Channel Shore: From the White Cliffs to Land's End

PREFACE

A July day, and I am in a deckchair under an umbrella on the beach at Bournemouth, near the pier. It is hot, but English hot, not Mediterranean or Aegean; a tolerable, friendly heat. The sky is blue, brushed by high cirrus, the sea pale-blue topaz. The golden sand which runs for miles is parcelled out evenly between low wooden breakwaters.

Everyone is here: the old, in invalid chairs or sunk in deckchairs beneath faded sunhats, toddlers tottering across the sand in disposable nappies sagging with sea water, girls with stomach piercings glinting against nut-brown skin, lads with bony chests in long trunks larking around in inflatables, children on body boards making the best of amiable waves. I watch a dark-skinned woman, fully dressed with just her hands, feet and head showing, dive and twist in the water. She comes out grinning, squeezing the water from her long black hair. In front of us a Polish couple are tenderly intent on their child. A dozen languages mingle over the sand.

Elsewhere the world is tearing itself apart in the normal way. But here the offshore breeze is suffused with the contentment of those lucky enough to be alive and relishing the perfection of an English summer’s day at the seaside.

A generation ago they told us the seaside holiday was dying and would soon pass away like Empire Day and the Morris Traveller and tinned apricots with evaporated milk and other curious relics. Cheap air travel, package holidays, guaranteed sun, sand and blood-warm sea – that was what the British holidaymaker wanted; not shabby amusement arcades, moth-eaten donkeys, rancid fish-and-chips, hatchet-faced boarding-house landladies, a wind-whipped sea the colour of breeze blocks and colder than the Mr Whippy squirming from stainless steel spouts in the ice-cream stalls.

But the seaside holiday clung obstinately to life. People realised that when the sun shone – which it tended to do more often and more potently than when I was a little boy, shivering in my shorts at Middleton-on-Sea – our beaches could hold their own against those of the Côte this and the Costa that. They were free, open to anyone, easy to get to. The sea was bracing rather than freezing, and although there might be jellyfish, they were not huge and red with terrifying bunches of tentacles, and the water did not spawn banks of bright-green algal jelly. And some of our seaside towns had charms of their own and had learned to please.

I love to be beside the sea, and to be in it, not too deep. But being out on it in anything other than a proper ferryboat or a flat calm makes me tense. I do not like the currents, the depths, the way fierce tides invade at the gallop. Waves with foaming crests make me nervous.

We used to have holidays on a small island on the west coast of Scotland. It was in the mouth of a long sea loch and was consequently swept by vigorous tidal currents, as well as being subject to the normal boisterous weather of those parts. On one occasion we set off down the loch for a picnic. The wind picked up and the water became choppy. At my suggestion we decided to turn back, into the wind and the waves. My sister, sitting in the bow, reported water coming through the planks as well as over the prow. I gripped the handle of the outboard as if the future of the human race depended on it, and we made it back to the bay in front of the house. Looking out half an hour later I observed that the boat had vanished at its mooring, leaving only the painter attached to the buoy as evidence that it had ever existed.

On another occasion I went with one of my brothers to the mainland to get lobsters. Fortunately we were piloted by one of the island’s permanent inhabitants, who did it all the time. While we were engaged with the crustacea the wind turned into the east and gathered strength considerably, so that by the time we set off back to the island the waves were charging ahead of us in long, implacable lines, the breaking crests flattened and whipped into the air by the wind. ‘This is exhilarating,’ my brother shouted as we rode one wave and then the next. I felt ill with fear.

I am a landsman. My nervousness of the sea is not something I am proud of, but it’s best to accept these limitations. It followed that when I came to write this Channel story it would be from a land-based perspective, of one looking out to sea with feet planted on firm rock, or sand or earth. The idea for it was not mine, but came from a film-maker, Harry Marshall of Icon Films, who wanted to make a sequence of programmes about the Channel and what it means to us, and thought I might make a suitable presenter. The project was eventually aborted – the deep thinkers at the BBC decided it would tread ground sacred to the long-running Coast. But by then I had been thoroughly seduced by the prospect of a personal exploration of that strip of land beside the waterway that, more than any other, has formed our sense of who we are.

So I went alone, free from the tyranny of filming, from Kent to Cornwall – down Channel. I was curious to know what it was about our Channel shore that was so special and indispensable; that drew some people and held them and called them back even when they had taken themselves off somewhere else. It was pretty straightforward to work out why some – like myself – chose to take their holidays beside the sea. More interesting, to my way of thinking, were those who chose to live within sight and sound and smell of the Channel shore: some born to it, many others pulled that way later in their lives by an insistent force.

As I made my way south-west over the course of the summer of 2013, I came to appreciate the nature of that force as I never had while just on holiday. Those who take their week or fortnight by the sea, or flit to and from their holiday homes, scrape the surface. If the weather is kind, they are happy; if not, they return home resentful, as if somehow they had been misled or let down. For those who live there, the whole point is the bad weather with the good, the richness of variation, the endless change in mood and colour and texture. They tend to be not so interested in the blatant pleasures of the summer season. They wait for the transients to depart to reclaim their kingdom.

I tried, as far as my circumstances permitted, to experience something of the Channel out of season. I was in Bournemouth in January, Torquay and Eastbourne in February, Penzance in March. But the main part of my exploration was undertaken over May, June and July 2013, by bicycle. I pedalled in stages, at no great speed, from St Margaret’s Bay in Kent to Land’s End – a total distance, taking in diversions, backtrackings, circuitous inland detours and so forth, of 675 miles. I was lucky, in that it was a fine summer after two dismal ones, which made for generally comfortable cycling, at least until I reached the strenuous hills of Devon and Cornwall. Much more important, the sunshine showed the places I went through and lingered in to advantage, and put their people in good humour, and me in good humour.

The cycling was a means to an end. This is not a two-wheeled epic of lung-bursting ascents (though there were times when I thought my lungs might burst) and hair-raising descents (though there were times when my hair would have stood on end if I had that kind of hair). Being on a bicycle is a good way to see, breathe, stop, talk, contemplate – quick enough to make a longish journey manageable, slow enough to absorb it properly.

So I pedalled and freewheeled and sometimes pushed. I stopped to look and to accost strangers and ask them why they liked to be beside the sea. I followed trails that made me curious – some were dead ends, some led somewhere, some gave me answers.

I do not live by the sea or anywhere near it, and at my time of life I am disinclined ever to move again. But having finished this journey, having breathed the air and watched the waves and listened to and felt the rhythms of the sea that beats against our English Channel shore, I can see the point in a way that I never did before.

1

DOVER PORT

There is no fuss, no fanfare, nothing to tell anyone that this is where our most familiar and important waterway begins and ends. The invisible line between the North Sea and the English Channel touches shore in Kent at Leathercote Point. There is a memorial on the clifftop there which honours the part played by the Dover Patrol during the 1914–18 war in protecting the passage of troops and supplies to and from France. But the inscriptions do not mention that this is where the Channel is born.

That is the way with water. The boundaries between seas are necessarily unseen and self-evidently fluid. The International Hydrographic Organization has determined that the eastern limit of the Channel extends from Leathercote Point in Kent to the defunct Walde lighthouse just east of Calais. The currents flow and the waves sweep across it as easily as the ships and yachts. Who marks the imaginary divide, or pauses to wonder when, exactly, they are no longer in the North Sea but the Channel, or the other way round?

In contrast, the facing coasts of England and France proclaim the separation between the two countries. The Channel is twenty miles wide at the Straits of Dover, and in clear weather each coastline is easily visible from the other. But their proximity serves to define their separateness rather than obscure it.

In large part the story of the Channel has been determined by these two geographical imperatives: the fixed opposition of the seaboards of England and France, and the unfettered waterway between, opening to the North Sea one way and the Atlantic the other. The destinies of both nations have been shaped to a remarkable degree by these unalterable forces and the interaction between them.

There used to be a hotel beside the beach at St Margaret’s Bay, which is the easternmost (and northernmost) settlement on the English side of the Channel. It was built in the 1880s and was called the Lanzarote, presumably a marketing ploy to suggest a climate comparable with that of the Canary Islands many hundreds of miles away to the south. The charms of the bay were celebrated by Charles George Harper in The Kentish Coast, one of the many travelogues churned out by this energetic journalist in the immediate pre-First World War period.

‘The spirit of the place is elusive and refuses to be captured and written down and printed,’ he wrote down and had printed in 1914. ‘Those who want to be amused – that great desideratum of the brainless and uncultivated – will not come to St Margaret’s Bay. I do not think a motor car has ever been down here, which is so much to the good.’

The Lanzarote was subsequently renamed, more prosaically but aptly, the Bay Hotel. In the 1930s it was joined at the eastern end of the bay by a cluster of smart white beach houses. During the 1939–45 war the Army annexed the whole place for training, as a result of which the hotel and the Excelsior Tearooms and various bungalows nearby were wrecked and shattered by gunfire, and had to be demolished. But the smart houses, although damaged, were salvageable, and in 1945 the playwright Noël Coward took a lease on the last one.

It was called White Cliffs. ‘I don’t think I can fail to be happy here,’ he said. The house was squeezed onto a ledge between the sea and the foot of the chalk cliff. There was just enough room for the chickens required to provide Coward’s daily breakfast egg, but not for a garden. Then, as now, cliff falls were a hazard and after the appalling later winter of 1947 he spent £2000 (£70,000 in today’s money) having the chalk above the house shored up.

Coward treasured the seclusion and peace, the view of the grey shingle beach and the water, the noise of the sea lapping or beating at the wall below his bedroom window. Although his heyday as a dramatist was by then over, he was busy on a host of projects. He was also enormously rich, and willing and able to entertain with a lavishness that was exceptional at that austere time. Among the stars who came to White Cliffs to feast and frolic were Spencer Tracy and his lover, the famously hale and hearty Katharine Hepburn, who amused the locals by swimming in the sea every day whatever the weather.

To protect his privacy Coward arranged for his mother, his secretary Cole Lesley and his friend, the thriller writer Eric Ambler, to take the leases on the houses closest to his. Even so, the attractions of St Margaret’s Bay became, in his view, its undoing. The road brought cars and the cars brought trippers to gawp at Coward and his glamorous guests. He complained that the beach was ‘crowded with noisy hoi polloi’. In 1951 he was told he could return to Goldenhurst, his house in Romney Marsh, which the Army had requisitioned during the hostilities.

The many – the English translation of hoi polloi – continue to descend on the bay in force at holiday time, filling the car park and crowding the stony beach. But I came midweek in early April and it was very quiet, just me and my bike and a few dog walkers and a girl who’d opened up the tea kiosk at an opportune moment. There was no wind at all. The sea was flat calm, bathed in a milky haze that made it impossible to see any distance out to sea or to tell where sea ended and sky began.

The girl at the kiosk who made my tea lived in Dover. She liked the job. ‘It calms you down being here,’ she said. ‘Just looking out at the sea helps when you’re stressed. Course it’s heaving in the season but a day like today is perfect.’

I wandered along to look at Coward’s house. It was empty and silent, the pale yellow shutters closed. It looked in good order, as if it had survived the ravages of sea and storm pretty well, but the house next door was showing signs of wear and tear, its plasterwork stained and its metal window frames spotted with rust. The cliff behind seemed menacingly close.

Coward had the lease of White Cliffs transferred to his friend Ian Fleming, who with his lover and later wife, Ann Rothermere, had been a frequent guest. Fleming’s gift to St Margaret’s Bay was to set much of the action of his third James Bond story, Moonraker, there and thereabouts.

A few years ago, when on holiday in Italy, I came upon a paperback copy of Moonraker, and was curious enough to reread it. An early passage sets the tone. Bond is bowling along the Deal road on his way to engineer the downfall of the card cheat and closet Nazi, Sir Hugo Drax. A Special Branch officer, Gala Brand, has been assigned to help him, and as he steers the Aston Martin Bond ponders her career notes – ‘distinguishing marks: mole on upper curvature of right breast’ – and lets his mind roam.

A later sunbathing session, presumably involving close investigation of the mole, is interrupted by a cliff fall triggered by one of Drax’s murderous henchmen. Bond and Gala Brand make it to the Granville Hotel above the beach at St Margaret’s – later demolished and replaced by a block of smart apartments – for a hot bath and ‘rest’, followed by ‘delicious fried soles and Welsh rarebit’.

The story ends with the rocket intended by Sir Hugo to blow up Buckingham Palace being ingeniously redirected into the Channel to destroy the Russian submarine in which Drax and his evil entourage are fleeing. To Bond’s irritation, Miss Brand declines his offer to accompany him to France for further exploration of her distinguishing marks, so that she can go and marry her policeman fiancé. Bond consoles himself with the knowledge that by deploying his amazing sexual magnetism to thaw her oh-so-English frigidity, he has eased the path to shared marital bliss.

The book has the whiff of uncollected food waste about it. Fleming’s way with Bond’s women is comically voyeuristic – ‘the wrap-over bodice just showed the swell of her breasts which were as splendid as Bond had guessed from the measurements on her record sheet.’ The story itself, energised by a rabid hatred of Germans focussed on the ridiculous caricature villain Drax, is vintage Bulldog Drummond, redeemed only somewhat by Fleming’s evident affection for the Kent coastline and the bay where he made his home for a while.

*  *  *

Dover cliffs

The path to Dover passes South Foreland lighthouse on the seaward side. The lighthouse’s days of guiding mariners through the Strait and away from the ships’ graveyard of the Goodwin Sands are long gone. It is now heritage, and very neat and white and National Trust. A little way on, the bastions of Dover Castle showed above the skyline. I met a couple from Folkestone who said they often came to walk this way. ‘It’s the sense of freedom you get up here on the cliffs,’ the wife said. ‘And of being so close to France and Paris,’ he added.

He was right. The French coast is as close here as it gets, although I never saw it.

Dover port

The cliffs extend to the eastern limit of the port, so that Dover and its main business are revealed suddenly and completely. Announcements of the ferry departure and arrival times in French and English float melodiously above the ceaseless dissonant grinding and hissing of gears and brakes and roaring of diesel engines as the mighty movers of goods manoeuvre themselves around the approaches to the ferries. The roads in and out, the A2 and the A20, make no concessions to gracious living. Their function is to shift heavy traffic as quickly as possible, and the buildings near them shake and reverberate with the sound and fury of forty-ton loads.

As the main Channel port, Dover does not need another role. During the nineteenth century it had pretensions to become a resort, and built an array of gleaming hotels and terraces and crescents of stuccoed mansions with balconies framed by ornate ironwork. Dickens stayed in a house in Camden Crescent, just back from the seafront, for three months in 1852 to work on Bleak House. He found Dover ‘not quite to my taste, being too bandy (I mean too musical, no reference to its legs) and infinitely too genteel . . . but the sea is very fine and the walks very remarkable.’

Victorian Dover was badly knocked about by German bombs and shells between 1940 and 1944. The work of further wrecking the town has been actively pursued by planners and developers ever since. In the 1950s the prime position on the seafront was filled by a huge slab of flats known as the Gateway. At the time it was considered rather daring and contemporary – Pevsner talked of it presenting ‘a bold face to the sea’ – but the passing of time has not been kind to it and the sheer size of the dingy brown façade with its clutter of balconies overwhelms everything around.

Schemes to clear up the muddle of the town centre have come and gone. Some did not get beyond the drawing board. Others – such as the one involving the building of the famously hideous and now derelict Burlington House office block in the 1960s – were partially realised, then abandoned once their awfulness became apparent. In the 1990s the council proudly opened an audio-visual extravaganza called the White Cliffs Experience to show that Dover could attract more than truckers and passing continental holidaymakers. It flopped and was turned into the Dover Discovery Centre, which squats unappealingly but at least usefully beside the London road.

Wholesale redevelopment is now promised again, although seasoned observers and cynics are not holding their breath. Meanwhile a grandiose plan for the western fringes of the town, to include 500 houses, a ‘retirement village’, a conference hall and the inevitable heritage centre, has been waved through by the government despite howls of outrage from conservation bodies including the National Trust and Natural England. The council leader wittered something about the transformation of fields into a housing estate ‘unlocking the economic potential of our heritage assets’, words which should strike a chill into Dovorian hearts.

Looking out from a plinth in front of the Gateway flats is a bust of the man who first swam the narrow divide with France. Matthew Webb, his body daubed with porpoise fat, reached Calais on 25 August 1875 to be welcomed with a rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’ from the crew of the Royal Mail’s packet service, which happened to be leaving harbour at the same time. He had been in the water for almost twenty-two hours and because of the tides and currents had covered thirty-nine miles, almost twice the actual distance. In the process Webb became a national hero and instituted a classic of endurance that has drawn legions of swimmers from all over the world ever since.

Poor Webb! He was a hero, but also an early victim of what we now know as the cult of celebrity. In the first few months after his conquest of the Channel a testimonial fund raised £2500 for him, and he toured the country to describe his exploits in his rolling Shropshire accent. But, as the invitations dried up and the money began to run out, he realised that he was defined by his swim and that alone, so swim he must. He embarked upon a programme of races and endurance challenges which put his physique under severe strain. After one challenge he coughed blood, and his brother, a doctor, warned him that he was asking too much of his body. Webb’s response was to announce that he would swim the rapids and whirlpools below Niagara Falls. A friend told him he would not come back alive. ‘Don’t care,’ Webb replied. ‘I want money and I must have it.’

He lasted nine minutes before being dragged down for the last time. His shattered body, identified by a blue anchor tattooed on his right arm, was recovered eight miles downstream. He had a gash to the top of his head that had penetrated to his brain.

It is no coincidence that of the more than 1300 swimmers from around the world to have crossed the Channel, a bare halfdozen have been French. Their lack of enthusiasm for following in Webb’s powerful breast strokes is symptomatic of a wider indifference. To us it is the English Channel, to them it is merely La Manche, The Sleeve. French writers have hardly bothered with it as an entity. The nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet – a fierce critic of all things Anglo-Saxon – said he was saddened that ‘this expanse of freedom’ should belong to another nation, but he did not dispute the claim.

This French complaisance is understandable. England may be the ancient enemy, but France’s borders are open to armies and influences from all directions. Historically the first duty of England’s rulers and the first priority of England’s security strategy has been to keep watch and hold sway over the Channel, whereas France’s enemies have come from every point of the compass.

Geological accident also contributed significantly to England’s primacy. The Pleistocene upheaval that separated Britain from continental Europe left the southern coast of England with a succession of deeply indented inlets and flooded estuaries to serve as anchorages for warships. In contrast the French Channel coast had no deep-water sanctuaries from the storms and the fierce currents that swirled around the offshore reefs. During the Napoleonic Wars Britain had Portsmouth and Falmouth from which to launch and supply its navy. The French had only Brest, outside the Channel and comparatively simple to blockade.

Most of the decisive events in our external history have involved the Channel in one key way or another. Julius Caesar crossed it to threaten invasion, and the army of Claudius to effect it. The monk Augustine came through the Strait of Dover to bring Christianity to Kent. Duke William of Normandy sailed from Barfleur in the late summer of 1066 to make landing near Hastings. Edward III, his son the Black Prince and Henry V all led their armies the other way en route to their great victories at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt. The Armada sailed up the Channel in 1588, the first act in England’s salvation and Spain’s catastrophe. Charles II arrived in Dover in 1660 to claim his crown. Twenty-eight years later William of Orange brought his fleet into Brixham in Devon to depose James II and ensure England remained Protestant. In 1805, with his armies massed at Boulogne, Napoleon ordered Admiral Villeneuve to leave Cádiz to make the Channel safe for the invasion – Villeneuve got as far as Trafalgar. In 1940 Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to clear the skies over the Channel and bomb the Channel ports in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain. Four years later those Channel ports dispatched the D-Day invasion forces to liberate Europe.

These crises all contributed to shaping the nation and our awareness of who we are. They have also cemented the place of the Channel in that awareness as both our principal defence against our enemies and the visible symbol of our separateness from Europe. The novelist William Golding detected what he called ‘a hard core of reserve’ in our attitude to crossing that divide. ‘The waters of the Channel have run for too many years in our blood,’ he wrote.

But our apprehension is subtly various. Throughout our history the Channel has been both bulwark and transport route. When the occasion has demanded, we have generally been able to turn it into a formidable defence. Yet our rulers and their armies and navies have come and gone across it, as have our traders. For the great majority of the past two thousand years the Channel has been far more important as our connection with mainland Europe, enabling us to do business, conduct diplomacy, export and absorb cultural and philosophical influences.

Our conception of the Channel is not one thing or the other, but a composite derived from multiple roles. The defence role is now defunct – no invader need ever cross the Channel again. Nevertheless, and despite the Tunnel, it continues to define and stand for our detachment from our neighbours. Travelling overland in mainland Europe, it is now extremely easy to overlook borders. It is not so easy to miss Portsmouth Harbour or the Dover cliffs.

2

A MERE DITCH

Dover Castle

Dover is flanked by two mighty defence installations, neither of which has ever played any useful active role in defending the realm. To the east is Dover Castle, the biggest in the country, which has stood for 800 years. Facing it across the town is the Western Heights, a labyrinth of redoubts, gun emplacements,underground shafts and chambers and magazines excavated and constructed to resist Bonaparte’s invasion.

In days long past, poor people – the lighter the better – descended the cliffs below Dover Castle to collect the fleshy green leaves of rock samphire. Pickled, it was highly regarded in a salad; the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn recommended soaking the leaves in brine before bottling – ‘then it will keep very green’ he wrote.

Rock samphire, Crithmum maritimum, grows in the fissures of chalk cliffs. It should not be confused with sea or marsh samphire, which belongs to a wholly different family of plants and is used these days as a fancy accompaniment to fish. Shakespeare was familiar with the hazardous business of collecting it; a late scene in King Lear is set in ‘the country near Dover’ in which Edgar leads the blinded Gloucester close to the cliff edge where ‘halfway down / hangs one that gathers samphire – dreadful trade!’

The dreadful trade died out in the nineteenth century. But a ghostly echo has been deployed for heritage purposes at Samphire Hoe, a country park created halfway between Dover and Folkestone from the chalky earth excavated by the Channel tunnellers. I cycled down to it quite by accident, thinking I was on the path to Folkestone. It has all the usual features – nature trail, cycleway, sea-wall path, hides for looking at birds, wheelchair ramps, visitor centre, café – and a squad of well-intentioned volunteers ready to steer you in the direction of the nesting sites of stonechats or the haunts of peregrine falcons or the meadowland where the shy spider orchid raises its curiously shaped brown head. I suspect that, were you to attempt to climb in search of samphire with a knife in your hand, you would be detained and reminded that conservation rather than consumption is the current orthodoxy.

I had a rest on a seat outside Folkestone’s parish church, dedicated to St Mary and St Eanswythe, a virtuous Kentish nun. I intended, once I got my strength back, to go inside and inspect the wealth of memorials. There is one to Folkestone’s most famous son, William Harvey, who first described the circulation of blood. I liked the sound of another, by the Reverend John Langhorne in memory of his brother, with these affecting lines: ‘If life has taught me aught that asks a sigh / ’tis but like thee to live, like thee to die.’

However, the door was locked and there was nothing to say where a key might be obtained. There was a notice announcing that the 8 a.m. Holy Communion had been ‘discontinued until further notice’. The roof of the aisle was hidden by scaffolding and sheets of plastic, behind which a pair of workmen applied hammers and nails. Two cider drunks were showering each other with abuse and spittle in one part of the churchyard. Multiple deposits of dog shit compounded the general air of abandonment.

A tour of Folkestone’s much-publicised Creative Quarter did little to lift the spirits. The transformation of the heart of old Folkestone into an enclave of bright, trendy boutiques and bars and galleries began a decade ago, and has often been held up as a shining example of how small-scale, grass-roots initiatives can spark a renewal of commercially moribund seaside communities. It was applauded and rightly so, but the limitations of the model were plain to see, with at least a quarter of the shops empty or about to be empty, and customers sparsely distributed along the cobbled streets.

Folkestone Harbour

In September 2000 Folkestone ceased to be a cross-Channel port. The opening of the Tunnel and the concentration of ferry services on Dover dealt the town a blow from which it has not yet recovered. The impact is most evident in the wasteland that has spread to the west of the old terminal. This stretch of seafront, in front of the vast Grand Burstin Hotel, used to be filled by the garish and cheerful Rotunda fun park, complete with boating pool, rollercoaster, dodgems, amusement park and Castle Dracula – all now swept away as if they had never been. The hotel is left, with its 481 en-suite bedrooms and an impressive collection of scathing TripAdvisor comments. Across the road are derelict buildings, a skatepark rich in graffiti and wide, empty spaces of cracked concrete, with the grey shingle, the black breakwaters and the grey sea beyond.

The chant from those who care about Folkestone is regeneration. There is a plan, naturally. There is always a plan, sometimes even a Masterplan. Norman Foster presented a Masterplan for Folkestone’s decayed seafront some years ago. It envisaged a marina, a university campus, 1400 homes, a revived ferry connection with France, even a lighthouse, plus the usual hotels/restaurants/leisure-and-conference facilities. It perished; a victim of the recession, it was said.

It has been replaced by another plan, not a Masterplan this time, the work of Sir Terry Farrell. His vision concentrates on housing – beach houses nearest the sea, so-called ‘dune’ houses behind, mews houses behind them, town houses at the back, flats to one side – with the retail and visitor attraction stuff woven in and around. The local MP, Damian Collins, called it ‘very exciting’, adding perceptively, ‘Rome was not built in a day and nor will this be.’

The spectacle of seaside towns grappling with the future tends to be a discomfiting one. The sequence is familiar: a decline in tourist trade matched by a decline