Sussex By The Sea

From Hastings to Bognor, Sussex’s seafront is still thriving, as a new book by Allan Brodie of Historic England proves.

- Jack Watkins

Anyone pessimistic about the plight of the British high street should take heart from the enduring spirit of the nation’s seaside towns, widely thought to have been on their last legs for years. “Seaside resorts, including those in Sussex, have been changing continuously for the past two or three centuries,” says Allan Brodie, senior investigator of Historic England and author of a generously illustrated new book The Seafront. He points out that talk of their decline has been a common theme since the 1970s ever since people started looking to the Med for their holidays. “They are still there, and still popular, and a walk along the seafronts of Brighton, Hastings, Worthing, Eastbourne and Bognor Regis shows most retails units to be occupied, at least during the summer season. There is still a dynamic quality to resorts around the coast.”

Brodie’s book conveys the contradictions and contrasting features of the fascinating, but not always easily definable area of English coastal resorts that lies between the seaward end of the pier and the first line of buildings along the promenade. He describes the seafront as: “familiar, yet unfamiliar, predictable but exciting, natural but artificial, relaxing and exciting, busy and quiet,” before tracing the evolution of something that has been part of our popular culture for more than 200 years. It’s also been the inspiration for many paintings and novels, notably Walter Sickert’s Pierrots, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, and Patrick Hamilton’s The West Pier.