Seaside Resorts

A seaside resort is a place that exists because people decided the coast was worth visiting, and almost every one can name the decade it happened.

The coast was medical first. Doctors sent consumptive northerners south from the 1760s, and the Riviera filled between November and April — Nice built its Promenade des Anglais in 1820 for patients. Summer was the dead season. Two Americans reversed the calendar in 1923 by persuading a hotel to stay open, and the tan changed from a mark of labour to a mark of leisure within a decade.

The season is the subject. These places triple in population for a few weeks and empty for the rest of the year, and the interesting portrait is usually of the other eleven months.

Access decides everything. A railway, a bridge, a ferry or a runway made each of these towns, and the date it arrived explains what got built. Where access is still limited, the place is different in kind.

Not every coastal town qualifies. Fishing ports, naval bases and trading harbours belong elsewhere. This type is for places reorganised around visitors.

Go out of season and see what is actually there.