Seaside resorts take an inland road to revival

BRITAIN'S seaside resorts are fighting back after years of decline - by turning their backs to the waves. Accepting that the days of the bucket-and-spade holiday have gone - squeezed between the foreign package trip and increased reluctance to venture into domestic waters - they are beginning to behave as if they were inland towns in order to attract tourists.

In the past three years, despite the recession, many have halted the fall in trade they have suffered since the Sixties. Now they are preparing for an increase as the economy picks up. On Wednesday, planners from coastal resorts all round the country will meet in Eastbourne to learn from an extraordinary success story: for the East Sussex resort - long a by-word for staid gentility and cursed with a pebbly, uninviting beach - has been leading the revival. Two years ago there were 10 empty, closed hotels on its elegant seafront; now there is only one.

The crisis the resorts have overcome has been spectacular. Britons now spend 11.5 million fewer holidays in their own country each year than 20 years ago, and more and more of those are taken inland. Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast for example, says its trade has fallen by nearly two-thirds over that period.

'People have not given up on the seaside, and they have not given up on Britain, but they have stopped going to the British seaside resort,' says Dr Douglas Hart, reader in land management at Reading University.

'They go abroad to warmer coasts, and they visit inland towns. Their expectations have risen, as the seaside resorts have declined, and these have been unable to raise the revenue to improve their facilities. So there has been a downward spiral.'

Research by Dr Hart and a colleague, Professor Michael Breheny, shows that small resorts have often suffered most. Clacton has one of Britain's highest unemployment rates. Ilfracombe, Woolacombe, Penzance, Helston, Falmouth and Whitby have all suffered badly. They are often too far out on a limb, particularly as rail services decline or disappear, and are undercut by bigger resorts.

But the bigger centres too have been going through hard times. A year ago, when Scarborough's only four-star hotel slipped into the sea, it seemed to symbolise the crisis. Hastings had an unemployment rate far above the national average even at the height of the season last summer. Boarding houses have filled up with the homeless. Publicity over Britain's polluted beaches and seawater have driven more people away.

Last year the Government assigned assisted area status to, among others, Hastings, Ilfracombe, Clacton, Torbay, Bideford, Bridlington, Great Yarmouth, St Austell and the Isle of Wight.

But some resorts have been steadily bucking the trend by rethinking their raison d'etre. 'Rather than seeing themselves primarily as seaside resorts, they have concentrated on becoming pleasant places to live and work,' says Stephen Mills, assistant director of the English Tourist Board. 'If they get that right, then people start to come on holiday again.'

Eastbourne, the site of this week's conference organised by the Town and Country Planning Association, provides the most striking example. Five years ago it started its counter- attack against the decline, commissioning research and mobilising the community.

It raises pounds 250,000 a year from a lottery, the contributions of local traders and national bodies, and has renovated the town and brought in private investment. It has increased light industry, and has just paid to paint the only hotel in the town that is still closed, even though it does not own it.

It is now attracting tourists to see its architecture, and brings in 20,000 foreign students a year to purpose-built language schools.

As a result, says its tourism director, Ron Cousins, who arrived eight years ago after achieving the unlikely goal of establishing Bradford as a holiday centre, bed occupancy rates are far higher than in neighbouring resorts.

Weymouth and Weston-super-Mare have adopted similar strategies and so - after its own fashion - has Blackpool. The north-western resort has re-launched itself as 'The Las Vegas of Lancashire' and might be as far from the sea as its desert-bound model. Few people use the beach, one of the most polluted in Europe, and the city has pointedly dropped the 'health' bit from its old slogan, 'Blackpool, Health and Pleasure Resort'. The number of child visitors has dropped dramatically, young adults make up almost half of its trade . . . but it still attracts more visitors a year than the whole of Greece.

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