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The English seaside has long been seductive. For 200 years, punters have sought out its quirky thrills from bingo to Wurlitzer organ dances, glamorous granny parades to child-jockeyed donkey races, lewdly shaped rock candy to harrowingly bad karaoke. But recently, many seaside towns have been pummelled by poverty, unemployment, underinvestment, addiction, Brexit, Covid-19 and the climate emergency.
Writer Tom Sykes and illustrator Louis Netter take you on a Gonzo tour of 21 English coastal communities in an age of anxiety and absurdity. Their encounters are comical, sad, weird and beguiling - sometimes all at once. A post-lockdown beach party turns violent in Bournemouth. The Hampshire shores pile up with plastic waste and sewage dumped by a water company. St Osyth and Jaywick's trailer parks and makeshift homes have come to resemble a Global Southern shanty town. Covid disinformation is daubed on walls and benches across the Dorset coast. A pub in Scarborough celebrates Ulster paramilitarism. Portsmouthians come to terms with the imperial past. A Blackpudlian musician confesses an intimate connection to the serial killer Harold Shipman.
But there's good news too. Combers and mudlarkers are cleaning our beaches. Art projects are drawing attention to coastal erosion and other ecological menaces. In an increasingly uniform England of red-brick estates and retail parks, seaside towns might just be our last outposts of eccentricity and individuality.
