarter of pupils in reception are classed as overweight and among those over 18 it is nearly 70%.

But how did this punishing cycle of decline begin and why, after all these years, can it not be reversed? There’s an obvious tale to tell about the rise of cheap package holidays in the 1960s. Peering out at the choppy North Sea from behind a windbreaker was never going to compete with lying under gold and blue canopies in Greece or Spain. But that cannot be the whole story. Surely by now new patterns of employment and changed infrastructure should have swept into England’s tidal towns to replace the seasonal, marginal, low-wage status quo ante?

Bunting believes that a failure of will across the political spectrum is the cause of this sclerotic misery, but it also has something to do with the very nature of peripherality. When economic, political and cultural power concentrates around inland cities it automatically excludes other places. And coastal towns always have their backs against a metaphorical wall, deprived of half the resources available to, say, land-locked Birmingham or Sheffield, which sit at the centre of a 365-degree hinterland.

Even when regeneration arrives, it often proves to be a mixed blessing. In Margate the building of Turner Contemporary, the reconstituted art deco wonder that is the Dreamland amusement park, and the benignant spell of Tracey Emin, have had unintended consequences. Regeneration’s first cousin is gentrification, which has led to locals being unable to afford places to live in their own communities. In 2015 the year-on-year increase in house prices was an obscene 24%. Likewise, the rental market has been decimated by a permanently frisky Airbnb culture. Bunting, as always, does due diligence and reports that “in March 2022 Airbnb offered 300 properties to rent [in Margate], but my search for long-term rentals produced only twenty-three flats, starting at £600 per month for a one-bed”.

Trickle-down prosperity clearly hasn’t trickled far enough. Hastings, which is 70 miles along the coast from Margate, bristles with craft studios and boutique coffee shops, yet two areas of the town fall into the most deprived percentile in the country. Spend a couple of hours wandering around renovated seaside towns with their much vaunted “artists’ quarters” and you will quickly discern micro-patterns of extreme poverty and wealth.

There is also, and Bunting does not shy away from this, an endemic suspicion and resentment of outsiders, which hardly helps. She notes the overwhelming support for Brexit in almost all the resorts, with areas such as Canvey Island, Clacton and the Isle of Thanet scoring some of the highest Leave votes in the country in the 2016 referendum. And the area around the white cliffs of Dover about which Vera Lynn sang so stirringly has been turned into what Bunting calls a “militarised zone” whose “targets are human beings desperate for a better future”. Still, she is admirably keen not to lecture, but to understand. By the end of this humane yet sobering book, it would be a tough reader indeed who passed judgment on those abandoned to their fate looking angrily for someone, anyone, to blame.

• The Seaside: England’s Love Affair is published by Granta (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.