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The Seaside: England’s Love Affair by Madeleine Bunting: book review



The Seaside: England’s Love Affair by Madeleine Bunting (2023) is set along the coastlines of England: ‘No European capital can lay claim to as many coastlines as London … all an easy day trip by train or car. Not to mention the delights further afield.’ 

Madeleine Bunting travelled to about 40 seaside resorts, staying in hotels, caravans, and holiday camps. Her aim was to understand the ‘enduring appeal of seaside towns, and what has happened to the golden sands, cold seas, and donkey rides of childhood memory.’

The book is sectioned according to the country’s beaches that the author visited, in a clockwise direction: Scarborough in North Yorkshire; Skegness in Lincolnshire; Dovercourt to Canvey Island in Essex; Margate to Folkestone in Kent; Brighton to Bognor in Sussex; Torquay to Weston-super-Mare in the South-West; and Blackpool and Morecambe in Lancashire.

For her ‘research’ Madeleine Bunting talks to residents and holidayers, takes swims, and eats the local fare – mainly fish and chips – while learning of the history and landscapes of beach life.

What is noticeable about the description of the locations in the ‘island nation’ is the vast variety of coastal landscapes, from cliffs to coves, pebbled shores to sandy beaches, marshes to estuaries, and into inland waterways. 

What is also noticeable, from my Australian beach-life comparative perspective, are the descriptions of cold dampness, grey gloom, and icy exhilaration, as well as English egalitarianism, eccentricities, and endurance.  

Each coastal location has its history – of medieval modesties and mythical fictions, changing natural landscapes, seaside senses, entertainment resorts, medicinal spas, ports and industries, war-time heroism and hardship, flotsam and jetsam, seach-change lifestyles and micro-inequalities, and transformational economies and enviromentalism. 

Madeleine Bunting evokes family traditions, nostalgia, and literary references in this study of seaside towns and their characters. At times, this is a dry and angry account of changing environmental and political times and the decline and deprivation of the seaside. It is also highly evocative with beautiful descriptions. It moves from crowds and funfairs to haunting solitude and sunsets, without succumbing too much to the shortcomings of nostalgia, but rather, attempting to show that seasides are the barometers of national identity. 








MARTINA NICOLLS

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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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