Clean ie raked beaches with bars, beach cafes, barbecue areas and showers; free clean toilets, availability of water sports, good restaurants, you can buy local seafood, bustling local food markets, cheap wine, ready erected luxury camping sites, marinas and working harbours, purpose built hotels, a motorway all the way, or you can take a high speed train. Shops and caterers are welcoming, they don't just "tolerate" families who bring children. You get called sir or madam wherever you go. It’s cheaper, hotter and sunnier, and it has less rain. No amusement arcades or fish and chips.
Soz but you have got to see it as it is. Before the war "on a busy summer's day, over 11,000 passengers would have been landed on Swanage Pier, with paddle steamers battling for space". They don’t come now in those numbers, but Swanage has not reinvented itself. I think the most unattractive thing about Swanage is that it has become a giant car park. Please get people on the park and ride so as to make King George’s car park a permanent market and reinstate The Downs with no car parking.
I suspect this is pre WW2. Paul Nash, the artist, used the phrase "quite unspeakable" to describe the trippers coming ashore from the steamers in the late 1930s.
Puy lentils
ReplyDeleteMartin Johnson!
ReplyDeleteClean ie raked beaches with bars, beach cafes, barbecue areas and showers; free clean toilets, availability of water sports, good restaurants, you can buy local seafood, bustling local food markets, cheap wine, ready erected luxury camping sites, marinas and working harbours, purpose built hotels, a motorway all the way, or you can take a high speed train. Shops and caterers are welcoming, they don't just "tolerate" families who bring children. You get called sir or madam wherever you go. It’s cheaper, hotter and sunnier, and it has less rain. No amusement arcades or fish and chips.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it would be fairer to ask what's the South of France got that Dorset hasn't? Thought Martin maintained his interests in both places these days?
ReplyDeleteCan't be that great over there...
To Anonymous who wrote "Clean ie raked beaches with bars, beach cafes, barbecue areas and showers; free clean toilets..." etc
ReplyDeleteI was feeling good about Swanage till I read your post!
Soz but you have got to see it as it is. Before the war "on a busy summer's day, over 11,000 passengers would have been landed on Swanage Pier, with paddle steamers battling for space". They don’t come now in those numbers, but Swanage has not reinvented itself. I think the most unattractive thing about Swanage is that it has become a giant car park. Please get people on the park and ride so as to make King George’s car park a permanent market and reinstate The Downs with no car parking.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if their beach parties are as well policed as ours are about to be!
ReplyDeleteWhen you say "before the war", you are quoting from the BBC website, and you mean before the First World War, ie pre-1914...
ReplyDeleteI suspect this is pre WW2. Paul Nash, the artist, used the phrase "quite unspeakable" to describe the trippers coming ashore from the steamers in the late 1930s.
ReplyDeleteSee BBC website
ReplyDeletehttp://tiny.cc/P4cq2
"The first paddle steamer to land at the new pier was the Lord Elgin and by 1905 10 steamers a day served Swanage.
"On a busy summer's day, over 11,000 passengers would have been landed on Swanage Pier, with paddle steamers battling for space.
"You could also get to France for 37p.
"After World War I, the pier went into slow decline."
Surely it was 7s and 6d?
ReplyDeleteIf memory serves.
It used to take rather a long time, the rowers were unreliable as were the winds, but, oh, the unfettered joys of Marseilles.
Nuff to make me wish I were young ag'in.
NURSE, NURSE, I seem to have an unexpected cramp!