I do like to be beside the seaside

HAPPY are the seaside railway-terminus stations, for they signal the escape from the dusty inland city and the beginning of the summer fun. The names trip off the tongue: Eastbourne, Brighton, Skegness, Scarborough, Blackpool and Llandudno are among the best known of these resorts of human delight. Perhaps that description belongs in the past tense, however. In 2023, in her lugubriously affecting The Seaside: England's Love Affair, author Madeleine Bunting drew a picture of a relationship turned sour. Some of these places are now resorts of despair for the left behind.

- Kate Green

Andrew Martin does not dispute Ms Bunting’s diagnosis, but insists the magic has not entirely vanished and that: ‘Sometimes the sun swinging out from behind a cloud is enough to bring it back.’ His book combines the history of the seaside holiday and the impetus gained when railway companies laid on ‘specials’ from the mid 19th century with firsthand observations of the ‘going to the seaside by train’ experience, such as it is, today.

Mr Martin, a railway historian, has a nudgingly humorous style, occasionally breaking out into the outright comedic, and a novelist’s ear for dialogue. Facts are lightly applied, the quirkier the better. Eric Coates composed