The last resort

Bowie, Morrissey, Brett Anderson - classic urban rockers, you'd think. Yet they do like to be beside the seaside. And they're not the only ones, says Michael Bracewell. We've all got coastal drift...

Back in the 1980s, when whole tracts of Britain's city centres were still comprised of tense, urban wilderness, it wasn't so hard to lose yourself in a maze of mysterious and deliquescent streets. These were the districts which novelists, flâneurs and artists from Charles Dickens to Gilbert & George had explored for their poetic obscurity, proximity to the past and vague air of threat - for their air of having witnessed, as thoroughfares, the whole of the human comedy. From Shoreditch to Salford, in the early films of Derek Jarman as much as the songs of Morrissey, these half-forgotten streets - like a secret country, almost - were the prompts for an art which dealt with the ragged edges of experience and a particular kind of intensity, deeply felt and richly romantic.

Back in the 1980s, when whole tracts of Britain's city centres were still comprised of tense, urban wilderness, it wasn't so hard to lose yourself in a maze of mysterious and deliquescent streets. These were the districts which novelists, flâneurs and artists from Charles Dickens to Gilbert & George had explored for their poetic obscurity, proximity to the past and vague air of threat - for their air of having witnessed, as thoroughfares, the whole of the human comedy. From Shoreditch to Salford, in the early films of Derek Jarman as much as the songs of Morrissey, these half-forgotten streets - like a secret country, almost - were the prompts for an art which dealt with the ragged edges of experience and a particular kind of intensity, deeply felt and richly romantic.

This all changed at the beginning of the 1990s, when the massive regeneration projects put in place by most of the major British cities appropriated the very post-industrialism of these formerly derelict districts as both the substance and ethos of their development programmes. The old industrial premises converted well into new "loft-style" apartments, while the new residents of these old buildings sought a local ambience which was termed "urban edgy" - a tamed and gentrified version, in fact, of their earlier tension and volatility. What was required of "urban edgy" was the landscape of a pop video with the convenience of Pizza Express. And who could blame them? But then further questions began to emerge. Where had all the strangeness and intensity of these formerly derelict inner city districts moved on to? And where else could one locate that heady proximity to the past? The answer, as the 20th century approached its febrile conclusion, turned out to be amazingly literal: that old urban intensity, along with many of its champions, had moved to the actual geographical edges of the country - to the seaside towns of England.

Demographically, you could call this shift a "coastal drift". And to do the drift properly required an almost wreckless commitment to obscurity: to towns where decaying confections of fantastical architecture, rotting art deco, the dance hall glitterball and the ornamental balustrade all expressed the exuberance of an earlier pop age - becoming, in the evening sea mist, like a melancholy but intoxicating Venice of popular culture. With faded grandeur abutting sea-front dereliction, and to the atonal electronic accompaniment of unplayed arcade games, these were the places where popular culture, from Victorian gaiety to the accelerated fantasies of mass consumerism, had played out their imperial phases for much of the last 100 years, and now seemed to inhabit the ruins of their past. These seaside towns made eloquent a wealth of contradictions; they became to the pasteurising materialism of advanced post-modernism what the French Riviera had been to those American artists who moved there to escape the Depression: affordable, exotic, alternately camp and luxuriously sad - a kind of gilded social realism.

To a particular kind of cultural tourist, the seaside towns of England have always articulated an extreme form of romanticism, firstly in a literary idiom which would then be updated by pop. From TS Eliot's apostatical reference to Margate Sands, through Paul Nash's essay on "Seaside Surrealism", to the "sopping esplanade" from which WH Auden predicted England's decline, the seers of British modernism set out a particular - and enduring - relationship with the ritual landscape of the English coastal holiday. I suspect that what they found there, in the protracted twilight of Edwardian gentility, was the quality Frank Kermode described as "the sense of an ending". That in some heightened poetic way, the bandstands, ornamental gardens and chilly vistas of our old resorts held a mirror to the passing of an epoch - to the gradual dimming of an earlier gaiety.

In this, the English seaside towns have developed an allegorical identity - a mood of acute romanticism in which they recollect their past within their present. In their every detail you can glimpse an earlier age - the more so in those run-down resorts which seem to articulate Graham Greene's pronouncement that, "Seediness has a very deep appeal; it seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back." Such a relationship to nostalgia has a perverse kinship with glamour - perfect to re-enchant the whole world of pop. And as the seaside towns developed in step with the history of popular culture, so in their dance halls, wintergardens and ballrooms you can feel pop's ghosts around you. Morrissey's genre-defining, epic hymn to the melancholy of the English seaside, "Every Day Is Like Sunday", was both a celebration and a lament for its deeply poetic subject; David Bowie's appearance as Pierrot, walking down the beach at Hastings in his video for "Ashes to Ashes" was like a prose poem on the whole abstraction of remembered youth. If these are the classics of the seaside pop outsider idiom, then their lineage is equally impressive: Suede's breathlessly elegant name-checking of Worthing, the Pet Shop Boys playing Blackpool's Grand Theatre, or the colonisation of Camber Sands holiday camp to host the All Tomorrows Parties festival of international electronica and post-rock. "We'll go far away, far away - and flog ice creams 'till the company's on its knees," sang Brett Anderson on the closing track - "The Next Life" - of Suede's glorious first album.

Over the last few years, I realised that many of my contemporaries had chosen to move to the coast - and not just to obvious spots like Brighton. Rather, they had done the whole trip, relocating to Frinton and Anglesey, Worthing, Weston-Super-Mare, Southampton, Formby, Llandudno and Fleetwood. It was as though they were looking to the gentility and glamour of the past - of the Edwardian, the inter-war and the mid-century - to frame their idea of modernity.

For the artist Linder Sterling and myself, moving to the village of Heysham - on a headland of astonishing natural beauty and historical interest, overlooking Morecambe Bay towards the Cumbrian hills - and being invited to make a book about the area, provided the opportunity to research this seaside romanticism in more detail. As the recent tragedy at Morecambe Bay has proved, this is a region where the breathtaking views and architectural heritage are matched by perilous tidal conditions and severe economic decline. The undeniable romance of the district, in this respect, seems always mirrored in the harshest form of realism. In the summer of 2003, we decided to make a traditional guidebook to the area, which could follow a route from Sunderland Point - a bleak, lonely spit of land between the River Lune and the sea - through the ancient holy sites of Heysham village, on to Morecambe itself, and from there to Silverdale and Arnside on the northern shores of the bay. As the same route had been celebrated by JMW Turner, who made several paintings of the area (one at the end of our road, in fact) with the great Victorian critic and visionary John Ruskin hot on his heels, we were by no means the first to identify the extraordinary drama of our chosen district.

In some ways, we were reversing the conceptual aesthetics of Martin Parr's Boring Postcards project: we wanted to restore the history and romance to images of archaically modern Englishness, rather than claim them for refined kitsch. The common denominator of our various sites was their poetic, sometimes tragic, relationship with the past. In art historical terms, we realised that our subject met all the criteria of surrealism, neo-romanticism (a phase of British art which David Mellor describes as a "vision of the future seen in terms of the past") and pop.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the bravura sweep of Morecambe Bay had earned it the label, "The Naples of the North", and the resort's popularity had been confirmed in the early 1930s by the construction of Oliver Hill's breathtaking art deco Midland Hotel. By the early 1950s, the bathing beauty pageants at the Super Swimming Stadium were attended by thousands of visitors, while over at Heysham and neighbouring Middleton Sands, two big holiday camps - one built to resemble an ocean liner on dry land - combined the vivacious pleasure-seeking of the first pop age with the coast's reputation for having some of the most dramatic sunsets in the world.

The more we researched our guidebook - much of which resembled the archaeological exploration of popular culture: finding Tommy Steele charm bracelets or a photograph of George Formby holding a ukulele made of flowers - the more the conceit of the sunset seemed to be its defining image. Morecambe had even been advertised, in the 1930s, as "The Sunset Coast", while in a more impressionistic sense the colours of the lingering twilight seemed to comprise an elegy for the long departed seaside carnival.

As a resort, Morecambe went into steep decline during the 1970s, unable to compete with the new availability of cheap holidays in Spain and Majorca, and further challenged by the construction of the dramatic but environmentally unsound reactors of a nuclear power station at Heysham. Today, the town is geared to major, and welcome, regeneration - focusing on the resurrection of the Midland Hotel as a deluxe boutique establishment, by Tom Bloxham's hugely successful Urban Splash company. Indeed, the phrase being used to describe the proposed regeneration of Morecambe is none other than "The Brighton of the North" - and the plan looks likely to succeed.

Thus our guidebook may turn out to have caught the last of Heysham and Morecambe's romantic obscurity. The economy of many of England's seaside towns is in desperate need of revival, and with that regeneration will inevitably follow the forces of gentrification, for better and worse. For a little while though, within those fading grand hotels, silent boarding houses, dormant ornamental gardens and windswept piers is both an ultimate expression of Englishness and its plangent requiem - the "sense of something lost", perhaps, prompting nostalgia for a former innocence. It's a moment which John Betjeman caught in his poem a bout wartime Britain, Margate 1940, and which, at the beginning of the 21st century, seems equally relevant to the sci-fi lullaby of today's coastal drift: "And I think as the fairy-lit sites I recall/ It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all."

'I Know Where I'm Going: A Guide to Morecambe & Heysham' by Michael Bracewell and Linder Sterling is published by Book Works, priced £10.95. Michael Bracewell is giving a talk at Swedenbourg Society, London WC1 on Thursday at 6.30pm. To book call 020 7247 2203 or email maria@bookworks.org.uk