The collapse of Bournemouth
One of England’s most prestigious seaside towns is now plagued by astronomical crime rates, spiralling rents, migrant hotels, and rapid, unwanted demographic change
At every possible opportunity in the summer weekends of my childhood, my father would take our family down to the coast. Our route to the sea was normally through the medieval city of Salisbury, across the chalk downs of Hardy’s Wessex, and into the piney moors of the New Forest. The destination would nearly always be Bournemouth, the prim, stately model of the British seaside town, perched magisterially on Dorset’s sandstone cliffs, above a long golden strand lapped by the warm waves of the Channel.
Our favourite beach was at Durley Chine, where we could park (for free, greatly appealing to my father) among obscured mansions in the shade of thick-smelling conifers, and make our descent to the shore, where the chine gives way to the rows of huts that line the promenade, and a reassuringly lower-middle class Harvester restaurant. We would while away the hours on the sand until the sky was orange, my mother reading, my father swimming, and my brother and I playing whatever games we could devise, mostly involving the throwing of sand. The day would end with fish and chips under the pines, watching the sun sink over the jurassic cliffs past Poole harbour, the gateway to King Alfred’s stronghold at Wareham.
These were among the most precious times of my early life, and the sights and sounds and smells of that part of the world and the accompanying hazy, worriless bliss are cherished sensations. Though the beach is public, it was one of those places that felt special and individual to my family, as if we had somehow carved out our own summer fief on the crowded shore.
It was on Durley Chine beach, on 24 May 2024, that two innocent women, Amie Grey and Leanne Miles, were attacked by Nasen Saadi, a criminology student from Croydon of Iraqi and Thai heritage. Saadi murdered Grey and left Miles in critical condition, and was sentenced this year to thirty-nine years in prison for his crimes. The incident was part of an escalating pattern of violence, particularly sexual violence, in the Bournemouth area over the past few years, with the beach as the focal point, a pattern which had begun in July 2021 with the brutal rape of a 15-year-old girl by Gabriel Marinoaica, a young man from Walsall who dragged his victim into the sea to commit his attack. Another notable incident occurred eight months later. Afghan asylum seeker and convicted killer Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai (he had shot two fellow Afghans while living illegally in Serbia in 2018, before fleeing to Norway, where his asylum claim was rejected, then travelling to Britain and successfully claiming asylum by pretending to be an unaccompanied fourteen-year-old, despite being an adult) stabbed Thomas Roberts (a local man and qualified precision engineer who had recently applied to join the Royal Marines) to death outside a Subway in the city centre, in a dispute over an e-scooter.
The news stories become relentless from that point. Among many depravities are the sexual assault of a 17-year-old boy by a group of Asian males on 17 June 2023, accompanied the same day by an attempted assault on a 16-year-old girl outside the fish and chip shop on the seafront. A week later, two girls, aged just 10 and 11, who would have been in primary school at the time, were sexually assaulted while swimming in the sea. As far as I can tell, none of these crimes have yet been prosecuted.
Two months after the murder of Amie Grey, on 19 July 2024, a day of delirious warmth culminated in violent clashes between youths, many coming in from London, on the seafront — clashes which were filmed and circulated on social media. In the chaos, a teenage girl was sexually assaulted. Jessica Toale, the freshly-elected Labour MP for Bournemouth West, a seat which had been Tory since its creation in 1950, said after the events of 19 July that crime and anti-social behaviour had become a ‘huge issue’ in contrast to the safe Bournemouth she remembered as a girl, stating that ‘…parents had told [her] that they are concerned about letting their daughters go to the town.’ These are almost reactionary words from a Labour MP, and reflective of the mood of anxiety and decline that seems to have enveloped the city, a mood founded on the series of despair-inducing events plaguing residents and visitors. On 30 June, disorder similar to that witnessed in July last year returned to the seafront, with police making arrests across the country in the aftermath.
A week later, on 6 July, a young woman was raped in a public toilet adjoining the beach. The police have charged Mohammed Abdullah, a Syrian asylum seeker living in West London, with the crime.
Jessica Toale’s words, and my own sense of the Bournemouth that was, are not rose-tinted nostalgic delusions, but accurate recollections of the place the town used to be.
The archetypal Victorian resort town, Bournemouth grew exponentially from a population of 13,000 upon the opening of the railway line in 1870 to a population of 128,000 at the beginning of the Second World War. Enterprising Victorian developers identified the lucrative marketability of the health-enhancing sea air and pine scent, buying up parcels of land in the hitherto sparse evergreen scrub and lining the clifftops with rows of respectable weekend villas. As the dwellings sprang up, so too did exemplary works of the public architecture of the era, including the imperious Italianate Town Hall, built originally as a luxury hotel, and the vast Art Deco Pavilion Theatre, giving the town a distinctly grandiose character. Through the centre and around the chines, exquisitely landscaped gardens were laid out for the town’s visitors to wander, which still remain as some of the finest urban parkland in the country. The Bournemouth that was created for the London middle classes was a haven of almost parodic Englishness, so comforting in its homeliness that British colonial administrators and businessmen would replicate Bournemouth’s style in their own corners of the Empire.
In the thirty years after the war, rising incomes, the collapse in the cost of international travel, and the concurrent compromising of the rail network by the Beeching cuts, among other factors, led to the decline of the British seaside resort. Yet Bournemouth largely escaped the kind of harsh decay seen in comparable destinations like Margate or Weston-super-Mare, likely in part due to Bournemouth’s prestige among those peers, and the exceptional amenity of its geography — the ecology almost resembles the shores of south-western France, with a more agreeable summer climate. Instead of atrophying indefinitely like Weston, Bournemouth’s growth was merely arrested, and until recently, its grandeur was maintained. The town, along with its even more geriatric neighbour Christchurch, became one of ‘God’s waiting rooms’, the population sustained by the turnover of retirees who would come to spend their golden years on the golden sands of a town that reminded them, as it still does many others, of happier days of youth.
You might imagine that a town with an elderly citizenry and imposing Victorian streets could feel stifling, but that was never the case. Outside of a summer Sunday, Bournemouth was often sedate, of course, but large enough that it wasn’t boring. In contrast to less staid seaside towns, such as Weymouth to the west, arcade-laden home of Sea Life, or Brighton to the east, self-regarding and alternative, Bournemouth was where you went to relax, rather than to engage in any active fun. It was a resort in the true sense, a careless bubble of pleasantness. It was partly this sense of the place that led me to assume, naïvely, that it would be immune from the forces of Britain’s dissipation, both active and entropic.
One of the most tangible elements of this country’s decline is crime, which subverts so much of what makes a healthy society. Despite the feeble protestations of certain journalistic yesterday’s-men, crime in this country, as measured by the rate of recorded incidents, has been spiralling for the past decade or so, from a low point in the early days of the Coalition Government, to a peak in the emergence from the pandemic. Even this measure is now becoming inadequate at capturing the true scale, as citizens, quite rationally, lose faith in the ability of the police to even investigate, let alone prosecute the crimes to which they have been subjected. When it comes to this disintegration of law and order, Bournemouth is sadly no different to the rest of the country; in fact, it is amongst the very worst.
Of the many offences listed on the statute books, perhaps the most obnoxious to society are violent, sexual, and public order offences. These are the crimes that leave the deepest and most tangible marks on the victims, their families, and the safety of the public realm. To begin with the most serious of sexual offences, rape, the recorded rate of such offences in the year ending 2014 was 39.3 per 100,000 Bournemouth residents. This was in line with the previous twelve years, where the average rate had been 43.2. In the year ending 2025, there were 147.6 rapes per 100,000 Bournemouth residents, an increase of 276% in eleven years, and 47% higher than the rate recorded in the same period in London by the Metropolitan Police. Even this depressing statistic was down 17% from a peak of 177.5 in 2022. The increase in the rate of all sexual offences from 2014 to 2025 was 224%, mirroring the increase in the rate of public order offences, which was 223%. Violent offences rose by 173%. For all three of these select categories, the year ending 2022 had been the worst, with 1 violent offence recorded for every 25 residents in that period. In 2024, there were 90 anti-social behaviour incidents per 1,000 residents in central Bournemouth — a higher rate than nearly anywhere else in the country, higher indeed than any part of Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, or Bristol, for instance, and higher than every part of London except the heart of Westminster. The sleepy family resort town has become a borderline no-go zone at night, especially for women, and it’s hardly safe during the day, either.
Far from being a hysterical minority, as often tends to be the type to write to MPs, the constituents who have told Jessica Toale that they will no longer let their daughters go into the town alone would be entirely rational in making that decision. Crime in Bournemouth has even escalated to the degree that more than two-hundred residents have come together to create a vigilante ‘Safeguard Force’ to patrol the beach and city centre. The commitment of those volunteers is commendable, but the signal it sends about the state of the town is not a good one. Where the police have failed in their basic duty to prevent and punish crime, ordinary citizens have had to step in, many of them ex-members of the Armed Forces, who have dedicated years of their life in service to a state that now seems incapable of returning the favour.
It is obviously correct to say that Bournemouth has always had crime, that there have always been people ready to menace others and sour the atmosphere. However, at no point in my memory, or it seems in Bournemouth’s history, has there been such a pallor of danger and unease over the town.
The creeping rot of Bournemouth’s physical environment reflects that pallor. What were once the icons of Bournemouth’s heyday have now become monuments to its mutilation.
At the heart of Bournemouth’s town centre was once the flagship branch of the 144-year-old department store chain Beales, which had been founded in the town in 1881. In 2020, the branch closed its doors for the last time, and now the towering, empty store forlornly overlooks the vape, souvenir, and mobile phone repair shops (three operate on the same street as the former Beales store) that launder the drug money funnelled through the town. (The last operating store under the Beales name was closed in nearby Poole in May of this year, holding a ‘Rachel Reeves closing down sale’, blaming the Labour government’s Autumn budget tax rises for the business’ failure.)
Further towards the sea, overlooking the pier and the Pavilion Theatre, is the great Royal Bath Hotel, the town’s most famous, a palace of Victorian splendour I used to marvel at from the car window. At Bournemouth’s peak, the hotel was patronised by only the wealthiest of the town’s visitors, and to tell someone that you were staying there was once a source of Hyacinth Bucket-style aspirational pride. In 2025, the hotel is owned by the notorious Britannia Hotels group (also the owner of the newly-designated asylum hotel in Canary Wharf that has recently become a lightning-rod of protest), under whose management standards have unsurprisingly cratered, with appalling reviews and a crumbling exterior. One recent Google review includes a picture of the view from a bedroom window of a filthy enclosed space littered with beer bottles, wires hanging loosely from an unseen source next to rotting pipework. The Premier Inn across the road is more expensive, and by all accounts somehow now a more luxurious option. At certain times (it is unclear whether this is currently the case) in the past decade it is suspected that the Royal Bath Hotel has been used to accommodate asylum seekers, much to the chagrin of paying guests. It is reported by The Sun that one of the hotels currently being used to house asylum seekers is the Chine Hotel, an elegant Victorian palace on the seafront which traditionally hosted performers from local theatres, and counts among its past guests Laurel and Hardy and Vera Lynn.
Hard-working families I knew from the less well-off corners of south-central England would save all year for a summer trip to Bournemouth, spending a week, if they were lucky, at one of the hotels overlooking the sea, if they were luckier. As of 31 March 2025, 530 migrants were housed in hotel accommodation at the taxpayer’s expense in the local authority containing Bournemouth. Each asylum seeker in the UK in hotel accommodation cost the government £60,000 on average in that year (£2.1bn spent on approximately 35,000 migrants, as the figure was 38,000 in March 2024 and 32,000 in March 2025). Using those figures, we can estimate that the British government spends somewhere in the region of £87,000 every single day, or £2.6m every month (or, more concretely, the income tax contributions of 7,000 median full-time earners), on providing illegal immigrants in the Bournemouth area with what is effectively a free all-inclusive beachside holiday, while local families squeezed by the pressures of rising taxes and stagnant wages can barely afford a weekend which may then be ruined by the presence of the very people the government has taken increasing amounts of their money to subsidise. We know that authorities across the country have attempted to supress the reporting of crimes committed by these illegal immigrants, most recently in Nuneaton, and that the rate of the committing of these crimes is significant, so it is a logical assumption that the distinguished guests of Bournemouth’s asylum hotels have made their own (un)healthy contribution to the town’s post-pandemic crime wave while they enjoy their state-funded vacation.
The results are predictable. The hostility bubbling over in corners of the country as divergent as Ballymena, Canary Wharf, and Epping is now beginning to simmer on the sunny south coast. A quick glance at the comments sections of local Facebook groups, hotbeds of increasing fervour, reveals sentiments such as ‘Civil unrest is already happening rightly as precedence is given to immigrants’, ‘All the immigrants just coming to sell drugs and run Bournemouth’, ‘Deport the bloody lot’, and ‘Turning third-world.’ A poll on one page asked what members would like fixed in ‘broken Britain’. From a long list of issues, the majority chose immigration at 53%, followed distantly by crime in second place at 8%. On the evening of Friday 25 July, protestors gathered at the Chine Hotel, the alleged migrant hotel, to demonstrate against the housing of illegal immigrants in Bournemouth. According to the Daily Mail, protestors began to chant ‘send them back’ at migrants who arrived at the hotel during the demonstration.
The changes in Bournemouth’s population have not come just from the small boats that land a hundred miles up the coast. The same rapid demographic transition witnessed across Britain in the last twenty years has occurred in Bournemouth as much — if not more — than elsewhere.
At the time of the 2021 Census, East Cliff ward, the eastern part of the town centre, was a 61% White British area. Ten years earlier, that figure had been 71%. As recently as 2001, East Cliff had been 89% White British. This is a change induced overwhelmingly by legal immigration, massively accelerated by the New Labour government, and now running into the millions per year gross in the wake of the 2021 changes to the immigration system by the Johnson Government. With the Boriswave crashing upon Bournemouth’s shore in the years following the latest census, we can guess that the East Cliff figure might now be sub-50%. In 2024, 36% of babies born to Bournemouth mothers had at least one foreign-born parent — not surprising given that Bournemouth’s two parliamentary constituencies, East and West, went from 8.3% and 7.4% foreign-born respectively in 2001 to 21.2% and 19.4% in 2021.
Such dramatic changes in the character of a place’s citizenry would be eye-popping, but not shocking, in a borough of a global metropolis like London, but it must be reiterated that Bournemouth is a town of 200,000 in the West Country, a hundred miles from London, which until very recently was relatively homogenous, with no established migrant communities whatsoever save from colonies of retirees from around the British Isles. When my grandmother was born in Bournemouth in the ’30s, it is likely that fewer than 1,000 of the 113,000 residents originated from beyond Britain’s borders, and even less than that from outside the British Isles. In 2021 that figure was 40,000, and will have increased by multiple thousands since then. Walking the streets of Bournemouth now produces the same unheimlich effect as watching another family move into your old home, or somebody else drive your car. Now that places as deep into England as Bournemouth are becoming like the Edgware Road, the sense is setting in that there is no escape from Britain’s unwanted demographic transformation.
The swelling undercurrent of the Boriswave was the influx of international students precipitated by the interaction of loosened visa rules and cash-hungry, standard-slashing universities. Bournemouth is a medium-sized provincial university town, home to a mid-ranking institution as well as an arts university, and thus is typical of the destination that many of these international students arrive at. There were more than 1,000 African students studying at Bournemouth University in the academic year 2023/2024, 935 of whom came from Nigeria. A further 1,800 came from Asia to study at the university. Regular Pimlico Journal readers will not be surprised to learn that two-thirds of these students were Indian. To emphasise the effect this has had on Bournemouth’s population, around 1 in every 200 people living in Bournemouth is now a Nigerian student, and more than 1 in every 150 is an Indian student. One can imagine what is beginning to happen to nightlife in the town.
The predictable effect of the Boriswave, propelled by these students (the international student population of Bournemouth has increased 54% from the academic year 2019/20), was the same as in many other parts of Britain: soaring rents, particularly at the lower end of the market. Between January 2021, when the borders were effectively completely opened, and June 2025, private rents grew 34.5% in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (the local authority) — 4 percentage points, or 13%, ahead of the national increase, and an annualised rate of 6.9%. One-bedroom properties became more expensive at even faster rate: 34.9% over four-and-a-half years. While we cannot attribute the whole of this increase to immigration, given simultaneously high inflation and interest rates (as well as expensive yet pointless regulatory pressures on landlords), it is likely that the additional pressure made a substantial contribution; there is a good analysis of the rent/immigration relationship on Neil O’Brien’s Substack here.
Anecdotally, several acquaintances who studied in the town, which was already very expensive by national standards — one list puts it as now the tenth most expensive city in Britain to rent, another as the fourth most expensive to buy, and another found it to be the ‘least affordable’ to rent in Britain relative to wages — found themselves priced out, commuting into the university from parents’ homes up to fifty miles away. In just another of many case studies in the British state’s maximisation of the welfare of foreigners at the expense of the native population, the practical effect of the Boriswave has been to price native residents and students out of Bournemouth so that people from other countries can come and study for an MSc in ‘Sport Business Leadership’, ‘Human Centred Artificial Intelligence for Games Development’, and, perhaps ironically, ‘Disaster Management’. In further insult, these degrees are unlikely to add much value either to the intellectual flourishing of their students or to the British economy, if indeed these students remain in Britain after completing their degree — most will, however, because this country’s general dysfunction has produced an incentive system whereby the brightest international graduates flee our taxes and housing costs, while the least capable stay on, having used the student visa as merely a route into the country, where they can lead lives marginally less awful than the places they came from. Many even claim asylum upon arriving at their university, a situation so ridiculous that even the hapless Starmer Government has been forced to intervene. Of course, if you are one of the wilier chancers using this route, a university in a nice beach town might be top of your application list.
It is not just the evolving resident population which has altered the social fabric of Bournemouth, but even more so the profile of its visitors. The kind of people that spill off the morning trains are very different now, in the Summer of 2025, than those who would have been arriving fifty years before. Shrewd readers may have noticed the secondary pattern among the perpetrators of the crimes and disorder with which this article began: not only were many of them of a foreign background, but many were also living elsewhere in the country when they committed the acts. Bournemouth has managed to become a magnet for the restless and dysfunctional across this island, who are drawn by forces unseen to the Dorset idyll to wreak violence upon innocent day-trippers and residents alike.
Unfortunately, I am not fully privy to the subcultural worlds behind this phenomenon, and so I will not comment too expansively to save any embarrassment, but it seems that Bournemouth has joined other readily accessible seaside locations such as Southend as a destination for roadmen and associated members of the underclass to go and wander aimlessly (and sinisterly) about in, and maybe, when the evening draws in and the boredom eventually bites, to engage in pointless and poorly-executed petty violence against one another. This sequence of events is unfolding up and down the coast, as if the amateur gang warfare of London council estate playgrounds were being dispersed around the country to more scenic locations. Bournemouth is now a ‘Hub’ for knife crime.
But even more sinister than the large, roving bands of first-decile youths who descend on the town are those who come alone or in small groups with the specific intent of carrying out acts of physical and sexual violence. Naseen Saadi clearly chose Bournemouth deliberately as the site to carry out a cold-blooded murder, and it seems almost certain that Gabriel Marinoaica also came to the town in the expectation he would find an opportunity to sexually assault a helpless victim. While sixty-something Britons peruse Rightmove for a nice flat with a sea view, romanticising a retirement in quiet, comfortable Bournemouth, younger and more dangerous men, many of a background alien to this island, see only a pool of prey to victimise. Such dynamics are self-reinforcing, and Bournemouth risks entering a vicious circle of violence, where ordinary law-abiding people are increasingly deterred by grotesque headlines, which in turn signal to the criminal that the town is a place of opportunity. The former is as strong a push factor as the latter’s wrenching counterpart.
A decade ago, Bournemouth was the default destination for any beachgoing families from my hometown. Now, everyone I know is fleeing up and down the coast. The beaches around Christchurch are swelling with escapees, as are the beautiful sands at Studland. The town that survived, and even thrived, after the package holiday revolution may well meet its end in the mire of twenty-first century Britain. It might not be long before Bournemouth’s hotels are kept open only by the generosity of the Home Office.
At this point, I find myself running out of synonymous phrasing for ‘Bournemouth is now terrible’. It is distressing to see somewhere you love, and feel a meaningful bond with, deteriorate along with the country that is your only home. It is one thing to read depressing headlines and statistics, to shake your head and carry on with the day, and another to witness the rot spread through streets you’ve walked hundreds of times, slowly poisoning the joy that the place used to bring. I did not, however, write this article to depress the reader or cry doom.
Bournemouth’s problems are a microcosm of the country’s problems, and just like the country’s problems, they are soluble. I do not need to begin a list of policy prescriptions here — minds more capable than mine can produce those with more detail and eloquence elsewhere. It is sufficient to say that Bournemouth’s condition can be changed with relative ease. Attention is drawn to the town simply to illustrate the necessity of action, because if Bournemouth isn’t safe from the knotweed of Britain’s decrepitude, nowhere is.
I would like one day to take my own children on trips to the seaside, to the town their great-grandmother was born in, and to give them memories untouched by the discord and ugliness which is coming to characterise Britain in the 2020s. That is no unreasonable aspiration.
Image credits: Lewis Clarke, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0
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Beautifully written piece. I know Bournemouth well, and you summed it up perfectly at the end - if Bournemouth isn't safe, nowhere is. They want us replaced and erased everywhere we are. It's time to fight back with a vengeance.
I don't believe any of this can be true, because Fraser Nelson said we're living in the best possible time in this country and he's got the statistics to prove it. So there.