Why we should stand up for the UK’s ‘worst’ seaside towns

With its brooding castle and miles of sand, Bamburgh always scores highly for its scenery and beach, as well as winning lots of stars in the ‘peace and quiet’ category. With around 400 residents, it’s really a village, but the more important distinction is in the use of the seaside description. Simply because a place is by the sea does not make it seaside.

Coastal Village or Seaside Town?

Why does it matter? Well, because over the past 300 years our seaside resorts have evolved a distinctive identity bound up with the provision of leisure and pleasure. Places like Blackpool, Brighton, Margate and Southend were the world’s first sites of mass tourism. Visitors have never chosen these places for peace and quiet because their seafronts were designed for excitement, novelty and fun. Pitting picturesque villages by the sea against bustling seaside resorts is not comparing like with like.

That Which? Connect panel members prefer a more sedate holiday experience is proven year after year UK’s best seaside towns - Which? That their choices condemn places like Bognor Regis, Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth, Bangor, Blackpool and Clacton to the bottom of the table, as among the country’s ‘worst’ seaside towns, only serves to reinforce the negative perceptions people have about our traditional resorts.

When media coverage amplifies the notion of winning destinations as ‘unspoilt’, the inference is that those places with fewest votes must somehow be ‘spoilt’ and, by implication, not worth visiting. This is a really unhelpful way to view seaside communities that have unique and interesting stories to tell about how our ancestors spent their leisure time and how, as a nation, we invented the concept of beach holidays, which we then exported around the globe.

Perceptions are important

Our seaside places have suffered from well-documented social and economic problems in the face of competition from cheap foreign package holidays.

Continually disparaging seaside resorts as worthless is not only bad for any potential resurgence in domestic tourism, which would surely be a good thing in an age of climate change; it is also bad for the people who call these places home.

A very simple calculation, based on recent population figures, reveals that the 2025 top 10 Which? rated places – Bamburgh, Beer, Portmeirion, Saint David’s, Sidmouth, Tynemouth, Dungeness, Tenby, Aldeburgh, Wells-Next-The-Sea – had a combined population of around 106,000.

The comparable figures for the bottom 10 places in 2025 – Ayr, Great Yarmouth, Weston-Super-Mare, Blackpool, Burnham-on-Sea, Fleetwood, Southend-on-Sea, Clacton-on-Sea, Bangor, Bognor Regis – come out at more than 700,000 inhabitants. That’s a substantial difference and one that should make us think about the language we use to discuss these places.