There’s filth in the water, and inhumanity in the air. Greed and nationalism have destroyed a great British pleasure
This ought to be a new golden age for the British seaside, since we have somehow managed to recreate the conditions of its last golden age, the late 1940s, and nobody can afford to go abroad. Take a plane almost anywhere, and you’re flying closer to a climate crisis and will find it hard not to ruminate on your own contribution to it. Take a boat and you’ll spend most of your holiday in Dover. These are the ideal circumstances in which to rediscover the beauty of, say, Weymouth or Scarborough.
But you have to wonder how charming it would be to go to a Dorset beach when the area is mainly in the news because of the Bibby Stockholm, the giant refugee barge that has just taken delivery of its first residents. Even if you couldn’t see it from your beach hut – it is modestly moored in a non-beauty spot – you couldn’t help but wonder what life is like on this cramped seaborne accommodation, where the walls are bare, the hours untenanted and the TVs have no plugs. Is it at all like a cruise? Or is it more like a prison hulk? Sure, we all live in the shadow of inhumanity, but it’s difficult to imagine a mini-break there.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
