Coastal towns are easily mocked, but we should not brush over their struggle

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/30/coastal-towns-mocked-not-brush-over-struggle

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British seaside towns have been an easy target of satirists, poets and pop singers for much of the past few decades – from Philip Larkin’s vision of a vandalised poster for Sunny Prestatyn to Morrissey’s wishing of Armageddon upon an unnamed resort in Everyday is Like Sunday, they have been scorned and excoriated in a particularly acute version of the casual contempt aimed at every urban area in the UK but for London, Oxbridge, Bath or Edinburgh.

Statistically, it transpires there is in fact something particularly bleak about the UK’s coastal towns. A report just issued by the Office for National Statistics makes clear that their residents are particularly aged, particularly homogenous, but more to the point, particularly poor, with higher average rates of unemployment and insecure work than any other kind of settlement. Despite – or because of – the exceptionally low levels of immigration in these towns, they are proving a hotbed of support for Ukip, which elected its first MP in Clacton and is hoping for others in Thanet and Skegness. How did this happen, and what is being done about it?

Coastal towns might be the places that many working-class people escaped to from the industrial city, particularly on their retirement, but various changes have left them even more vulnerable than many industrial towns. Tourism was dealt a blow in the 1970s comparable in its finality to that which dealt with the steel, coal and textile industries – in this case the advent of the cheap package holidays on the Med. With a couple of relatively popular exceptions that have managed to pack in visitors – Blackpool or Brighton are the biggest – most of the towns affected have struggled to recover. Some, like Walsall, West Bromwich or Middlesbrough, have tried to restore themselves via that old New Labour magic trick of culture, and the “creative industries”, encouraging tourism of a less kiss-me-quick/saucy postcard (or insert your seedy childhood memory here) form. These towns were always, after all, dominated by the service industry, so the change should actually be less violent than that from steelmaking to coffee-preparing.

Here, the way ahead might have been shown by the successful refurbishment of Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion, a pioneering modernist building by the great interwar German architect Erich Mendelsohn, which nowadays hosts festivals of avant-garde music as much as tea dances.

A proliferation of biennales and triennales in seemingly unlikely places such as Folkestone and Whitstable has followed the new galleries and cultural centres in extremely deprived towns like Margate or Hastings. I saw some of this at work in a conference on urban regeneration at Folkestone’s Triennale, sponsored by a local philanthropist who had, fittingly, made his money on Saga, encouraging the elderly to holiday in less rainy locations. The city was so liberally sprinkled with artworks that it looked as if somebody had left them as part of a relational aesthetics-themed murder mystery. A postmodernist/Hawksmoor-themed beach hut by Pablo Bronstein looks out to the sea, bright optical art sculptures lurk in the craggy pathways that lead down to the beach, flags and billboards by Yoko Ono proclaim “Earth Peace”, it all culminating with the lucky happenstance of a Banksy, immediately placed behind perspex so it couldn’t be removed or vandalised (unsuccessfully, it turned out).

Walking around the town, it was clear that the aim to attract culture tourism from London had been successful; but it will face the same question that any seaside town faces – what happens when it’s off-season? Spitting distance from Folkestone’s branded Creative Quarter is Folkestone Harbour, bought some years ago by Saga’s owner Roger De Haan, who has commissioned a masterplan from Sir Terry Farrell – so that, just like in a normal industrial town, speculation will replace industry. Yet however many fans of contemporary art get trains into towns like these, even if a good few take the opportunity to rent cheap studio space not too far from London, there’s no guarantee that anything will trickle down from them to the stricken towns, and their residents, themselves. There’s no reason why fine contemporary art and the highest votes for Ukip in the country can’t happily coexist.