Blackpool gets the bawdy postcards. Brighton gets the travel supplements. But for every famous stretch of British coastline that’s been written about to death, there are a dozen forgotten British seaside resorts that once buzzed with brass bands, promenading families, and the particular smell of vinegar on chips in a paper cone. These were places that, for a brief and brilliant window of history, were absolutely the place to be. Then the package holiday arrived, and the lights went out.
The story of Britain’s seaside resorts is really a story about the railways. Before the mid-nineteenth century, a trip to the coast was a luxury reserved for the well-heeled, the kind of thing you did if you owned a horse and had the leisure time of a country squire. The physician Richard Russell had been banging on since the 1750s about the health benefits of sea bathing, but for most working people, it remained a theoretical pleasure. Then the railways arrived, and everything changed.
The Railway Boom That Built a Hundred Resorts
By the 1860s and 1870s, rail lines were threading their way into coastal towns that had previously been quiet fishing villages or modest market settlements. The effect was immediate and often dramatic. Populations swelled. Boarding houses and hotels shot up overnight. Pier companies raised capital and sank iron legs into the seabed. Towns that had been pottering along quite happily with a few hundred residents suddenly found themselves hosting tens of thousands of day-trippers and week-long holidaymakers from the industrial Midlands and the North.
Skegness, on the Lincolnshire coast, is perhaps the most famous example of a resort made entirely by the railway, but even Skegness has its imitators that the history books tend to ignore. Sutton-on-Sea, just a few miles down the same stretch of coast, enjoyed a brief Edwardian flourishing before quietly retreating into obscurity. Withernsea, on the East Yorkshire coast, gained its own branch line in 1854 and promptly reinvented itself as a resort for Hull’s working classes. The pier was built. The boarding houses filled up. Then the line closed in 1964, and Withernsea found itself stranded, quite literally cut off from the visitors who had sustained it.
Forgotten British Seaside Resorts That Once Had Real Glamour
Hunstanton, on the Norfolk coast, is one that deserves far more recognition than it gets. It was the only east-facing resort on the east coast of England that actually faced west, which meant sunsets rather than sunrises over the water. The Le Strange family, local landowners, spotted the opportunity when the railway arrived in 1862 and essentially built a new town from scratch: a proper Victorian seaside resort with a planned grid of streets, a promenade, and a seafront that was genuinely lovely. At its peak, Hunstanton was pulling in visitors from the East Midlands in considerable numbers. Today it ticks along quietly, a touch faded but still rather charming, its Victorian bones still visible beneath the amusement arcades.
Further north, Saltburn-by-the-Sea in North Yorkshire was the personal project of Henry Pease, a Quaker industrialist who envisioned a genteel, temperance-friendly resort for respectable Victorian families who found Scarborough a touch too rowdy. The cliff lift, installed in 1884 and still operating today, remains a remarkable piece of Victorian engineering. Saltburn never quite reached the heights Pease imagined for it, but it kept its dignity, and has spent the past decade or so quietly becoming rather fashionable again.
The Welsh and Scottish Coasts Had Their Own Stars
England had no monopoly on forgotten glories. Portobello, just east of Edinburgh, was once described as the Brighton of the North. In its Edwardian heyday it boasted an outdoor swimming pool that held five thousand bathers, a funfair, and a promenade that on a summer Sunday afternoon would be absolutely heaving. The pool is long gone, demolished in 1988, and Portobello has since been absorbed into the Edinburgh commuter belt, its resort identity more memory than reality.
In Wales, Aberystwyth punched well above its weight. The funicular railway up Constitution Hill, opened in 1896, is one of the longest electric cliff railways in Britain and still runs today. The town attracted serious Victorian money: the original Castle Hotel on the seafront was so grand it was eventually repurposed as the founding building of Aberystwyth University. Not many seaside resorts can claim to have accidentally founded a university.
Rhyl, on the North Wales coast, had a more populist trajectory. By the 1950s it was pulling in vast numbers of working-class holidaymakers from the English Midlands, its funfair and lido the draws. The Sun Centre, an indoor waterpark opened in 1980, was briefly one of the most visited attractions in Wales. It closed in 2013. The story of Rhyl is, in many ways, the story of Britain’s seaside resorts in miniature: a rapid rise, a glittering peak, and then a long and painful adjustment to a world that decided Spain was cheaper and more reliably sunny.
What Killed the Great British Seaside Holiday?
The honest answer is several things happening simultaneously. Package holidays to the Mediterranean, made affordable by jet travel and tour operators like Thomas Cook, began drawing British families away from Bridlington and Bognor Regis from the early 1960s onwards. The appeal was not hard to understand: guaranteed sunshine, cheap wine, and a swimming pool that didn’t involve a half-mile trudge across shingle in a force seven gale.
The Beeching cuts of the 1960s were brutal for many smaller resorts. When the branch lines closed, the day-tripper trade evaporated almost overnight. Towns like Withernsea and Hornsea on the East Yorkshire coast, or Lynton and Lynmouth in Devon, found themselves genuinely hard to reach. And a seaside resort that’s hard to reach is, for most people, not worth the bother.
The BBC has documented the ongoing challenges facing British coastal towns, where deprivation indices in places like Clacton-on-Sea and Margate have at various points ranked among the worst in the country. The boarding house economy that once sustained these places collapsed when self-catering holidays and later cheap foreign travel took hold, leaving behind a surplus of large Victorian houses and not enough people earning enough money to fill them.
The Slow, Complicated Comeback
Not every forgotten British seaside resort stayed forgotten. Margate, written off entirely by the 1990s, experienced a genuine renaissance when the Turner Contemporary gallery opened in 2011. Whitstable reinvented itself around oysters and second-home buyers from London. Hastings developed an arts scene. These recoveries are real, though they bring their own complications around housing affordability and the displacement of long-standing communities.
Other places are finding their feet more quietly. Clevedon in Somerset, with its impossibly elegant Victorian pier (restored after storm damage in the 1970s and now a Grade I listed structure), has become a destination for people who want the sea without the crowds. Lytham St Annes, the genteel neighbour of Blackpool that always kept itself slightly apart from the kiss-me-quick end of the market, still has its seafront windmill and its air of Edwardian self-possession.
There is something worth preserving in all of this. The forgotten British seaside resorts represent a particular chapter of social history: the moment when ordinary working people first got access to leisure, to rest, to the pleasure of standing at the edge of the country and watching the waves come in. The piers and promenades, the cliff lifts and the winter gardens, were built for them. They deserve to be remembered for more than just the rust and the nostalgia.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which forgotten British seaside resorts are worth visiting today?
Saltburn-by-the-Sea, Clevedon, and Hunstanton are all excellent choices, each retaining genuine Victorian character without the crowds of more famous resorts. Saltburn’s cliff lift still operates, and Clevedon’s pier is one of the finest restored Victorian structures in the country.
Why did so many British seaside resorts decline after the 1960s?
The rise of affordable package holidays to Spain and the Mediterranean from the early 1960s drew millions of British holidaymakers away from domestic resorts. The Beeching rail cuts also severed branch lines to many smaller coastal towns, making them far harder to reach for day-trippers.
What was Britain's most popular seaside resort in the Victorian era?
Blackpool was the most visited by volume, particularly among working-class families from Lancashire and Yorkshire. Brighton attracted a more fashionable crowd due to its royal connections via the Prince Regent’s Pavilion. But dozens of smaller resorts each had their own regional fan bases.
Are any Victorian seaside piers still standing in the UK?
Yes, around 50 pleasure piers survive in various states of repair across the UK. Southport, Clevedon, Cromer, and Eastbourne piers are among the best-preserved. The National Piers Society maintains a register and campaigns for their protection.
Did the railways really create British seaside resorts?
To a very large extent, yes. Before the railway age, coastal resorts were mostly accessible only to the wealthy. Once branch lines reached towns like Skegness, Withernsea, and Hunstanton from the 1840s onwards, working-class families could reach the coast for a day or a week, creating an entirely new leisure economy.
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