Psycho-geographic post-card no. 3: Hemsby

 

I've finally got around to finishing writing and 'posting'  this final 'postcard'', just shy of a month after we got back from Norfolk. Thus even surpassing my usual tardiness when sending physical postcards.

We walked from the car park at Winterton, where sadly the cafe on the clifftop had disappeared, leaving behind just part of its floor.  A coffee concession  had appeared in its place, slightly more inland, but not far from the remains of the old cafe floor.  The concession of two silver round edged vans that somehow managed to look like they belonged to both space age and of 1970s American dragster racing tracks.

Winterton is a village near Yarmouth, but a much quieter concern. It is primarily of interest for the beach and the peripheral natural area which consists of a gorse-infested green corridor separated from the beach by the higher sand-dunes. It is also the beginning (if starting to the North)  of a continuous zone of connected coastal villages and  holiday parks, that become more built up until finally becoming Great Yarmouth.

As we emerged onto the beach, it appeared a wedding was taking place. A long table had been laid out  with a white cloth and places set. The table was perpendicular to the sea's edge and not far from it. A bunch of people were gathered photographing a couple dressed in bride and groom attire. A little further along, another gaggle of people were photographing a young woman posing in a dress/sheet type affair. These people all seemed connected. We couldn't tell if we had walked through the middle of a photoshoot for some type of high-end magazine, a student art project or possibly even a real wedding (this seemed unlikely). The people seemed oblivious to us and other people and their dogs drifting through the middle of whatever event they were part of. It was as if the wedding scene had been superimposed, as if projected from another place where it really belonged. It was only when we got a bit further away from it that I realised how off kilter it seemed.

Soon after, following a relatively deserted and uneventful beach strectch, we headed inland to the green corridor behind the dunes. The environment here had a prehistoric quality. On entering 'the valley'  as it is named on the map, we became the people that time forgot.  For a while the environment resembled a pre-human landscape. But after a while we began to emerge back into the present. Sporadically, bungalow-like dwellings appeared in the dunes. Inland, chalets began to replace the wilderness. Soon we arrived alongside the 'Funpark' at Hemsby. A large slide loomed up like a relic from a golden age of the seaside's more garish maifestations, rudely interrupting an environment that had up until now been mostly devoid of human paraphernalia or people. The slide marked the point of a definate shift from one type of coastal experience  to another. We entered a realm where most of the elements of 'The Seaside' that I recalled from childhood holidays were present.

Away from the near deserted beach and sand-dunes, where the only sounds were the sea, wind and birds, we were thrust into a cacophony of very different noises. And smells. Hemsby Beach, as distinct from the more inland village part of Hemsby, consists of one main drag that bifurcates various holiday parks/resorts. We had emerged somewhere about halfway down, in the epicentre of a realm of fish and chips, amusement arcades and cheap gift shops selling all manner of seaside ephemera. A number of  plastic moulded garish anthropomorphic characters, most representative of junk food items that were available in the various food outlets, appeared at various intervals along the street.

The smells and sounds were overwhelming in their sensory assault, but at the same time reassuring. With one or two minor updates, they remained exactly as a recalled from holidays with my parents in the 1980s in nearby Great Yarmouth. Great Yarmouth was a much larger concern than Hemsby, but here many of the essential elements were contained in microcosm. 

I drifted past an amusement arcade, 'Palace Caesar'. It's facade was apparently unchanged since the 1980s, other than the presumably originally bright red plastic frontage having faded to hot water bottle pink. From the blur of sound coming  from inside, a distinct few seconds of arcane ZX Spectrum era noise emerged that I recognised from an ancient arcade machine, but I couldn't place which one. I passed a 'Captain Pugwash' children's ride out the front, a character I'd assumed long forgotten by most and probably unknown by children today. 

The whole stretch felt like it had never left the era of space invaders, sugary donuts, fairgrounds and dangerous blow-up things proffered by gift shops to take in the sea. There was a faded quality, slightly washed out like a Polaroid photograph, accompanied by an analogue soundtrack of off-kilter  seaside noises and arcane seaside smells.

There were no dangerous inflatables or 'saucy' seaside postcards for sale (or indeed any postcards). Otherwise the place was the seaside of old, nothing had changed. It felt immune to the sort of creeping gentrification found elsewhere along the Norfolk Coast (and more widely) as if it existed within an invisible shield that preserved it.

I felt reassured by this small enclave of old school 'seaside-ness', and wished there was time to visit Great Yarmouth up the coast, but that would need a full day to do it justice. Possibly two.

Later back at the caravan, I read that Great Yarmouth had recently been ranked sixth from bottom in a Which survey of the UK's best seaside resorts. The findings at first, seemed puzzling. The Which commentator said something along the lines of 'biggest definitely is not best' and suggested that places with fairgrounds (of which Yarmouth has two) had done particularly badly. When it became apparent that one of the main criteria used to rate resorts was 'peace and quiet', then the survey results made much more sense.  The inbuilt assumption was that peace and quiet is always more desirable  than the sort of noise, smells and sights places like Hemsby and Great Yarmouth had to offer. This bias meant that the quieter, posher resorts did much better. But my feeling was that Which were asking an incomplete set of questions to a limited set of people.  There was apparently no balancing questions about 'largest and noisiest fairground', 'best Victorian-era seaside resort architecture' or 'finest so-bad-its-a must waxworks', which surely would have moved Great Yarmouth up the ranking considerably. I doubted many of those I'd seen wandering along Hemsby Beach earlier had been among those surveyed. I doubted also that they would give much credence to the survey rankings of post lockdown 'staycation' resorts, which had a definite smug 'crap towns' quality about it. 

The Which survey, and it's inbuilt bias against places like Yarmouth or Skegness, along with my all to brief dip into the old school seaside resort in Hemsby, gave me an immense  yearning to visit Great Yarmouth. I vowed to get there before the year is out. If I do, another psycho-geographic postcard will be forthcoming. To consider such an excursion a 'staycation', now the parlance used to describe a holiday anywhere in the UK, not just one where you stay at home, seems ludicrous. Instead, particularly post lockdown, I'm imaging the trip will be more akin to a journey into another world.