Coast of Teeth: Travels to English Seaside Town in an Age of Anxiety
by Tom Sykes and Louis Netter
Signal Books, £14.99

IF you have ever caught the train to Brighton of a weekend or bank holiday, you may have noticed the excited anticipation rippling through the carriage as it pulls into the station. 

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All races, cultures, ages, sexes and even classes have the prospect of a day of earthly pleasure-seeking: wide and windy beaches stretch to the horizon, along with bad food, slot machines and shivering dips.

British seaside resorts still provide careless enjoyment, a sense of freedom — just good and (more or less) clean fun. I love it all.

There is little sense of that in Sykes and Netter’s representation. 

They focus on the very dismal side of these towns from Cornwall to Blackpool. Theirs is a portrait of blight and neglect: people and buildings are crumbling away, along with much of the coastline itself. 

I have mourned it too, whether it be the homeless and hopeless occupying the grottoes of the Victorian Lees in Folkestone, or the seediness of Skegness.

For many or most of these towns, inequality, destitution, anger and despair pervade the handsome Georgian terraces, Victorian guest houses and 20th century housing estates on the outskirts.

In describing the inhabitants and holiday-makers in these towns the authors say they “have striven to represent them fairly, accurately and empathetically.” But for me they have failed. They see but lack discernment. They know but do not comprehend. 

The cause of the misery and suffering they observe is “underfunding, underskilling, unemployment and flaws in the benefit system.” 

That is a very weak explanation of the fate of these victims of an economy and society in decay, of the destruction of fishing and general deindustrialisation and low wages. Perhaps for that reason, the book curiously lacks compassion. 

There are endless sketches of weary faces with surly, broken-toothed expressions or raucous laughs, of bulging bras and sagging beer-bellies. Taken as a whole, they constitute the very caricature of “broken Britain” that the authors sought to avoid. 

The constant refrain in the commentary is that the people they encounter are bigoted, racist and nostalgic for a lost world and empire.

After all, they must be — all these places voted for Brexit. The authors are convinced of their objectivity, their lack of prejudice but they seem to sneer and smirk (their word) as they encounter still more deluded Englishness. 

It is a shame. 

The authors are right to draw attention to the waste of a potentially wonderful resource.

The sketches come into their own in the few glimpses of the architectural heritage of these towns or the odd comical seagull on a discarded sandwich or rusting sewage pipe. 

They are right that there is something quirky and eccentric to be celebrated in the people and places, but there is no vision for making the seaside, once so woven into the fabric of English working-class life, vibrant again. 

The problems of seaside towns, as of England’s mining villages, and former steel and mill towns predate Brexit.

They are the inevitable result of a relentless market logic, of a predatory capitalism that has found it can degrade with impunity human beings and all that they hold dear.

Our coastline is in many ways a living commons: even if not held in common it is free for all to use freely — unlike the coastline in many parts of Europe.

It needs planned support and investment. We need to stop the sneering and start making common cause.