A vivid journey around England's great seaside resorts, exploring their history and current struggle, and what they reveal about England, from the award-winning author of Love of Country.

"...a fascinating barometer of the state of the nation right now, in the wake of austerity, Brexit and Covid." - Travis Elborough England's seaside is made up of a striking variety of coastlines including cliffs, coves, pebbled shore, wide sandy beaches, salt marshes, and estuaries cutting deep inland. On these coastal edges England's great holiday resorts grew up, developed in the early eighteenth century originally as spas for medicinal bathing but soon morphing into places of pleasure, entertainment, fantasy and adventure. Acclaimed writer Madeleine Bunting journeyed clockwise around England from Scarborough to Blackpool to understand the enduring appeal of seaside towns, and what has happened to the golden sands, cold seas and donkey rides of childhood memory. Taking in some forty resorts, staying in hotels, caravans and holiday camps, she swims from their beaches and talks to their residents to delve into their landscapes, histories and contemporary plight.

"A brilliant new book... It is a travelogue, an impressive work of social history, an affectionate celebration and much more besides. But a grim English irony burns through almost every page" - Guardian

"A poignant picture of life on the edge of England" - Spectator

"Eloquent and detailed... Britain's island story has never seemed so pertinent" - Financial Times

"[A] remarkable book, as bracing as a smack in the face by a stiff sea breeze, Madeleine Bunting tours the English coastline to discover what it reveals about the state of the nation today" - Guardian

"This superb tour of the English coastline is compelling, sometimes exhilarating but also profoundly sad... Bunting's wonderful travelogue offers us a powerful - and deeply dispiriting - microcosm of the whole nation" - Observer

"This was an epic journey... An ambitious, thorough and hugely readable investigation of this country's coastal fun-palaces" - Mail on Sunday

"Beautifully written... Our intrepid author, it has to be said, embraces the Spartan version of the seaside... Her trip brings out her lyrical powers and salt-and-vinegar sharpness" - Literary Review

"[The Seaside] is stuffed with statistics, scraps of conversation, longer interviews, literary allusion and potted history... Bunting is an engagingly dogged guide" - TLS

"Bracing" - Strong Words

"[Bunting] reminds the reader of what it is like to be beside, or in, the sea" - Country Life