North Wales’ oldest pier was demolished in 1973, the domed Pavilion theatre was razed the following year. Until the 1970s, the more than five million people who lived in Lancashire (the most populous county outside London at the time) saw the long strip of sandy coast as an accessible and affordable alternative to boisterous Blackpool.Īnd then the package holiday arrived: Majorca and Corfu stole the working classes, Marbella and Tenerife the aspiring middles. The resorts of North Wales in general reflect massive social changes in the wider region. Whether you’re after cockles or craft beer from your seaside break – well, we’ll leave that for you to decide.
Instead, we chose a score of classic resorts and studied how they have adapted – or not – over the past three decades, looking at factors such as housing and high streets, renovations and conservation, as well as the cultural clout that so often accompanies gentrification. Of course, this list isn’t conclusive or even a top 20.
It is also a very delicate balance: when property prices go crazy, locals are forced out and the prospect of becoming a ghost town lurks behind the shuttered fish and chip shop. The wave of recent gentrification has to vie with other trends of the times: care homes and retirees’ housing developments festival culture and eco-consciousness runners and “wild” swimmers nature-lovers and naturists. Upgrading a town so locals take more pride and feel ownership is surely no bad thing, even if it means a few old pubs and B&Bs go under. Only a small sect of nostalgists will insist there’s nothing better than slot machines, watery cockles and dubious comedy sets. As tastes have become more sophisticated across all strata of society, the savviest resorts have raised their game. Later came other shocks – second homes, Airbnb and a pandemic – exerting new pressures. Big seaside cities, like Blackpool and Brighton, have always had pockets of money as well as misery.īut with the emergence of affordable foreign package holidays in the Seventies, seaside resorts had to rethink, lest they dwindle and decay. Others were humble fishing villages that grew into hip townlets with pricey real estate, as in Salcombe and Fowey. Some resorts started posh and became popular, as with Barry and Southport. Fashionableness ebbs and flows like the tides in our seaside towns.
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