The beach of Deauville, France

Deauville, Normandy, in northwest France is famous for its coastal boardwalk – the Promenade des Planches – built in 1923, and its beach on the English Channel. The driving distance from Deauville to Paris is 194 kilometres (120 miles) and the channel distance to the British coast is only about 180 kilometres (110 miles).

The city of Deauville was built upon the seaside sand dunes and marshes in the 1860s. It was the vision of Joseph Olliffe and his friend the Duke de Morny who was Emperor Napoleon the Third’s half-brother.

With the new railway line, Deauville became the closest seaside resort to Paris. The resort city grew in only four years, and attracted wealthy Parisians, and soon after, the international elite. French fashion designer Coco Chanel opened her first ever fashion store in 1913, financed by Arthur (Boy) Capel, in Deauville (although she had already opened a hat store in Paris in 1910). During the First World War (1914-1918) and Second World War (1939-1945), the hotels were hospitals for wounded Allied soldiers. Between the wars, a new railway station and the now iconic Art Deco bathing facilities were built.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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