I suggested to my friend that we go there for his stag do; and even for the debauchery of a stag do it felt a bit too grim! To the point that I felt guilty for suggesting it.
Coastal towns really are monuments to another time. The houses are beautiful, too - a two bedroom flat in one of the old guesthouses on the sea front with bay windows is a steal in most towns, if you can cope with the town itself.
Scarborough is another one. It was clearly so much more full of life than it is now, but its status as an elder resort is part of its charm. The poverty, so much not.
1. Setting the Scene
2. The Tenets of Clean Code
3. The Enemies of Clean Code
4. SOLID and Other Principles
5. Naming Things is Hard
6. Blackpool's Fading Vitality and the Withering Shadow of Coastal Britain
7. Primitive and Built-In Types[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/u2vu5x/i_thi...
But yes, otherwise all rather run down. The extreme wealth discrepancy was an eye opener.
I don't see this as a "making fun of people" thing. It feels to me more like an open acknowledgement that there are a large number of negative health impacts associated with poverty, and it really sucks.
Maybe there's a cultural thing here. English humor is pretty self-deprecating: the term "Shit Life Syndrome" is the kind of phrase that fits the English mindset pretty well.
Instead of starting with blame and condescension of your own, try to seek understanding from the people you accuse.
Every profession that is about caring for other people have these jokes because it is necessary to maintain some distance from human suffering to remain professionally functional. Humour makes it possible to maintain two dissonant thoughts in one’s head.
It’s in the very website linked here. The sense of powerlessness and malaise and desperation shared between the patients and their caregivers. What else does one do to come into work the next day and keep at working to improve a hopeless task?
I 100% agree!
This isn't a joke, it's an insult.
It’s absolutely not an insult. It is a lament.
That they forgot to close down
> the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK
I'm surprised to hear that coastal towns in the UK are doing poorly. In North America, it's generally the coastal areas that are more prosperous.
Was it overbuilding during the era of British sea power? Or a great sucking-up of wealth by London?
It makes me wonder if, long term, seaside areas would make good places to buy property. Surely, on the whole, they have more natural beauty than inland areas.
Destinations on the South Coast were not affected in the same way though and have remained a popular choice with more affluent clientele.
Brighton reinvented itself as a party town and creative hub thanks to Norman Cook and its large student and gay scenes and its fast links to London.
Worthing and Eastbourne became popular spots to raise a family for London telecommuters (two days a week in a London office is viable from there, and property is a fraction of the price).
Margate and Folkestone became artistic hubs, after the last of ex industrial inner London got redeveloped.
Whitstable became a foodie mecca and well-heeled daytripper spot, Borough-Market-on-sea or so.
The Suffolk and North Norfolk coastal towns do a nice line in second homes for the Range Rover and XC90 set.
Many, if not most of these places were pretty desolate in the 90s. Others are still to turn the corner. Hastings is on the way up but still a lot of junkies and the generally down-on-their-luck in temporary B&B accommodation. Herne Bay is still rough as. Lots of South Essex coastal towns are grim and deprived, maybe not as bad as Blackpool but definitely struggling.
Rediscovered, maybe. It has long been a party town, from the Pavilion - a faux-Indian palace put up by a Prince Regent in a previous century for seaside parties - Quadrophenia-era nightclubs to being the gay capital of England all before Fat Boy Slim was born.
It’s also the south coast town closest to London, with a direct railway line. Huge geographical-economic advantage over Blackpool.
It was a wonderful place to be a student in the ‘90s.
Bournemouth (middle of the South Coast) took a slightly different path and some of the accommodation was repurposed to house students from Europe studying English. IIRC the contiguous strip comprising Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch is one of the largest non-industrial conurbations in Europe. I moved to Bournemouth in 1988 for work reasons and it always seemed to me like a large studenty-town that happened to be near the Sea rather than a 'seaside town' (i.e. one that is structured around the beach and bucket-and-spade shops). It's also viewed as Brighton's straight cousin. Christchurch, on the other hand, is known locally as 'the last resort' because of the large proportion of retirees in the population.
I also can't resist the old joke that Cleethorpes isn't twinned with any other town but is in a suicide pact with Grimsby.
I must be getting old since Barton on Sea is becoming more attractive as residential destination by the day...
Why play on the cold, stone covered beaches on the few days of sun a year when you can fly for a couple hundred UKP to Spain and have reliable sunshine, warm weather, and sand.
Different histories, reliance on different industries, quality of transport links make a huge difference.
Not even all coastal "tourist" towns are doing badly - I live near Burntisland in Fife which actually seems to be thriving, probably because of the excellent location for commuting by train into Edinburgh, combined with nice beaches, great views (of Edinburgh!)...
St Andrews? Elie? Lovely. Methil? Granton? Pass.
Are there examples of “it’s alright” seaside towns above some threshold size?
Hastings kind of the other end of things. A fair few problems but not hopeless/desperate.
Main difference between them being Eastbourne's proximity to other prosperous places and slightly better road/rail connection to London.
Anyone living there with any skills or potential have to leave to get good jobs elsewhere. Typical brain drain and related decline.
A bunch of the coastal towns in the UK offer neither. They have a legacy of things like small fishing operations, which was significantly more valuable in the past when food was more scarce and fisheries were healthier.
Fishing ports which now have few fishers left. Long term decline due to overfishing along with Brexit making it hard for them to sell their catch to markets in EU. Grimsby.
The Victorian seaside mass resorts that lost out to cheap foreign holidays. Blackpool.
Places like Cornwall which are full of second homes and outwardly look very nice but mask deep poverty as there is little affordable housing and few food jobs.
Also the definition of coastal is different in the UK, an island with nowhere more than 70 miles from the sea. Washington DC is 85 miles from the Atlantic but still populated by the ‘coastal elite’.
Washington is 31 road miles from Annapolis, which is on the coast of Chesapeake Bay; straight line distance to the coast is shorter.
D.C. is also directly on the shore of the Potomac River where it becomes a tidal estuary.
There is a very, very deep rabbit hole here. Because it's late and I have to be up early in the morning, I'll merely point out the entrance [0] and quietly back away...
I know we're not supposed to call Brexit voters thick, but it's difficult sometimes...
As to failure modes, the decline in small and midsize ports generally in favour of huge container ports, Felixstowe etc., also the offshoring of processing either to factory ships (conveniently located beyond the reach of employment law) or distant countries. Quite a few South and East coast places used to have passenger ferry services to Europe and no longer do - Ramsgate, Hull, Great Yarmouth, Folkestone spring to mind but I'm sure there were more.
My parents used to take me to Blackpool each year for our "exotic foreign holiday" (I was from Scotland).
I actually have many happy memories from the time. There was the Doctor Who Exhibition we went to once - nothing even remotely like that anywhere near my home town. Then there was the Blackpool Tower. My parents used to complain about how expensive it was to get in, and I think we only went there once, but on that one trip me and my dad went to see a laser light show set to music (so futuristic!) and also went to a stall that used a video camera hooked up to one of those new fangled computer things that could print out an ASCII art picture of your face (such mind bogglingly advanced technology!) Also the arcades. Again they cost money so it was rare we'd go in, but there was once I was given money to try a grabbing claw machine, and won a pack of sweets. My parents thought I was good at them, and so gave me money to try and win something for my sister, which was a huge boost to my confidence (finally something I was better than my sister at!) Unfortunately I didn't manage to win anything for my sister. It was only decades later that I found out that those machines aren't skill based - there's a dial inside where the operator can control the "payout rate", i.e. the percentage of times the claw goes limp vs stays rigid. (Another childhood illusion shattered.)
Anyway, maybe that was before it got too grim, or maybe I didn't notice because I was so young, or maybe I just thought that was what England was like:-)
One awful thing I remember though was just how filthy the beaches were. The coast was lined with sewerage outlets, so where-ever you swam there would be all sorts of things floating by. Once I picked up what I thought was a funny shaped balloon and started filling it with water and playing with it. I went to show my mum how I could make the balloon bigger by squeezing it, but she just looked horrified and bashed it out of my hand. I had no idea why, but didn't ask, and just kept quiet. I did however wonder what it could have been that was so bad, but the best I could think of at the time was that perhaps it was some form of artificial breast for breast feeding, given it was skin coloured and had a teat at the end. It wasn't until many years later that I realised what it almost certainly was.
Do you work in the ad industry now by any chance?
P.S. It's joke. I adamantly refuse to work on anything adtech related. When I stated "for a more exciting game" I clearly didn't indicate who it would be exciting for.
Nicotine is odourless.
I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my license. I was put up in someone's house that was run as a sort of unlicensed b&b. The entire place, the curtains, the linen, the pillow,.. all smelled of old nicotine and damp. On my first evening I went out by myself to a fish-and-chip shop, feeling like a silly city boy in a greasy gritty concrete town. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember walking, late evening, lonely, on a bridge over the railtrack. The entire place felt deserted, metallic and concrete.
I went back to my room and ate the oily chips on my bed. After the first day with an old crusty – but perfectly lovely driving instructor – and a rather large heavy-haulage driver who was renewing a license, we went out for some drinks. Beers. Lots of beer. And they took me to a gay club – of which there are oddly many in Blackpool – because they thought it'd be a laugh. It was actually a massive spectacle for me. It was the first time I saw older men kissing, right there, by the entrance on a old tawdry sofa. I was still on a journey of coming out, so it felt oddly enlightening or validating or something. It was an old-england gay club – the type you hear about in the era of stonewall.
The entire town was like a time capsule to a poorer apocalyptic britain. Betting shops, cheap nail salons, boarded up derelict buildings everywhere! Even the beach was deserted. It reflected the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK. It felt like a shadow of its former self, but somehow, there was a old english magic to it that I can still feel. My nostalgia is probably getting the better of me, but I remember it fondly.
So yeh I think I understand this SLS thing. In places like Blackpool – forgotten remnants - you can feel the depression in the paving stones – the grey withering vitality – swallowing you whole.