Hunstanton's biggest ever birthday party

Norfolk's most genteel resort is 150 years old this summer - and in the best of health. By Bob Carter

The man outside Woolworths was whistling "Suicide is Painless". Just round the corner a man with a microphone addressed a dozen, mostly elderly, people in the garden of the church. "I used to gamble. Every time I came on holiday I had to go in the arcade and spend a pound". It's easily done in Hunstanton. A pound would give you 50 goes at the tuppenny falls or buy a cheap tray in the shop proclaiming "Don't Ask - It's a pounds ".

On a cloudy, close August Sunday, Hunstanton is preparing for its biggest- ever party. There's a jazz band on the new bandstand on the green and a feel-good smattering of "no vacancies" signs in guesthouse windows. The resort of Hunstanton is 150 years old this summer and in the rudest of health - in a genteel sort of way.

A century-and-a-half ago there was none of this high excitement on top of the cliffs lining the top left-hand corner of Norfolk - just a small village where smugglers and customs officers occasionally fired sea-rusty muskets at one another, consigning the casualties to a corner of Saint Mary's churchyard, where they lie to this day.

Across the other side of the churchyard, in their family plot, lie the le Stranges, the family largely responsible for the Hunstanton of today and whose memory will be conjured up again this weekend when the birthday party gets into full swing.

In 1846, Henry Styleman le Strange, designer of the nave of Ely cathedral - and lord of the manor of this part of Norfolk - saw the business opportunities offered by the trend for days out and holidays at the seaside and built, a respectable distance away from the family seat, the New Inn, now the Golden Lion Hotel.

Even today Hunstanton tries to portray itself as a cut above the other resorts. And yes, it does seem different - strange, as in le Strange. Where other resorts have donkeys, Hunstanton offers pony rides. No motorboats here for trips round the bay: instead you take a ride along the sands in a wartime landing craft which then careers into the waves for a truly amphibian experience.

They'll tell you in the tourist information office that it's a quieter, more family-oriented place than the noisy commercialism of Cromer or even, God forbid, the flashy modernism of Great Yarmouth.

But it does not do to compare these places. Hunstanton - the Hunstanton of holidaymakers and not the old Hunstanton that lies quaintly rustic a mile or so up the coast - still has that essentially temporary feel, not helped by plenty of "to let" and "for sale" and even "keep off derelict building" signs which bear witness to the hard times that England's East Coast seaside resorts have faced.

The past and the present are essentially separate and though the old church up the road was begun in the 14th century, the idea of continuity seems to hang on two or three generations of the same family, using the same caravan year after year.

Tomorrow these Hunstanton regulars can join in the party, watch the raft race or the aerobatics, hear the big band, eat the cake and "ooh" and "aah" at the fireworks reflected in the calm waters of The Wash.

But it is hard to imagine the holidaymakers snapping up a Hunstanton souvenir sketchbook. The birthday porcelain, meanwhile, seems more designed for the hardy band who live here all year round, as an affirmation of self, an attempt to convince them of the town's permanence and importance. After all the set-backs, they are still here.

They looked the other way when H G Wells and Rebecca West set up home here in 1914. They struggled on when the Mikado Concert Hall burnt down in 1922, and shrugged off the pier fire in 1939. They soldiered on when the US Air Force at nearby Sculthorpe declared the Cold War at a close and returned to America, taking away a lifeline almost as important as the railway which closed in 1969. And even the disappearance of the pier, in a storm in 1978, failed to finish them off.

So they have earned their celebration and they may just be able to do it again at some date in the future for, despite its reliance on the beach bucket-and-spade-holiday, Hunstanton is branching out. It is as if there's a ripple effect gently washing over the town from the villages further east: Titchwell, Weyborne, the Burnhams and Brancaster, villages that at the weekend echo to stockbroker accents and 4x4 engines.

For walkers, birdwatchers, cyclists and horsemen and women who can't afford the cottage on the marsh, miles from anywhere, Hunstanton offers a much cheaper alternative. It stands at the junction of the Peddars' Way and the Norfolk Coastal Path, both established long-distance footpaths. One of the most popular lists asked for at the tourist bureau is that of the eight local stables. Birdwatchers, meanwhile, fill up the guesthouse beds at either end of the summer - from Hunstanton you can spend a week at bird reserves around the coast and never visit the same one twice.

So there, in the greenish leisure boom to come, lies the future, if not the spirit of Hunstanton. That still eludes the arcades, the Sealife Centre, and the Oasis Leisure Centre, which boasts a swimming pool just yards from the real waves. Nor is the true spirit of Hunstanton with the church revivals, the acres of caravans or the lone whistler outside Woolworths. The spirit of a resort like this will always be just beyond the sea wall where the summer-tamed tides of The Wash deposit acres of sand. A gleaming strand which every year transforms streetwise teenagers into children again, digging round the rock pools, building dams and reservoirs and waving crabs at tearful sisters.

You might knock it, you might jet half way round the world to escape it, but there's nothing that compares to a day on the beach, a cheese sandwich (with real sand) and dinner from the chip shop. And so long as Hunstanton remembers this, the town should have many happy returns of the day.