Freed from Behind the Paywall - Essay: From The City To The Sea
After spending 67 years as a devoted Londoner, I have moved to the seaside. How's it working out?
This piece was originally posted in January 2023
I was born in West London, and I have stayed there my whole life, moving in a very narrow semi-circle between Southall, Shepherds Bush, Notting Hill, Hampstead and Kensal Rise, where I have lived for the last 20 years.
And now, shockingly - to me, at least - I have moved to the seaside.
Whitstable, to be specific, a coastal town in Kent of which I know relatively little except that it is famous for oysters. I visited it a few times last year with a friend, and fell in love with the place and on impulse decided to move there, despite the fact that I know nobody there and barely know anything about it. Now I own a small two-bedroom cottage ten minutes walk from the seafront.
It’s a strange feeling. Or should be. After all, I have always loved London for all the usual reasons - its stunning variety, its incredible culture, the vibrancy of multi-ethnic life. Now I am in a tiny place, overwhelmingly mono-cultural and 50 miles from the vast polyglot city of my birth.
And yet it doesn’t feel strange at all. My prejudice about seaside towns, inherited from my parents whose contemporaries all seemed to move there in preparation for their demise, usually to locations like Bournemouth and Worthing which were heavy on nursing homes and surgical appliances, turns out to be outdated. Those retirement towns of my parents’ generation generally felt like waiting rooms for the funeral parlour - deadly quiet, staid, steeped in tedium.
But things on British coast have changed - at least in this part of Kent.
I don’t know if Whitstable is a typical coastal resort, I have done very limited research on the subject. But far from being sepulchral, it is brimming with energy, inventiveness and optimism. And many seaside towns near London have been undergoing similar transformations as distance working becomes more popular and property prices in London continue to remain at astronomical levels ( I could afford to buy a house outright in Whitstable because after divorce, my share of the sale of my terraced house produced sufficient capital).
Brighton is the ur-seaside town for metropolitan escapees, but nowadays it costs almost as much to live there as it does in London. So along with Whitstable, places like Hastings, Ramsgate, and Margate, all rapidly improving and a short train ride from London, are becoming magnets for cosmopolitans who can’t afford to live in the capital anymore. Often these DFL’s ( Down From Londons) as they are locally known co-exist with the more unfortunate members of society who have been transported there by local authorities unable to house them in London - often refugees or people with social difficulties of one kind or another, so one does not escape the disparities of wealth so apparent in the Capital. But Whitstable itself does not have the end-of-the-line feel that some of its neighbouring towns.
It would be ridiculous of course to say that it has everything London has albeit on a smaller scale. There are no art galleries of any quality. There is no cinema. There is a theatre, but you are unlikely to see the new Jez Butterworth play premiered there, more likely a panto or crowd pleaser.
On the other hand, it has some of the best restaurants I’ve ever visited, at least the equal of the best I’ve been to in London. The high street is full of tiny, groovy shops selling vintage, delicatessen, fine wine, clothes and curious gewgaws. There are record stores, a cheese shop, a lovely book store. It is relatively unscarred by the chain stores that pock every London suburban high street. It feels deeply original and refreshingly small-scale. The architecture is quirky and full of variety. There are proper butchers and bakers and probably candelstick makers too. And it has, of course one overwhelming advantage over London.
The sea.
When you are born in England, an island country, there seems to be something in the blood that draws you towards the briny. I love the smell of the salt in the air, the cry of the seagulls, the kelp on the beach. And walking on the long boardwalk that stretches along the coast here, I am overwhelmed with delight by the fresh bite of the air and the incredible glowing expanse of the sky. When the warmer weather comes, I shall be in the sea as quick and enthusiastic as a seal, though not as lean. My daughters all jumped into the sea on Boxing Day , only to emerge very quickly, screaming. Because guess what? It was COLD.
In a strange way, all though I have hardly been there, Whitstable feels like coming home. This is partly to do with the social makeup of the town. I was born into the white working class, and Whitstable is in the odd position of being simultaneously quite wealthy - hence all the top-class restaurants and bouji shops - and very much of a certain…caste. Even in very fancy places you will hear the squeals and glottal stops of the unrestrained East and South Londoner. In other words it’s at times somewhat rough at the edges - well off without being entirely bourgeois. There’s lot of old geezers like me, living off their pensions and putting framed posters on the wall of the Roxy Club 1976 or such like. I suddenly find I look like every other man on the high street - wrinkled, balding, dressed North London urban with a trimmed beard and a spring in our step. There is a comforting anonymity in this, somehow more comforting than the anonymity that one inevitably feels in London.
I am not part of any community yet, but it feels like an extremely friendly place. I suspect that I shall start to blend in very soon. Yes, it can be overwhelmed in the summer by tourists, but they keep the place going economically and inject vigour and movement.
It is a cheerful place, but one of the things I find depressing about it - ironically - is the arrival of people somewhat like me. That is, Londoners who buy houses here and use them as investments to rent out on Air BnB. One small street I looked in while I was shopping for houses had at least half a dozen key-safes ( a sure sign of an Air B n B property) in view. It pushes up property prices for locals and damages the integrity of the local community.
This is not the route I wish to pursue. For me, Whitstable is a home, not an investment ( although I do still rent a small place in London where I can work and do consultations). I will not be renting my Whitstable house out. It is for myself, my family and friends, and I love the fact that after years in a tiny flat, I have somewhere we can all be together. At Christmas I had eight people down, mainly family, for Boxing Day lunch, and it was a wonderful and unaccustomed feeling.
I know I am one of a long tradition of exodus for older people fleeing the city for the seaside, but I never thought it would happen. And now it has - as much to my surprise as anyone’s. When my time comes, I hope to expire peacefully floating on my back ten yards from the shore. Or better still, slumped into a plate of cod and chips in the best fish and chip shop I have ever eaten in, V.C Jones on the High Street. If that’s to be my last supper, I can’t think of a better one, and there are worst things than to ascend to the pearly gates with the aftertaste of salt, vinegar and pickled onion on my tongue. For it is the taste of the English seaside.
Then maybe 'The Late-Middle-Aged Man and the Sea'. Novel or memoir.
You could write a novel about it, Tim. A good title might be 'The Old Man and The Sea' (not that you ever seem old to me).