This is summer: Beaches

Bamburgh, Northumberland

Visit Northumberland (01665 720884) www.visitnorthumberland.com

Skies are big over Bamburgh, a huge, unspoilt, horseshoe-shaped beach beneath the famous castle. The fine white sand runs all the way to Seahouses, three miles to the south, and is very popular with kite-surfers. When the tide goes out, the sea retreats a mile from the castle, leaving a huge expanse of sand.

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This is a beach for views. On the horizon you can see out to Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands. The most sheltered spot is below the castle, the quietest area is to the north, where a lighthouse stands on a rocky outcrop. Beyond the lighthouse wooden posts mark where the ancient port of Bamburgh once stood.

It can be chilly here at times but still stunning, especially when you have the place to yourself. But even on the warmest of days, Bamburgh is never crowded. Several films have been shot here, including Roman Polanski's Macbeth.

Sand-dunes rise behind the beach and beyond them stands the town that serves the castle. The Lord Crewe, one of the oldest hotels in Northumberland , is a good place to warm up after a walk.

Skegness, Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire Tourist Board (01522 526 450) www.funcoast.co.uk

This year The Jolly Fisherman is 100 years old. It was John Hassall's 1908 poster that put 'Skeggy' on the tourist map along with the Great Northern Railway Company's slogan, 'Skegness is so bracing'. This fishing port and stretch of red sandy beach had been part of the Earl of Scarborough's estate. In 1877 he planned it as a resort for factory workers from the Midlands, but it took The Jolly Fisherman and Billy Butlin (who opened his first holiday camp here in 1936) to sell this 'bracing' North Sea resort.

Lonely Planet recently described Skegness as 'everything you could want in a seaside resort'. It certainly has a typically British pier (562 metres long when opened in 1881 but a lot shorter as the result of various 20th-century collisions). Plus there's a fairground, boating lake, bowling green, numerous fish and chip shops, donkeys pulling pensioners in landaus along the seafront, and every conceivable slot machine in the Skegness Pleasure Beach complex.

While Skeggy has never fully recovered from the growth of the Costa Brava in Spain, it still has a gaudy seaside allure. A new development, 'Natureland', up past the bowling green, shows the town's new greener credentials. There, rescued seals, dolphins, walruses, pelicans and even a whale have been looked after and put on show before being returned to the sea.

Southwold, Suffolk

Southwold Tourist Information Office (01502 724 729) www.exploresouthwold.co.uk

Perhaps not the best beach in Britain because of its uncomfortable combination of sand and shingle, but certainly the best for its pastel-coloured beach huts, which have become very fashionable in recent years, after Tracey Emin sold hers to Charles Saatchi for £75,000. Southwold has more than 300 of these wooden buildings, stretching along the beach like beads in a gaudy necklace.

The British beach hut evolved from fishermen's huts and mobile Victorian bathing huts. In Southwold, those round Gun Hill command the best prices, while to the north of the recently rebuilt pier they are cheapest because there's no beach to speak of.

Southwold beach and its huts featured in Michael Palin's semi-autobiographical film East of Ipswich. In Iris, the young Iris Murdoch (Kate Winslet) stayed in the 'Corner Hut', near the Gun Hill Beach Café.

Many huts have decidedly eccentric names. Janet Gershlick, whose hut is called 'Auntie Bong Bong', has written a book about these buildings and the folk who live in them. These days it's not unknown for black-tie 'hut parties' to be held on Southwold beach. Eccentric Britain at its best.

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