Seaside special

Earlier this month the Telegraph published another of its interminable lists (some of which are quite useful, to be fair).

This one caught my eye because the headline was ‘Britain’s poshest seaside villages … The smart coastal spots to launch your picture-perfect life – from A-lister favourites to little-known gems’.

There were ten places on the list and they included two I know quite well, a third I visited for the first time last year, and a fourth I’ve driven through many, many times.

They’re all nice but I’m not sure I would call any of them posh or somewhere I would want to move to permanently.

Take Polzeath in Cornwall, which I first visited on a family holiday in 1966 when it was a ‘sleepy surfing haven’. We must have liked it because we returned two years later for another holiday.

Each time we stayed at the St Moritz Hotel in Trebetherick, another village half a mile up the road, but every day we would walk down to the enormous sandy beach at Polzeath.

Tide permitting, we would play on the sand or ‘ride’ the waves on surfboards hired from one of the local surf shops.

Trebetherick was one of John Betjeman’s favourite places. The famous poet, born in 1906, also holidayed there as a boy and eventually settled in the village. He died in 1984 and is buried in the graveyard of a local church.

The original St Moritz Hotel is long gone, but according to a 2008 Guardian review of the ‘new’ hotel, ‘The unassuming bungalows outside the hotel go for around £1m’.

‘Unassuming bungalows’ is an accurate description and much as I like the area (I’ve been back several times since), imagine living somewhere that attracts so many tourists and holidaymakers.

Great if your seasonal business depends on them, but it’s not my idea of a ‘picture-perfect life’ all year round.

Sandwiched between those two visits in the Sixties was another family holiday, to Walberswick in Suffolk.

We stayed at The Anchor (which still exists) but, again, I don’t remember either the hotel or the village being posh.

If I remember, we stayed in a chalet at the back of the hotel and each day we would wander down to the beach to swim in the sea and watch people catch crabs.

Since we moved to Cambridgeshire 25 years ago we’ve visited Walberswick (and nearby Southwold) multiple times and one thing I’ve learned is, never go on a public holiday because traffic on the long road into the village can be a nightmare.

Lovely location but does that sound ‘perfect’ to you?

Anyway, last year we stayed in a country house hotel just outside Abersoch, another ‘village’ on the list but on the north west coast of Wales.

Just as Burnham Market in Norfolk is known as Chelsea-on-Sea, Abersoch has been dubbed Cheshire-on-the-Sea (to the ‘fury’ of local residents).

If you ask me, that sounds like estate agent gibberish. It’s a nice place, with an excellent beach, but when did multiple ice cream parlours count as posh?

Aberlady in East Lothian is the fourth place on the list that I’m familiar with, although we’ve never stayed there.

Instead we used to drive through it on our many visits to North Berwick, a small coastal town that also attracts favourable reviews.

Ten years ago however we did stay in Gullane, a few miles down the coast from Aberlady.

Gullane is best known for its links golf course, but if you’re a follower of Scottish football you’ll know the name because the sands at Gullane will forever be associated with the brutal pre-season training organised by Rangers manager Jock Wallace in the Seventies.

To be honest, I am struggling to think of a ‘picture-perfect’ list of desirable seaside villages that I would actually like to move to.

The problem is, they’ve largely been discovered, and once people know about them all manner of visitors and tourists descend on the place, quickly followed by multiple second home owners.

However picture-perfect they might be, who wants to live in a place like that?

Below: Cardigan Bay from our hotel outside Abersoch (August 2023)

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