In Praise of the British Seaside Holiday

In Praise of the British Seaside Holiday


Neon pink sticks of rock, with the name of the location printed right through the middle in wobbly letters; fish and chips out of newspaper on a cliff-top walk; windbreaks, deck chairs and hard-boiled eggs with a little bit of salt. Yep, there’s nothing quite like a British seaside holiday to get the nostalgia going.


And, for the full retro deal, what you need is a camping (or caravanning!) British seaside holiday. Cornwall holiday parks – like Lake District camp sites – offer the ne plus ultra of classic British holiday entertainment. That’s bingo for the ladies; cabaret for everyone; indoor, heated swimming pools; and, of course, a million permutations on Butlins’ famous Red Coats.

Red deckchairs against a white wall.
Camping, let it be said, is a very different experience in Britain (even Cornwall!) from elsewhere in the world. What can be a raw, rugged “back to nature” experience in some climates and cultures becomes the living, breathing embodiment of the saying that “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”

And, while we’re not as bad as most Americans and many Australians, we Britons do tend to bring everything but the kitchen sink with us while camping. It’s not at all unusual for campers to come equipped with multi-room tents – perfect castles, even without the standalone dining gazebo and kitchenette. We’ll gear up with a panoply of accessories from storage boxes to camping tables, barbeques and fridges(!), as well as inflatable mattresses with sleeping bags, and likely pillows and sheets, for every single member of the family, possibly (but not necessarily) excluding the dog.

Then we set up, side by side, on neat, grassy pitches, and cram ourselves even closer together than mainland Chinese campers do. Bush camping, this is not. Not for the average Briton the bliss of waking by a mirror-smooth lake with nothing but your own tent in sight, and the sun sparkling on the water, or on an empty mountain top with the sun rising below you…

And, you know what? That’s OK. A British seaside holiday is not supposed to be adventurous. It’s not supposed to be rock ‘n’ roll. Wilfred Thesiger would not enjoy it. And, further, the weather almost certainly won’t hold up. It’s a communal event, a family thing – and even if you do need a wetsuit to spend more than half an hour in the water, quite frankly, who cares?


Image: Red and White by Jocelyn Kinghorn on Flickr’s Creative Commons.