One of the benefits of living nearly a hundred miles from a motorway is being within 20 minutes of some of the country’s best beaches. This has been a godsend during this Summer of the Five Suns. There’s no queuing on the A11 for us, behind what one of my old Norfolk friends calls ‘absolute SCUM coming down here with their caravans’. We just chuck paddleboards, towels and buckets and spades into the back of the knackered Land Rover and are in the water within half an hour.
If George Orwell had written an essay about the perfect British beach, he would have had Cromer in mind
But we don’t bother with the beaches that regularly top Condé Nast Traveller and Sunday Times polls. We swerve Wells-next-the-Sea where you’ll be tripping over influencers snapping the Instagram-friendly beach huts and Yummy Mummies braying at each other in the Joules outlet like PG Wodehouse’s mastodon aunts across the primeval swamp.
Holkham – which the aspirational middle classes insist on pronouncing ‘Hoke-am’ (don’t) – is also best avoided. Once the county’s best-kept secret, it is now a bunfight (actually, make that a Matcha Danish fight) and if you make the mistake of heading for the only quiet bit, you’ll see things that can never be unseen, viz naturists flying kites. Blakeney and Cley-next-the-Sea are very pretty and fine if you like the vibe of 27 per cent owner occupancy, spending an hour looking for somewhere to park and chins in deck shoes and gilets foraging for samphire.
But I head in the opposite direction for Overstrand, Cromer or Shezza (Sheringham), where gentrification is but an estate agent’s pipe dream. They all have wide sandy beaches and at Shez you can park just behind the promenade on a building site where a bloke in a string vest will watch your car for the day for a fiver (cash only). As long as they’re not throwing stones, no one cares if your children run amok. Which is great, as I have about as much control over mine as we do over our post-Brexit borders.
The crowd is just locals and people staying in the caravan parks. No one raises an eyebrow if you spark up a Silk Cut or take a gin in a tin out of your cool bag. There are chippies and, crucially, arcades – brilliant for when tiresome tweenagers grow bored and start hitting each other with paddles – and proper seaside food like cockles, whelks and lurid slushies made with illegal food colourings.
If George Orwell had written an essay about the perfect British beach, he would have had Cromer in mind. Yes, there have been attempts at gentrification, as will always happen in towns with good housing stock. But pleasingly, the queue for the fish and chip shop owned by a Michelin-starred chef is dwarfed by the one for the greasy joint round the corner. There’s an end-of-the-pier variety show and plenty of boozing, sunburn and bad tattoos on show. It makes one quaintly proud to be British, like the sight of travellers enjoying a pint of Stella at 6.30am in the Gatwick Spoons, as evoked by Declan Lyons.
My love of an unfashionable beach started early. From Easter onwards, my mother would take us to swim at Dunwich in Suffolk, as the outflow pipe from Sizewell B made the North Sea lovely and warm. The average lifespan of a pilot shot down over this stretch of water in the war was about nine minutes; we could stay in for hours. Happily, my husband shares my love of a rough-round-the-edges beach. His Cornish mother took him back to Marazion and Penzance in the summer holidays, never Rock or Padstow. Who wants to be vomited on by a public schoolboy who’s overdone it? That sort of thing should be confined to the Feathers Ball.
Close by are overrated and overpriced Southwold and Walberswick, which were long ago colonised by artisan bakers and actors. The last time I went to Walberswick, there was an altercation in the pub, which had gone gastro, between one of the few old Suffolk boys left in the village and the manager. ‘Chick peas!’ he exclaimed with impotent rage, waving the menu in his face. ‘Chick peas!’ – actually ‘chick POISE’ in the local accent, which no actor has ever got right except Ralph Fiennes in The Dig. I had every sympathy. Chick peas are about as appropriate on a pub menu as vegan sausage rolls in the café at Beatrix Potter’s house.
In Essex, I’d always go for Clacton with its golden sands, bars and waltzers on the pier over snooty Frinton. When the first proper pub opened there in 2000, one resident was famously quoted in the press as saying it was the ‘worst day for the town since it was bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1944’.
But perhaps the very best, least fashionable beach on the East Anglian coast is the much-parsed-about but rarely visited Jaywick Sands. My friend Matt, who’s the local vicar, raves about it and, when he’s not tending to his parishioners or declining invitations from Newsnight producers to appear on their programme, can be found sailing his dinghy or manning the lifeboat.(He has done one interview, for the Church Times, which I urge you to seek out, since it’s the most sensible thing written about the place I’ve seen.
Now the journalists have departed after the by-election, you’ll have it almost to yourself. Should you wish to avail yourself of a milkshake, either to drink or lob over the newly re-elected local MP, should you see him (which you won’t), then be assured that you’ll definitely find plenty of vendors.
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