Blackpool bling ... an all-day wristband buys you a month's worth of adrenalin on the Pleasure Beach. Photograph: Paul Thompson; Eye Ubiquitous/Corbis
St Ives? Wonderful place, charming. Four beautiful beaches, those thoroughly modern cafe-bars, that famous artists' light. So charming, in fact, that it makes me want to scream. Come on! St Ives may have won Best Seaside Town 2007 but compared to some of the other candidates I find it a fey, pleased-with-itself sort of place. Surely the point of visiting a seaside town (as opposed to, say, a secluded cove) is for a dose of brash vim, garnished ideally with gimcrack and tinsel. Were St Ives music, she'd be played by Chris de Burgh: Lady in Pale Mauve, perhaps.
My type of seaside town isn't about dancing cheek to cheek, but is one where you get a full-on beery fondle. This isn't just end of (or under) the pier vulgarity, it's the belief that a visit to the seaside is the antidote to work life lived in front of a PC screen, and to a home life hypnotised by the telly. I want the seaside to shock me back to life with rollicking music, rude smells, salty winks and vinegary chips - and no bloody balsamic vinegar at that. Both Blackpool and Broadstairs came close to winning Best Seaside Town, and either would have been more than worthy.
Blackpool offers you its incomparable Pleasure Beach, where your all-day wristband buys you a month's worth of adrenalin and your fiver still buys you a pie and a pint with change left over to go towards a blowy deckchair on the prom.
With her blowsy northern charms, Blackpool draws you into her honest, bosomy embrace to encourage, cajole and finally shame you into letting your bleedin' hair down and getting some sand in your shreddies. When I was a kid, Blackpool's beach smelt of Charlie by Revlon mingled with sewage outfalls. Today, you're more likely to catch a whiff of CK One, albeit probably car-boot knock-off.
Less bling than Blackpool, Broadstairs compensates the visitor with her own old-fashioned, slightly faded charms. For those of you surprised to see her on the shortlist, I urge you to take a look. Go there for 50s ice-cream parlours and trampolines on the beach; for a bit of Punch-and-Judy bawdy, instead of a swanky boardwalk; for candy floss, not dental floss; for kitsch postcards, not coffee-table books.
Let's celebrate our seaside towns, let's pat ourselves on the back for the Mediterraneanisation of our smartest resorts. But let's also honour and offer thanks for our slaggier, saltier resorts, for the life-affirming energy charge of the Blackpools, the Cleethorpes and the Clactons. Fill up on sugar, alcohol and ozone, all night long you'll be honour and offer. Boom! Boom!
· Read Kevin's trawl of all the best coastal food haunts in tomorrow's Guardian guide to the Seaside, free inside the paper.
