Tourism and travel to coastal areas of the United Kingdom is proving more popular every year as guests and day-trippers savor some of the country’s most beautiful shorelines, quaint villages and scenic countryside locales.
With that additional interest come problems.
Many of the places in high demand for tourism have seen decades of decline in other aspects of their existence — in their fishing industries, in the higher and often exorbitant rental housing prices, in their popularity for second homes used perhaps just once or twice a year, in their communities besieged by pressures on their young people having no choice but to see their futures elsewhere and in their simplified career opportunities that often pay minimum wages.
There are well-meaning hoteliers doing what they can to sustain their communities via their businesses, and some have needed to come up with innovative housing solutions to be able to hire and retain staff.
Some tourism centers are remote, which is what makes them popular as getaways.
These pressures were driven home to me, more than I was aware of them before, six years ago when I listened to a radio documentary series — which across its lifespan has been routinely excellent — called “The Patch” on BBC Sounds.
The idea of the show, and what a great idea it is, came about when an obscure website was found, which does nothing more than generate random postcodes, what U.S. readers will know as zip codes.
Press the button, and a random postcode will appear.
Producers of "The Patch" thought, why not press the button and then find a story from that postcode that has not been told before?
They did that in August 2020, and a postcode appeared that was in the Cornish town of Camborne. The story they found was that even though it was 3 miles from the coast, there were many people there who had never seen the sea.
Why? Few opportunities and jobs, an impoverished social fabric, an absence of transportation, low levels of car ownership and high costs charged at beach locations.
The U.K. government introduced new funding this month for coastal and fishing communities.
The £360 million Fishing & Coastal Growth Fund is meant to support the fishing industry and by turn their communities to, in the government’s words, “modernise the fishing and seafood sector, build resilience and support coastal regeneration.”
Two components of that are to “improve recruitment, retention and skills” and to bolster “sector community partnerships, including support for place-based pilots and initiatives that encourage local solutions by those who understand the issues.”
Presumably, “those who understand the issues” are locals, not politicians, for no doubt other funding initiatives have been tried in the past.
I wish this one luck.
Another silver lining is the continued growth of nomadic workers or resettled workers choosing to live in such places, a trend likely started during the pandemic but extenuated by the general cost-of-living crisis and many people’s recalculation of their lives and desires.
Migration such as this is helped by improvements to broadband.
An article on this, also from the BBC, stated that this new band of migrants, “rather than commuting to city offices … are putting down roots, renting homes, enrolling children in local schools, joining clubs and co-working spaces and contributing skills that once flowed almost exclusively to major cities.”
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