My strongest associations with Skegness are of Butlins, skinheads and chip shops. Photograph: Don McPhee
What comes to mind when you think of the British seaside? Candy floss, crazy golf and ballroom dancing? Wind, rain and a beach that looks as grey as the sea and the sky? Not sunshine at any rate, unless you're very lucky. My strongest associations with Skegness, the seaside town nearest to where I grew up, are of Butlins, skinheads, chip shops and mouldy caravans. Not, I have to say, a barrel of laughs.
The British seaside is a fairly recent invention. The classic chalet-and-pier towns grew up during the 19th century, when it finally occurred to someone that it might be nice to let workers in industrial towns go on holiday. Their late flowering was in the 1950s and 60s, before the advent of cheap travel abroad. Now they're pretty much on their last legs. It's more than that: the idea of the British seaside as an urban zone is finished. The Punch and Judy pitch is empty and tumbleweed drifts forlornly across the esplanade.
Yesterday the Department for Culture Media and Sport announced that £45m is being earmarked to develop flagging resorts. The government's architecture advisors at CABE are leading the project, citing buildings like Thomas Heatherwick's East Beach cafe and the sea defences at Cleveleys as inspiration. CABE wants seaside towns to "recapture the flair and importance they held in the Victorian age". But you have to ask, is that realistic? There's a reason these places are decaying - it's because nobody wants to visit them any more. Tourism is a boom industry in the UK, but people flock to the Eden Project, Warwick Castle or Westminster Abbey, not to Clacton and Mablethorpe. There are no longer thousands of factory workers whose idea of a good time is eating cockles in the freezing wind.
So does it make sense to pump money into them? It's not like they're having a bad year or two and need funding to keep them going until the next boom. These are places that have been more or less abandoned by the British public. And why? Because they're dreary and uncool. We've moved on. In any case, there are serious doubts over whether throwing cash at areas that are already in economic trouble actually does any good.
It may not be too late for these towns. Perhaps global warming will come to their rescue. In case it doesn't, and if you can't persuade me otherwise, I think there's a strong argument for managed decline: come friendly bulldozers.
