The Seaside by Madeleine Bunting review – sea, sand… and deprivation

On the Naze headland in Essex, Madeleine Bunting finds a bungalow owner “carefully mowing the grass around a rose bush on the edge of a cliff which was soft and crumbly like fudge; trimmed hedges, lawns and flower beds have become a form of impotent protest against fierce winter gales and an irritable North Sea”.

There is something very English about this touching, embattled but hopeless stoicism. The country may have invented the idea of the seaside holiday and embarked, as Bunting puts it, on a “great and turbulent love affair” with its resorts. Some even came to be considered “the epitome of modernity and progress”. Yet the brute facts of the British climate meant that their decline was built into them from the start. (If people are looking for sunshine, Benidorm is always going to be more reliable than Blackpool.) Hence today’s distinctive melancholic landscape of crumbling piers, funfairs and grand hotels built to accommodate the much larger crowds of the past.

This superb tour of the English coastline is compelling, sometimes exhilarating but also profoundly sad. There is no question that Bunting loves the seaside. She has vivid memories of running wild as a child in Runswick Bay, near Whitby, North Yorkshire. Brighton’s “dream factory of idealists, fantasists, escapists and adventurers” proved the perfect place for teenage experimentation. She still takes great pleasure in everything from “eating hot fish and chips” to “cold-water swimming”. And she skilfully captures ephemeral joyous moments in particular places.

To the south of Skegness, in Lincolnshire, for example, “silvery pools of shallow water reflected the cloudy skies like a mirror, and the land beyond floated in a thin strip against the sea. In the distance, seals stretched out to sunbathe. The air vibrated with the sound of larks, a reed bunting flitted between the winter-bleached reeds, and, closer to hand, the handsome, black-necked Brent geese murmured conspiratorially.”

The book skilfully avoids the kind of writing – what Bunting describes as “part poverty-porn, part class-based contempt” – all too common in middle-class accounts of the more downmarket resorts and, indeed, shows how class incomprehension can go both ways. The social historian Vanessa Toulmin, known to colleagues as “the professor of crap seaside towns”, grew up in Lancashire’s Morecambe and loves “the buzz of crowds and music” but was baffled by a visit to Southwold, in Suffolk. (Did going for walks and looking at the sea really count as a holiday?) Meanwhile in prosperous Padstow, we read, “everyone had been funnelled into the same postage-stamp-sized corner of Cornwall, most of them for the privilege of eating a pasty on a harbour wall”.

This is also a very angry book, which offers the kind of sharp and compassionate political analysis you might expect from the author of Labours of Love: The Crisis in Care. Bunting finds “entrenched deprivation” in almost all the places she visits, and sees them as symptomatic of “the wider national failures of a brutally inadequate welfare state, growing inequality, failing public services, and a crisis of affordable housing”.

What makes it even worse, perhaps, is that “unlike inner cities or post-industrial regions, the poverty of the coast is missing a narrative that can command attention”. The resorts were “never developed as sustainable communities in their own right”, so people struggle to get by in low-paid sectors such as seasonal hospitality, retail and social care, and there are few signs of better days ahead.

Bunting is honest enough to admit to a certain regret for the fading of such “quintessentially English memories” as “donkey rides, Punch and Judy, the shortcomings of modest, family-run hotels, kiss-me-quick hats, lettered rock and candy floss”. But she is also highly alert to the dangers of nostalgia. YouTube algorithms have identified people watching “vintage Blackpool footage” as precisely the right audience for “an advert for independent financial advice from Nigel Farage”. A chapter on Kent explores the deep memories of the second world war, the former barracks now used for asylum seekers and the way that the coast around Dover is “turning into a form of militarised zone”. All this is linked to the large pro-Brexit majorities in resorts all around England. Despite its many moments of pleasure by the sea, Bunting’s wonderful travelogue offers us a powerful – and deeply dispiriting – microcosm of the whole nation.

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