The Seaside and the Future of England
“The Jolly Fisherman”: Poster by John Hassall, for GNR in 1908, courtesy of the Science Museum Group
By TIm Thorlby
5 mins read
“Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside!”
As the English summer unfolds and holidays beckon I have been struck by several news stories recently which affect our coastal towns. This is a blog about the fortunes of those many coastal communities, how they have fared in my lifetime and what the future holds.
With the rise of Reform, our coasts may even hold England’s future in their hands. As our politics falls apart, is there still time for a New Deal for the Shores of England?
The sounds of the seaside
Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside!
I do like to be beside the sea!
Oh I do like to stroll along the Prom, Prom, Prom!
Where the brass bands play, "Tiddely-om-pom-pom!"
I grew up with the sound of this little musical ditty being sung in our family, not least because we actually did live by the seaside. It’s an Edwardian Music Hall song from the heyday of the English seaside holiday.
I grew up in Skegness, a small town on the east coast of Lincolnshire. It has miles of golden sands, a big sky and lots of sunshine.
Other sounds of the seaside – apart from our family singing this song – included the cry of hungry seagulls, the crashing of the waves onto the seashore (in the heat of summer, I could hear this from my open bedroom window) and the canned music of the funfair drifting on the breeze.
I miss the place. But I left when I was 18 to seek fame and fortune in the city, along with many of my classmates. The seaside is not a great place for jobs. Much of the economy is seasonal, relying on summer tourism or local farms. Some find a way to make it work, quite a lot leave.
I have been thinking about my childhood home a lot recently. Partly because it has been in the news recently, but mainly because it is rarely in the news. And I think that’s a problem. Our coastal towns, even now, are largely forgotten places for Government.
The winds of change?
Skegness, like many coastal towns, has a regeneration partnership which bids for funds and invests in helpful projects. Their most recent annual report is full of great projects. Clearly, some things are changing. The new FE learning campus in particular looks like a good step forward for the town.
Yet many things have not changed at all since my childhood days of making sandcastles on the beach. This small town remains one of the most deprived in England.
Its local authority area (East Lindsey District Council) is one of the 10% most deprived in England and nearly half of the communities along the coast fall into the 10% most deprived; the seaside is where most of the county’s deprivation is concentrated.[1]
The newest measure of disadvantage, from the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, has identified 613 ‘Mission Critical Neighbourhoods’ in England and places no less than 14 of them in and around Skegness.
In fact, this national study of deprivation by the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods[2] has confirmed that England’s coastal communities are now the frontline in poverty:
"...many of the neighbourhoods facing the highest levels of disadvantage today are coastal."
This pattern of coastal disadvantage has not changed in my lifetime. The economic and wealth gap between our coastal areas and the rest of the country has continued to widen in the last forty years.
It is therefore no great surprise that Nigel Farage’s Reform party, with its politics of disenfranchisement and grievance, has done particularly well along our coasts. Of their six MPs elected in 2024, half represented seaside towns – Nigel Farage in Clacton-on-Sea, Rupert Lowe in Great Yarmouth and Richard Tice….in Boston and Skegness.
In June 2024, Richard Tice was elected as the MP for the parliamentary constituency of which Skegness is a part (‘Boston and Skegness’), the first Reform MP for the town and one of the first for the UK. He overturned the large traditional Tory majority with a small majority of 2,000 votes.
Although immigration has been an issue in the nearby town of Boston, this is not really the experience of Skegness. The 2021 Census shows that the White British population is still 94% of the community. The largest group of immigrants (people not born in England)? People born in Scotland.
The substantive grievance in Skegness is economic. As has been said before:
“It’s the economy, stupid”
They’re not wrong.
Investment! Investment! …oh
As I have written in numerous previous blogs, the UK has a poor track record in recent decades in the levels of investment generally and particularly outside of London and the South-East.
The North-South divide has continued to widen in the last forty years, as has the Coast vs Inland Gap (which is not currently a Thing by the way, but it ought to be). I will not repeat the arguments here.
Towns like Skegness have benefited from small-scale investments, like the recent Towns Fund, which is welcome, but few big economic investments. These pepper-pot funds are not enough. Even the newly announced funding for the Neighbourhoods Plan (with its Trailblazer Neighbourhoods) is unlikely to tackle this head on, as it does not really address core economic issues and is not really big enough.
NB: There is a warning here from the experience of the Towns Fund. Rishi Sunak spent £1.2 billion through the Towns Fund and similar pots, mostly in Tory constituencies, to refresh town centres, look busy and see off Nigel Farage. (A strategy once memorably described to me as “more bogs, bollards and brick paving”) It failed. In all of the constituencies to benefit from Towns Fund cash, only one Tory MP survived.
Imagine my excitement then when I finally got to read the Government’s new ‘modern’ Industrial Strategy, just published, setting out plans for over £100bn investment into the UK’s growth sectors over the next decade. Surely, our time has come? Fetch the popcorn!
Let’s be clear, the Industrial Strategy is a Good Thing and should deliver some welcome long-term investment into key industries. It’s fairly big economic news. It’s even quite sensible.
But is it going to deliver much for tourism? Or our coastal economies? Will there be Industrial Strategy Investment Zones on the coast? Not really.
I do get the fact that the Industrial Strategy is going to invest in expanding industrial assets that already exist. That does make sense. And it may, delivered effectively, benefit the North of England (also a Good Thing). But it is likely to do little for the Coast because the eight ‘Growth Sectors’ identified for investment (like ‘life sciences’ and ‘advanced manufacturing’) are primarily not located on our coasts.
The UK’s Coast vs Inland Gap will continue to widen.
Where is the investment to transform the economies of our coastal communities? How do we make sure that the investment now starting to flow will - at least in part - reach the shores of England? In an era of broadband and zoom calls when geography matters less to many businesses, why can’t more of this investment be in coastal locations?
A New Deal for the Shores of England
It seems quite clear to me that ‘business as usual’ is not going to work, even with all of the new economic investment coming down the track. Much of it will continue to bypass our coastal communities.
We need a New Deal – a new approach – that will benefit those living along the shores of England.
I would say that there are three crucial bits of the jigsaw missing:
HEAD – where is the policy think tank researching and drawing together the challenges and issues facing our coastal communities in a way that packs a political punch? We need an IPPR for the Coast
HANDS – where is the agency which is clearly focused on delivering investment for the coast? All of our existing development agencies and investment banks have national remits. They all forget about the coast or have other priorities. We need a new Coastal Regeneration Agency, which is tasked with prioritising the economic regeneration of our coastal areas and has billions of pounds to spend and knows how to lever in the Big Money from other agencies and government departments. The issues on the coast are not the same as those in the inner city; they need very different solutions.
HEART – where is the political movement and ‘voice’ in Parliament making waves (pun intended) about our forgotten towns?
A little while ago I researched and proposed how a Coastal Regeneration Agency might work and be funded.
I won’t repeat it all here (I realise you are not all Policy Wonks or Government Ministers), but please take a look at my Policy Lab Paper if you are interested. I think it’s a good idea. It’s the sort of institution we need to bring a hard focus to this work. (If you actually are a Government Minister, please do get in touch).
‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’
I look forward to the day when our coastal towns are, once again, thriving places with bright futures and lots of opportunities for young people who want to stay.
These communities are also now central to the political arena where the future of England – and the UK – are likely to be decided.
The politics of these forgotten towns is being built into a base for our first Reform Prime Minister, no longer a fanciful idea. Their fortunes are therefore no longer just of local interest, they affect us all.
Ice cream, anyone?
This blog was written by Tim Thorlby. Please sign up for the email alert if you’d like to know about future blogs, usually published once a month.
Notes
[1] See the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2019
[2] ICON (2025) Progress and Pressure | Access: https://www.neighbourhoodscommission.org.uk/report/progress-and-pressure-understanding-economic-and-social-change-in-englands-neighbourhoods/