"Strange. That's the word for it." So says ex-Royal Navy stoker Hardy, now driver of the electric train that plies the Littlehampton seafront, 80p each way. A bingo-winged passenger agrees: "Bloody beautiful, though - and good for the borough."
Thomas Heatherwick is a modern English free-thinking designer in the old-fashioned vein. He has gained renown for designs that cunningly combine the bleeding obvious with the outright inspired. His clients, the Murray family, live in Littlehampton, a pleasant, old-fashioned Sussex town-next-the-sea that was, until now, famous for not all that much. Now the two have come together to bring us the mould-breaking East Beach Cafe that's strange to some, striking to most, and the blueprint of coastal cafes to come, both in terms of cuisine and architecture.
After the showier charms of neigbouring Arundel and Bognor Regis, Littlehampton is a modestly prim, fruit-on-the-sideboard-and-nobody-ill-in-the-house sort of place. The wind carries a bright iodised tang; there are primary-coloured beach huts; the beach is mostly big stones and cracked shells; and - oh yes - there are seaman Hardy's 10-minute sea-front train trips.
The road into town swings you past perfectly nice homes of no single architectural style: arts and crafts, Tudorbethan, Edwardian masquerading as Victorian, 1980s bland brick. Where better than here to build a stretched, rippled, sharp-and-smooth, oxidised steel structure? Seen from the car park behind, East Beach Cafe seems initially to have been shorn from the walls of a New Mexico canyon. Adobe-brown, sculptural and arresting, it is, in the Great British tradition, carefully ignored by the caravanners and day-trippers paying and displaying.
Climb the few steps to one side, and there's a Teas For The Beach servery tacked on to one end and a spare, decked terrace, sheltered by an L-shaped perspex windbreak. There is a queue for the cafe. From the minute you walk in, you know that East Beach is not just right-on and right now, but smells right, looks right and feels right. The punters are determinedly non-trendy — last Tuesday lunchtime the place was packed with a crowd of all ages, incomes and styles. There was also none of the smug metro attitude that often accompanies smart new openings as everyone was too busy enjoying the food, drink and view.
East Beach Cafe's menu achieves the smart trick of keeping everyone happy. There are bacon butties with good local bacon and good local bread. Buttered field mushrooms on toast for those mornings when you need comforting. Fish and chips, of the impeccably fresh and crisply executed kind. Bowls of mussels and big juicy burgers. Dover sole with caramelised endives if you're feeling posh. Muesli for brunch, Pinot Grigio for lunch, Pimms for sunsets. Dark and Stormy - demerera rum and ginger beer cocktails - for when it's, you know, dark and stormy.
The place opened less than a month ago, the kitchen's already on song, and the room, which feels like sitting inside a light-filled seashell, is delightful. The only thing that's strange is that there aren't already hundreds of East Beach Cafes to brighten our coastline and breathe fresh life into our Ryanair-depleted resorts.
