Last month, I went to Folkestone to see its Triennial, a festival of art in out-of-the-way corners. I was looking forward to my visit. The town's air of decay doesn't bother me, a melancholy sort, pessimistic to my very bone marrow. I find it beautiful and poignant. Yes, its grandest hotel, the Metropole – as vast and elegant as anything you will find in Biarritz – has long since been divided into apartments. Yes, its harbour station, where once the Orient Express used to call, is derelict, the tracks rusty and overgrown. But there are still plenty of fishing boats bobbing by the harbour walls, and ice-cream stalls, and places where you can buy plastic windmills, cheap sunglasses and cockles that taste mostly of malt vinegar. On a sunny day, when the English Channel is clouded aquamarine rather than steely grey, it's really a delightful place to be.
Three years, though, is a long time in the life of a seaside town, and since my last visit something remarkable had happened. On the harbour was a beautiful new building, cleverly constructed of dark wood and glass so that it resembled an inordinately swanky version of a fisherman's hut. The curator of the Triennial, who was showing me around, pointed at it proudly. "And that is Rock Salt," she said. "Our new restaurant." I asked if it was any good. "Oh, yes," she said. "It's fantastic. The fish is fresh off the boats every day." Though we were meant to be looking at sculpture, she took me inside, where I examined the menu. It sounded delicious: grilled prawns, potted crayfish tails, dressed crab, coley brandade, sea bream with samphire. I asked for the name of the chef. Mark Sargeant, came the reply. What? You mean the same Mark Sargeant who used to work for Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's hotel, where he was in possession of a Michelin star? The man nodded. I looked at the view over the harbour. It was lovely. We might have been – I really mean this – in St Tropez. Oh, hell. If only it had not been 11 o'clock in the morning. If only I had not been expected at yet another impenetrable video installation.
That June morning, the mirage-like appearance of Rock Salt in Folkestone amazed me – though it shouldn't have done, I know. Blame the Boden catalogue, blame the recession, but in the south, at least, the British seaside is slowly becoming fashionable again. Perhaps the most visible sign of this is the appearance of new and rather good places to eat, from Mark Hix in Lyme Regis and Nathan Outlaw in Rock to the architect-designed cafes at the end of the pier in Deal and on the beach at Littlehampton (of these, it is the East Beach Cafe, designed by Thomas Heatherwick to look like some vast seashell, that is the better known; I, however, favour Asif Khan's more remote West Beach Cafe, which sells the most fantastic – and sustainable – fish and chips). For the first time in years, it is possible to go on holiday in these places and know that you will be able to eat fish that has been caught locally rather than delivered by lorry from some far-off factory. Hell, you might even find homemade ice cream and proper cloudy lemonade.
This is a lovely thing, of course. I'm not going to lie. I'm middle class. I dream of crab sandwiches and red-checked tablecloths as much as the next person, and when such things elude me, as they did in Broadstairs a couple of years ago, where all I could find were laminated menus and the smell of old cooking oil, I get quite grumpy. But still, it would be just as dishonest to tell you that my longing for such things is born of nostalgia. False memory syndrome, more like. The only cloudy lemonade I knew in childhood was to be found in the pages of the Famous Five books. On our seaside holidays, my brother and I ate a diet that consisted almost entirely of sweets, crisps, bright yellow ice cream and fish in batter so amazingly thick, you could have stuck it on your feet and walked across the shingle without it ever disintegrating. And to wash it all down, this heavenly sludge of sugar, fat and food colouring? Pop, of course, by which I mean lemonade, limeade, cherryade and, best of all, Tizer. To this day, I cannot eat fish and chips without secretly longing for Tizer. Even when – admittedly, this is a fairly rare occurrence – I am in Scott's. In Mayfair. A place where all the other diners seem to arrive in Bentleys.
It wasn't my parents who fed us this stuff. It was my Granny Cooke. My parents, the first in their families to go to university, took us to rainy places – the Lake District and Northumberland – and then, in the fullness of time, to France, where we discovered set yoghurt, apricot jam and brie. They thought beaches were boring, uneducational, the past. It was left, then, to granny to educate us in the ways of the bucket and spade. This suited both parties, I think, for all that I slightly dreaded these holidays (granny's snoring was as loud as Krakatoa, and she was registered blind, which meant that, though she was determined that this would make no difference whatsoever to her life, I was always anxious when she set about frying fish fingers in an unfamiliar kitchen). My granny had been widowed a long time. She had also, as a younger woman, tried and failed to have more than one child. There was nothing she wanted more on this earth than to be in sole charge of me, my brother and my baby sister for a whole week. And what was in it for us? Sugar. Slot machines. The giant rainbow slide in Bridlington. Sugar.
We did not go to the Boden places. We went to Withernsea, on the east coast, and to Morecambe, in the north west. Have you even heard of Withernsea? I mentioned it to someone the other day, and they looked at me as though I was quite mad. (At which point, I tried to cover my embarrassment by going on about the blue-stocking novelist Winifred Holtby, who grew up in Hornsea, which is close by.) These were old-fashioned places, for sure, but not in the rock-pooling-and-high-tea sense. They were towns where families could holiday on very little money. People go on about how the cheap package to Spain killed the British seaside. But Withernsea was even cheaper than Spain. It was, somewhat appropriately in the circumstances, as cheap as chips. And yet, when I think of it now, the memories are all so sensual, more Bonjour Tristesse than Shameless. Salty lips forming an 'O' over a Swizzle lolly. The tip of my tongue in Mr Whippy. The strange and, to be honest, wholly unwarranted hunger that the seaside seemed always to induce, an ache that could only reasonably be filled with white bread, something fried and something fizzy. And then, sated, you lay on the sand – it was always, no matter how good the weather, slightly damp – and you closed your eyes, and enjoyed the different shades of pink as the clouds scudded over.
What I am trying to say is that I have mixed feelings about this new fashionability. The greater part of me is thrilled. How lovely to be able to sip on lapsang souchong as well as PG Tips, to scoff homemade fish cakes and proper fish soup.
If it means that some of their finest buildings are saved – their precious theatres, concert halls and piers – then I hope that towns like Margate, the town that brought us Tracey Emin and wooden rollercoasters, and Hastings, which brought us Suggs and a block of flats, Marine Court, that can be admired from 20 miles away, will continue the slow and always fraught business of gentrification. May their artisanal bakers truly prosper. But I worry about the forgotten places, and the ignored, the towns that have yet to appear in glossy magazine articles or the Cath Kidston catalogue, where no man with a signet ring and deck shoes will ever desire to pass a weekend. My heart aches for Saltburn-by-the-Sea, for Hunstanton and Filey and even poor old Blackpool. (I exempt from this roll call only Great Yarmouth, for which my heart does not ache, and probably never will.) And I hope, too, that even where change is afoot, we will not get too carried away. There is a time for organic honey and ricotta ice cream served in a bitter chocolate cone, and that time is right now. But I would be sad if the rise of such delights resulted in the extinction of the '99 Flake. Sometimes, for sure, a girl wants to tie a big, white napkin around her neck, and feast on the finest sea bass, and sod the price tag. But sometimes, she wants to stand in the rain feeling sorry for herself eating gritty cockles from a polystyrene pot with a little wooden fork. Doesn't she? Or is that just me?
