Donald Hiscock | Articles | New Statesman
When I visited Bognor Regis as a child, there were donkeys under the pier. When I revisited the other day there were men in donkey jackets doing maintenance on top of the pier. I'm not suggesting that it is falling apart, but any town bearing up to the full force of winds off the English Channel is going to struggle to keep its public face neat and tidy. Bognor, it seems, is doing its best.
It is a bit of a cliché to say that the winds of change have affected Britain's seaside resorts, but these places are, after all, rooted in visual clichés. A seaside town has got to provide all the trappings of a bucket and spade holiday that we expect. Ideally it should have a pier, plenty of fish and chip shops and places to buy lettered rock. It should also have amusement arcades, bingo and dirty postcards. Beach Britain is a peculiarity unlike anywhere else in the country, but that is its attraction.
Nonetheless, changes are taking place in our coastal resorts. The Shifting Sands report published in July jointly by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and English Heritage examined the changing image of English seaside towns. Visits to the seaside have fallen in the last 25 years and trips abroad have become more desirable for many, but the report demonstrates that high quality buildings have helped towns to re-invent themselves and attract tourists back to traditional beach resorts. I visited two such resorts to find what is important for locals in a seaside town and whether life in a resort is all about its buildings or something less tangible; quality of life.
People told me I should visit Bournemouth for a real resort experience, but I wanted to start with the familiar, so Bognor it was. There have long been jokes about Bognor Regis. Any name that has "bog" in it probably invites sniggers, but this also seems appropriate for a seaside town where people come and abandon their prudishness and titter over risqué postcards. For me, Bognor is the perfect name for the quintessential resort. The 'Regis' bit was bestowed by King George V after he enjoyed visits last century.
Perhaps he shouldn't have gone on record as saying, "Bugger Bognor" when in his last throes of life. It's what most people, when asked, seem to know about the place.
But no one I met in Bognor had a bad word to say about the place. I must admit that I secretly hoped that a visit to the town would provide me evidence that living in a seaside resort out of season makes for a very dull experience. I was wrong.
"It's definitely a town with a good sense of community and not just a resort," says Angie Edlin, manager of Bognor Pier. "There's a very mixed population here, especially with the students."
The pier nightclub has benefited from the presence of students at the Bognor campus of nearby University College Chichester. Many people choose to set up home in Bognor because the property is cheaper than neighbouring towns. This brings in families and the services that a younger population needs.
The view of Bognor as a good place for families is echoed by Adrian Crabb, owner of seafront fish restaurant, La Bodega: "It's less of a retirement place nowadays and definitely a good place to bring up kids."
As a businessman who has worked in the town for twenty years, Crabb reckons that Bognor has a lot more pride in itself nowadays. He benefits from the annual Birdman competition, where hardy types hurl themselves off the end of the pier in a mad attempt to fly in their homemade contraptions, and other year-round events promoted by the council.
"Business is very seasonal of course," says Crabb, "but we get a lot of weekend trade from visiting Londoners."
With the lure of fresh fish from the town's fishermen who still bring their boats up onto the beach, those who come from the capital for a fishy feast are also finding that the town is looking pretty tasteful too.
"Bognor was tatty not too long ago, but there is a lot more pride in the town now," says Crabb. "It's certainly brightened up in the last couple of years."
Bognor Regis has recently commissioned what it grandly calls a Masterplan, to look at how the town can develop in the future. A lick of paint now could lead the way for the construction of landmark buildings and the establishment of a vibrant heritage quarter.
Bognor's Masterplan offers a gradual change to the town's appearance over the next twenty years, providing architecture that will re-position the resort as a prime coastal destination. The main focus of the plan is the development of the existing Regis Centre site into a family leisure attraction that makes the most of its seafront location and creates a lively public space.
Residential development is also planned to support the building of a café quarter, adding life to an otherwise quiet seaside resort once the day-trippers have departed. Pedestrianised areas will link the new quarters and also open up the seafront to the retail heart of the town and lead the eye to the town's older areas. The Masterplan also takes into account how the town looks for those arriving by train. An open space filled with pubs and restaurants will greet visitors outside the station. There are also plans to re-develop a disused furniture store at the top of the town, retaining the building's character but creating a lively entertainment venue. The focus, however, is more on the new than re-furbishing older buildings.
From Angie Edlin's vantage point on the pier, a bit of regeneration for the town couldn't come too soon.
"There are fewer people on the beach nowadays. People don't come to the seaside and stay put like they used to," she says.
If the sale of inflatables is anything to go by then business on the pier has certainly been going down. Even with the long, hot summer of 2003 it is still a struggle to get guaranteed trade.
"There is not as much on the seafront as there used to be," adds Edlin. "There aren't enough big hotels and it goes quiet in the winter."
But Angie Edlin doesn't think it's the look of Bognor sea front that puts people off, it's more to do with people choosing to spend their money in theme parks and shopping malls.
If Bognor lacks drawing power then Bournemouth has it in bucket loads. And it is not just the seven miles of sandy beach that lends itself to being put into a bucket, but the fact that the Dorset resort has always marketed itself as a year round destination.
The town has seen much development in recent years, in particular its award-winning public library and town square that connects to the pier via gardens. The council is now turning its attention to the beach area at Boscombe, a lively area in summer but' like Bognor, relatively quiet in the winter. The plan is to restore the Victorian Boscombe Chine Gardens and re-create Boscombe as a spa village, taking it back to its nineteenth century beginnings.
The Bournemouth International Centre is also due for a face-lift. The building is certainly ready for the kind of make-over that the politicians who visit it each year at conference time regularly experience from their party image makers.
Bournemouth is not very different from Bognor in its approach to development but has the advantage over Bognor in having more Victorian architecture to preserve and display.
I arrived in Bournemouth on a wild and windy day. A fan of Bognor's pebble beach and down-to-earth charms I was ready to find this top conference town too snooty for my tastes. What tickles the fancy of a visiting politician is likely to be less of a thrill for me. I was wrong again.
But Bournemouth does have some natural advantages that poor old Bognor can't match. There's the sand for one, but the views out to the Isle of Wight on your left and the Purbeck cliffs to your right make idle gazing seaward less of a blunt existential experience here and more a case of instant karma.
There is no doubt that Bournemouth is a bustling resort. The town has shaken off its retirement image and is now home to a big clubbing scene. Bognor has rock, but it's Bournemouth that rocks. The town's youthful, cosmopolitan character is helped in part by its university and its many language schools.
Where else can you go for a fish and chip lunch on a Thursday and rub shoulders with celebrities? In my case, it was at a restaurant called Chez Fred. And I'll own up now: for celebrities read Max Bygraves and Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart. But after Bognor and its pleasant ordinariness I was easily impressed by my brush with the famous.
"More and more good restaurants have opened in Bournemouth in the last few years," says Fred Cappell, owner of this chippy to the stars. "People's tastes are changing, they are going abroad more."
Fortunately for Fred, the taste for chips, never seems to wane. But his is not the only restaurant in town where queues are common.
"It's a booming place. There's been a lot of investment in small businesses and you hardly ever see any to-let signs," adds Cappell. "It's a great place to work and also a great place to live."
Down on the pier - yes, longer and in better nick than Bognor's - beach inspector Brian Cummings invites me to shelter from the rain and admire the view from his 'office' window.
"I think I've got one of the best jobs in the world," he says. "And I never get tired of this view."
As Cummings sees it, the pier is like a magnet to visitors. In his twenty years in the job he has noticed that incomes have gone up and how people use the beach has changed.
"There are more day-trippers who come for the surfing and jet skiing," he says. "The traditional end of pier show is on the decline."
Bournemouth has adapted to attract the spending power of its visitors. The buildings that have gone up on the seafront are more functional than fancy. Private businesses have been encouraged to provide for the needs of the holidaymaker hungry to part with his money. Apart from its library, which is for local residents, the architecture of Bournemouth's beachscape is about being easy on the pocket rather than easy on the eye.
But that, after all, is what coming to the seaside is all about.
Who has ever chosen a resort on the merits of its architecture? For me it's
the donkeys or the noddy trains that run along the promenade. It's more about
getting a good bag of chips and blowing a few quid in the slot machines on
the pier. Go there, have a good time and go home again.
Bognor and Bournemouth do not compete on equal terms. The latter has a large student population, for whom living in a beautifully situated seaside town is quite nice but probably not as nice as the numerous pubs, clubs and cafes that are vying for custom. The way a seaside town looks obviously does matter to its long-term future, and this is why Bournemouth is probably secure. Let's hope that Bognor's proposed building programme pulls in the punters.
I do like to be beside the seaside, but I am not sure that I really want to live there.