Most people, most of the time, accepted such discomforts philosophically, as the obvious and unavoidable reciprocal of the rewards of seaside life. These included fish caught that morning, landed before noon and sold at shops that backed onto the fishing harbour, or freshly preserved in a smokehouse across the road; a more than usually liberal supply of inns, bars, cafés, restaurants, bakeries and fish and chip shops aimed at the tourist trade but sufficiently dependent on patronage from the townspeople to keep the prices keen; and enough antique, second-hand and knick-knack shops to guarantee – for the purchaser prepared to plod a sufficient distance – almost any clothing, furniture, instrument, implement or distraction desired.
Seaside communities share a set of characteristics that would define them as a species in the taxonomy of township: for one thing, they smell of the sea, parked cars are splattered with seagull excrement and the buildings nearest the front tend to look either freshly painted or faded and weatherbeaten, because these are the only two states possible on a southern coast exposed to prevailing winds. The seawall, promenade or coastal defences provide one obvious limit to expansion, and ambitious town planners hoping to exploit the holiday trade long ago zoned conspicuous areas of parkland to enhance amenity, and at the same time took steps to preserve access to the open countryside, so light industry, warehouses and superstores tend to accrete asymmetrically in one direction along a coast road and on the high terrain inland from the newest developments. All such towns have seen better days, and hotels and mansion blocks once built by speculators to attract the regular patronage of gentry and aristocracy have in some cases become temporary and uncomfortable accommodation for the dispossessed: refugees and asylum seekers from a dozen civil wars in Europe, Africa and Asia; and the unemployed, divorced, rejected, alcoholic, drug-addicted and depressed from the cities to the north. The south coast towns embrace pockets of considerable poverty within bigger settlements of only modest wealth, but the communities of have and have-not seem to muddle along peacefully most of the time. The areas nearest the promenade, pier and beach tend to become no man’s lands of peeling hotels, bars, amusement arcades, small ethnic restaurants, fish and chip shops, sweetshops, ice-cream parlours and kiosks specialising in souvenirs, ethnic jewellery, crass postcards and silly objects. In high summer and good weather, the beachfront roads and pavements are crowded with cars, cyclists, roller skaters, joggers, strollers, buskers and gangs of teenagers; the numbers are intermittently swollen by chartered busloads of day trippers, some of them families from south or west London out for a picnic in the fresh air; some of them visitors from Belgium or Holland. Near the close of the day, the numbers diminish, and the seagulls reclaim the shore, to peck at discarded and rejected kebabs, half-eaten pizzas and discarded boxes of chips.
Although such things define the seaside town as a species, each English south coast settlement retains a distinctive individuality, and could not – except for limited aspects within the ‘tripper zone’ that they all share – be mistaken for any other seaside town. Eastbourne, on the western side of the Pevensey Levels, has a spacious and gracious old town of flint and brick buildings served by brick pavements of the sort I have seen nowhere else, and an extended and cultivated promenade that gets wilder and more beautiful the further westward it is from the town’s heart. Hastings town comes almost to a dead halt around a crush of little buildings opposite the fishing harbour, at the foot of the East Cliffs. Its promenade begins beyond a seafront fairground and extends gracefully enough beyond the town’s pier, all but destroyed by fire, and along in front of a succession of handsome buildings all the way past St Leonards to a place known as Bo-Peep, where the attempt at formal seaside identity collapses into a clutter of light industrial buildings and small houses, beach huts and boat sheds and a long shingle walk to a huge, detached shopping development that announces the start of Bexhill-on-Sea. This southern perimeter is the baseline for a bulging triangle of suburban development that extends north to a road called The Ridge, beyond which the countryside begins. At the 2001 census, this area was home to 85,029 people, with a mean age of 39.6 years, of whom more than 94.5 percent were born in the United Kingdom, 67.4 percent of whom identified themselves as Christian, and only 2 percent of other faiths.
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In 2001, I and my family were of this number: now, in this addendum to a chapter that has taken more than a year to complete, we are not. We have moved across the Pevensey Levels to Eastbourne; another town that grew up around a bourne or stream, another town mentioned in the Domesday Book, a town in its own different way as distinctive as Hastings, and to a house in no way as distinctive as the one we maintained in Hastings. The reasons for the move are not important: what matters is that we felt no great wrench, no dislocation and no sense of loss as we made it. The twenty-three years that I spent living in Hastings was the longest period of my life in any one settlement, let alone one house. If we count by years of residence, then that would make me a Hastings man. But it does not. The towns of Kent and Sussex, of Essex and Surrey and Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, have to some extent struck a bargain with the national capital, London. You provide the employment, and we will provide the people; you provide the income, and we will furnish the beds, the county towns might have said. The distinctive autonomy, the panoply of entirely local legislation, custom and practice that distinguished one community from another, began to disappear centuries ago as central government exerted increasing authority. The arrival of the railways did the rest: a million or two households in the south-east of England depend on earnings paid by London-based employers, and places such as Kent and Sussex are simply part of a larger commune called the commuter belt. Townspeople from Hastings – and from Tunbridge Wells and Ashford and Lewes and so on – began to get used to spending hours of each day neither at home nor at work, as citizens of nowhere in particular, travelling at an average of fifty miles an hour through landscapes at which they have long since ceased to look.
Once a town becomes a dormitory suburb of a metropolis, a place of convenience and affordability, it loses some of its character. Economic policies now encourage the movement of capital and labour, but it is important to remember that they always did. Towns welcomed merchants and merchandise; after the great plague of 1348, which is supposed to have killed more than one person in three in Europe, the survivors also welcomed any craftsman or skilled labour that came their way. For precisely the same reasons that medieval settlements grew into fortified towns, each with its own unique character, so this uniqueness began to dissipate. People have always been prepared to move home, to go somewhere else in the hope of a new and perhaps a better life, a greater challenge, a more thrilling vocation, and this departure is the thing that confers some of the substance of identity. Jesus the carpenter’s son became Jesus of Nazareth when he left Nazareth, first for the countryside and then for Jerusalem. At home in Vinci, Leonardo was simply the son of Messer Piero; he became Leonardo da Vinci when he moved to Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome. But bureaucracy now confers upon us other, more precise forms of identification: we have formal surnames, registered at birth and recorded on a passport. These surnames are sometimes place names – Norton, Barton, Sutton all date back to old English locations – but they define lineage rather than place. We acquire tax and National Insurance numbers, and must be identified by our dates of birth. The town exists as a postal address, but it could, in Britain, be supplanted by that unfeeling and relatively recent precision tool, the postcode.
Most of us are uprooted, detached and replanted. The Duke of Devonshire has his historic home in Derbyshire. The Prince of Wales does not live in Wales: he may more easily be found in Scotland, Norfolk, Buckinghamshire, London or Gloucestershire. And this writer, who made a home in Hastings for almost a third of a lifetime, has somewhat ruefully discovered that he is not a Hastings man. He has become a man from somewhere. He is a United Kingdom citizen; he has made his home in England for almost fifty years; he loves Sussex; he is married to a Londoner; his son is a Yorkshireman by birth, and his daughter a Maid of Kent; he is a monoglot Francophile and Russophile and emphatically European in his political sympathies; but he cannot shake off an awareness, a cast of mind, a substrate of identity that set in his teenage years, under bright skies in which the Sun was always in the north, beer was always served cold, roads were covered with loose metal, houses had verandas, trees were evergreen, Christmas Day was hot and children ran to the beach in bare feet.
To be aware of this is not to wish to go back. We cannot go back to what was, because that