Scarborough

Years a go I worked with a man from the West Midlands who at the onset of August invariably recalled fond childhood memories of holidays in Blackpool in the 1950s. “Bingo on the Golden Mile,” he’d say rubbing his hands together with glee at the thought of it, “haddock and chips from Fleetwood and Stanley Matthews running down the wing at Bloomfield Road”. By the time I first visited Blackpool Stanley Matthews had been back in the Potteries for a decade, but, as our family’s Riley drove slowly along beneath the glittering lights of The Illuminations it still felt as if you might catch a glimpse of his baggy shorts flapping along the seafront.

Nostalgia is an integral part of the British seaside. Even now there seems to be a whiff of Brylcreme and No.55 Cologne mixed with the scent of the sea and the vinegar and boiling beef fat. You could never go to a cricket match at Scarborough without somebody telling you of the time Ritchie Benaud of the touring Australians hit sixes into the boarding houses, and the game was punctuated by the pop-pop of gunfire from the model battleships on the lake in Peasholm Park that re-fought the Battle of the River Plate several times a day. Across the way Barbara Windsor topped the bill at the Floral Hall and the backlit Perspex mosaic at the Harbour Bar offered ice cream served in wafers shaped like clam shells. There was cinnamon toast inside when it turned nippy, or a bacon bun (banjo’s the North Riding boys called them) standing outside the Teapot caravan watching the waves rolling in from Norway and crashing against the sea wall.

Scarborough hasn’t changed much since then, either. The Harbour Bar is as bright as ever (though the Knickerbocker Glories somehow don’t seem as tall) and the battleships still blast away. Undoubtedly that’s all to the good. The seaside resorts that have survived best are the ones that didn’t try and adapt to modern trends, that kept the boating lakes, the crazy golf and the shops selling sunhats, saucy postcards (“He wants a stick of rock like that monkey’s holding!”) and models of lighthouses perched on a promontory of cockle shells. Stasis, as Florence, Venice and Bruges have proved in an altogether grander manner, is a cornerstone of tourism. Last time our family were staying on the coast in Devon we spent one rainy afternoon merrily watching Shrek in a cinema that still had usherettes who showed you to your seat by torchlight and emerged during the interval with trays of choc-ices. In the café round the corner there was sole Veronique on the “evening dinner” menu and two old ladies talking about their ballroom dancing class, “He’s such a lovely man,” one was saying of the instructor, “Wonderful manners. Always smart. Immaculate fingernails. I’m surprised no young woman’s snapped him up”. It was like parachuting back into my childhood.

In Whitby a while ago a granny on the beach remarking that the town was on the verge of becoming a UNESCO world heritage site surveyed the town wistfully and said, “I’ve been coming here for fifty years. I hope they’re not going to smarten it up and ruin the place”. And you knew what she meant.