Toxic sand and piles of litter: why we’ve stopped going to British beaches
I’m just back from a week in North Norfolk where I had my first UK seaside holiday for 20 years. contrary to the sentiments in this article that coast was heaving, towns like Sheringham and Cromer were a delight and in my view the rural seaside holiday is far from dead.This article in the light of my experience smacks more of a Daily Mail journalist escaped to the Guardian than reality. To get a flavour of how great the places we visited were watch the end of “Shakespeare in Love” it was filmed not in the Caribbean but at Holkham Beach! This article tells us
Have we stopped going to the beach? A National Trust survey says there has been a 20% reduction in visits to the coast. Apparently, people even prefer “urban beaches” – such as those in London and Sheffield. For a cyber generation, one can see how the fantasy or ersatz version might be better than the real thing. A blue screen is preferable to a blue horizon. All that sand in your sandwiches. Swarming jellyfish. Voracious, tortoise-murdering gulls. And cold water – I’ve lost count of the number of people who look at me as if I’m mad when I say I swim in the sea all year round, who proudly tell me they wouldn’t consider it even in the height of summer.
Maybe it’s an inverted class thing. The “hoi polloi”, used to flying off to European resorts or further afield, regard a British holiday as an admission of failure – leaving the coves of Cornwall to the likes of David Cameron and James Cracknell (who last weekend, along with his 11-year-old son, saved a grandfather and grandson from the Devonian waves).
Those who look askance at our littered beaches have a point. A recent academic book, The Last Beach, threatened to ruin the experience for me by reporting that the accumulation of pollution and sewage in the sea is now affecting the beach so severely that, in some places, the sand is toxic. The authors have a salutary shortlist of don’ts: “1. Don’t walk barefoot on the beach. 2. Don’t lie on the sand. Lie on a thick towel or blanket. 3. Never, ever get buried in beach sand.” The reason? New evidence suggests there are more faecal particles in the sand than in the muckiest sea.