The Great British beach: a modest proposal

A Magazine goes on holiday

A while ago, I attended an event dedicated to the Spirit of the Law. It was the first time I had ever seen a Scottish guy don a kilt outside of a formal occasion. I thought they just brought those out whenever a royal kicks the bucket, but as it turns out, they also wear them when giving talks about ‘Power’ and ‘Zion’. This kilt also lacked the traditional tartan patterns and was adorned instead with flowers, which was odd. I suppose he was paying lip service to Alexander McQueen — a fellow Scot — who deconstructed and reworked formal Highland attire beyond recognition, so who am I to question it? He was also wearing leather boots, a bit LARPy, but then again, nothing scares the elite more than the heel click of a young, lean male Zoomer with long blonde hair. He called this venerable publication a ‘Tory boy rag’, followed by a bizarre soliloquy in praise of Tony Blair — the only bit of edgy contrarianism the power bottoms of the online British Right have the balls for.

I had heard this script before. Clearly, he was in thrall to none other than Dr Neema Parvini a.k.a ‘The Academic Agent’, sworn ‘enemy of Pimlico Journal’. When that fat Iranian shyster calls Blair the ‘Dark Lord’, it isn’t a reference to Darth Vader, but a Freudian slip harking back to a time his mother called him a ‘handsome chappy’ after the 1997 exit poll, spiritually cuckolding his Iranian father — the incubation period for this obsession. There was no block button back then, so he had to put up with the hysterical domestics that ensued thereafter.

There was another event scheduled for Edinburgh, but it was cancelled as I made my way up there. Fortunately, the most remarkable piece of coastline just south of Eymouth salvaged the situation. What lay before me was a headland, a pristine field of grass with a seemingly abandoned farmhouse and a hundred-foot cliff at the end.

I thought about enjoying a pint while admiring the view and taking in the waves crashing against the rocks, imagining myself as a priest in Lindisfarne watching the Viking longships edge closer through the mist and over the horizon and wondering if they were going to fill our prisons. Unfortunately, there weren’t any pubs nearby due to ‘planning laws’, which the boffins of the Right inform me is a contentious issue among them. So I booked a flight to sunny Albania, a country with no planning laws beyond ‘asking for permission’, to which the answer is always ‘yes’. Areas, such as the coastline in question would be lathered in concrete and chocked with resorts, with food and beer aplenty. As it turns out, an ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’ isn’t any less beautiful just because you’ve built a hotel and there are hundreds of women in swimsuits about.

This begs the question, then: Why aren’t British coastlines developed, at least for tourist purposes?

The rise and fall of British beaches is well-storied and well-rehearsed. The arc begins with railways transforming once-remote fishing towns on the coast into tourist destinations for a working and lower-middle class with newly-found disposable income. Butlin’s essentially invented the package holiday and democratised leisure for millions. By the 1960s, however, the rot had already begun to set in: package holidays to the Costa del Sol and Benidorm introduced chorizo and pineapple to people who’d spent a great deal of their lives rationing lard. Miraculously, ubiquitous car use gave British seaside towns a second wind. Without them, coastal towns would have met their end a lot earlier. Even as package holidays to Spain eroded the long summer stay, the car allowed coastal resorts to retain a flow of shorter-term custom, which kept the arcades, fish-and-chip shops, and piers alive longer than the narrative of ‘sudden decline’ would suggest. Coastal towns are mid-century time-warps in ways you don’t see elsewhere. Even today, people flock to Southend and Brighton whenever it exceeds 20 degrees. Clearly, transport is no issue. So instead of listening to Blue Jumpers who want to build railways everywhere, let’s just build some car parks instead.

Now there are thousands of GCSE essays written on why Blackpool is horrible. I don’t need to rehash this. Instead, I will highlight the absurdities of going on holiday to the Mediterranean; where Britain is better and where it isn’t, and where it potentially could be with minimal (and maximal) effort. By the end, you’ll realise the decay of British seaside towns owes more to a decline in self-regard far more than to the rise of Ryanair.

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It wouldn’t be controversial to point out that Britain has some of the best and worst coastlines in Europe. For better or for worse, the white sands of the Hebrides and the coves of Cornwall remain largely untouched and offer sights comparable in beauty to beaches in the Caribbean. There are beautiful places all across the Mediterranean, of course, but consider this: what actually is there to do in these places? Beaches in Southern Europe often languish in a curious inertia; their flat, featureless expanses and tepid seas offering little beyond roasting beneath an unyielding sun.

In Old Blighty, God ordained that Britain be a sporting nation, and it gave it a coastline to fit. At Weston-Super-Mare, the tide retreats over a mile, leaving behind firm, tightly packed wet sand conducive to most manner of sport from football to cricket to cycling. Your kids can actually build sandcastles; in the Mediterranean, you have to build moats because the tide only ever retreats a yard before washing it away. You learn early the plight of the Japanese, of having to rebuild everything all the time, but soon they will learn of mine: some gypsy woman trampling on your sandcastle because she’s going around reading people’s palms and trying to tell their fortunes in Durres. As there is no tide in the Mediterranean, you cannot play sports during the day because the sand is soft and scorching hot and, in any case, you’ll have your ear chewed off in ten languages because you blasted a football at some seedy Italian rocking speedos in front of children. On pebbly beaches, there’s no sport at all. To rectify this, local authorities elect to purchase sand at mafia rates — and in Italy, it’s actually mafia business — and dump it fifty yards from the sea, making it redundant altogether because nobody wants to play volleyball in 35-degree heat with no sea breeze. It’s why most sporting facilities in these places are empty anyway. Reports from the European Federation for Sport reveal that sporting facilities in Mediterranean regions have declined in usage by nearly one-third over the past decade.

With no tide, calm seas, and no breeze to speak of, a consequence of its limited fetch and sheltered basin, there is not much in the way of water sports either. So while the Dutchman with his sailboat spends all day waiting for a breeze that will never arrive, like Napoleon in Egypt, the rest of us have to resort to modern innovations such as the motor. Except that jet skis are now pretty much out of the question in most places: you can’t veer near the coast, doubtless because some yob rammed a poor child the year prior and kept everyone else to confined lanes. If you veer further in, you could die instead. The Algerians will shoot you with .50-calibre mounts if you accidentally enter their territorial waters from Sadia, and the Moroccans will open fire on you when you return, with Rabat and Algiers both accusing each other of ‘piratical overreach’. You go to (Sh)Agadir for the talent, but instead find yourself embroiled in the middle of a Punic dispute over a dustbowl they call the ‘Western Sahara’.

Even in the ostensibly placid precincts of Southern Spain, your freedom to jet ski is curtailed by an emboldened constabulary well attuned to the spectre of drug trafficking. Spanish Civil Guard and National Police under the directives set out by ‘Plan Maritimo’ routinely intercept recreational riders who follow the same trajectories as narco traffickers. A 2024 report by the Spanish Ministry of the Interior confirmed over 150 interventions involving mistaken identity — including a significant percentage involving jet skiers wrongly flagged as smugglers. In 2024, a British tourist on a rented jet ski off Estepona was boarded at gunpoint by Guardia Civil operatives who mistook his jet ski for a cartel vessel. The ensuing frisk, with lots of barking in Spanglish and a thorough examination of his crotch, resulted in a €500 fine for ‘suspicious navigation’. In another case, a Dutch tourist attempted to flee before stopping after almost running out of fuel. I can’t actually blame the Spanish police too much: there have been an alarming number of provincial harlots arrested for being ‘unassuming’ drug mules in many countries. It has destroyed a lot of trust between Brits and foreign authorities in holiday destinations — far more than the loutish, drunken behaviour of locals (which is what the worst shitlibs in our country think it’s about). Rental outfits in Malaga now mandate GPS trackers and ‘no-adventure’ clauses, while local authorities plant bilingual placards enjoining ‘cautious cruising’ lest one court the canons. Imagine how dangerous this endeavour must be in Gibraltar, where the Spanish will rob you of your money and dignity, and the Maghrebis down south will rob you of your life.

Even the Woke have a hand in this: if the western Iberian sea might seem perilous, then prepare to have your pockets raided by the French and Italian governments for ‘disturbing grass’. Compounding these perils are the Mediterranean’s blanket ecological strictures, enshrined in EU directives like the 2008 Marine Strategy Framework, which cap motorised recreation in protected zones to safeguard cetaceans and seagrass meadows. Anchoring prohibitions barring yachts longer than 24 metres from dropping anchor in shallows under 30 metres, with threats of €150,000 fines and a risk of jail. Jet skis bear the brunt of this legislation: mandatory licensing from age 16, a 300-metre exclusion zone from the shore (save for narrow channels), all to supposedly spare seagrass from propeller gouges and stirred silt. These mandates, of course, do not work and in fact reveal themselves to be counterproductive. By funnelling motorised vessels into concentrated deep-water corridors, the laws amplify congestion in fragile zones, where concentrated exhaust fumes and wake turbulence erode deeper seagrass beds that were once spared. Studies from the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography show that such channelised activity spikes localised pollution, with hydrocarbon levels jumping 40% in designated lanes, suffocating the very meadows the rules claim to cherish. Moreover, the modern mooring gear of most pleasure craft rarely approaches the violence imagined in the campaign literature. The cliché of the ‘anchor tearing through seagrass’ is largely a visual metaphor sustained by NGOs, tourism boards, and varying flavours of NIMBY. Factoring this in, it’s only logical that we give the kids speedboats and turn our canals and rivers into motorways. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to traverse the entire south coast of Britain on a speedboat and get from Brighton to Exeter in two hours rather than slogging it on The People’s South Western Railway for five.

There really is no point in going on an all-inclusive package holiday to the Mediterranean. We decry the ‘eventification’ of rather inconspicuous activities like ‘the F1’ and roast dinners, but holidaying for the sake of it is by far the worst culprit. They book the four-star in Cala Millor that’s actually in Son Servera (and this is one of the better places lest you dog it out in Alicante), a good forty-minute crawl on the transfer coach through industrial estates and half-built apartments that ran out of money in 2012. Nobody is in the sea, and nobody will be in the sea because they’re all stuck in a resort on a dustbowl fifteen miles from the sea, and there is only one shuttle bus a day. You wake up at 6 am, hungover from lager that wasn’t the Madri these types seem to expect and look down from your balcony to see a Teutonic chequerboard of towels already placed on the sun loungers by Germans — much more disciplined. Your day has been ruined already.

Unless you’re in an Anglo-Saxon colony, you’re not getting a good breakfast. Britain is the only country with a decent breakfast. I am reminded of Julian Pettifer’s skit in 1964, calling Spanish breakfasts a ‘miserable affair’. Imagine reeling from the night before, only to find a ‘continental breakfast’ buffet laid out. Why do South East Europe and Turkey think cucumber and tomatoes are appropriate for breakfast? Those are for salads, not your bowels at 7 am. You will now spend the rest of the morning nursing your hangover, which is being compounded by the glare of white walls, white furniture and the screeching of children cannonballing into a swimming pool with chlorine concentrations not seen since Ypres.

You will then spend the rest of the day drinking before engaging in some ‘activity’ by the evening if you haven’t taken the last shuttle to the beach strip (usually something provincial like karaoke). But actually, you won’t be spending your day drinking because resorts have now started capping the number of drinks you can have within a given time.

This is the reality for a large portion of the country. Remember the guy people made fun of for cooling off in a wheelie bin on his front driveway? It is functionally the same as sitting by the pool for seven days, except the man in the wheelie bin didn’t max out his overdraft to do so — unlike yer bird, who found cheap tickets to Rhodes to ‘relax’ by a rooftop pool observing the sort of skyline you’d see in Ramadi.

‘But I have money, surely I can enjoy myself somewhere upscale?’ Well, I’m glad you asked, but the situation hardly improves. Taki documents the decline well, and I am extremely envious of the people who got to enjoy the Côte d’Azur in the 20th century. The days of bombing it on a grand tour from St Tropez to Positano and enjoying everywhere in between are long gone. I bet Taki has seen some changes. It’s a ‘bit different nowadays’, isn’t it? First the Russians came after the Wall fell and took the best villas. Fine: one could still breathe. But what have you got now? Instagram hookers from the other side of the Iron Curtain and mystery meat from the Levant with ‘clean girl/old money aesthetic’ moodboards on Pinterest. Ten Euro ticket, fake Birkin, tits out to here. They’ll check into the cheapest €180 ‘interior view’ room at The Byblos before ordering one solitary plate of spaghetti al pomodoro on the first night, because it’s the only thing south of thirty euros, and then spend the rest of the week subsisting off local coffee shops. These people are the reason half the upscale restaurants with à la carte menus in central London now have mandatory main course clauses and minimum spends to flush them out. Just when you’re trying to enjoy a sole meunière, the Lebanese cattle in £39 Shein bandages start doing their silly dabke dance on dinner tables, screaming ‘Damma Falastini’, recording a vertical snap captioned ‘living la vie en rose’ for the proles at home, be it Edgware Road or Achrafieh. Tell Bobby Jenrick they have Hamas Hate Marches in St Tropez too: Louis XV furniture that once sat Aga Khan and the Duke of Windsor is now occupied by table hoppers from every corner of the former Ottoman Empire who might as well have been the descendants of Sultan Abdulhamid’s last harem, waiting for some private equity cretin to invite them to his table and put them on a tender.

There was a time you could walk into the Viole Rouge and see Gunter Sachs and Porfirio Rubirosa holding court with Ursula Andress drying off from her skinny dip and Brigitte in nothing but a smile. Proper people, and proper livers the size of beach balls. You’d get blasted by midday and sink a 50-foot ketch by dinner. Not anymore.

No: what you have now are crypto boys from Tel Aviv with hired Bugattis and rented watches and tarts giving handjobs for a lukewarm glass of Whispering Angel at Nikki Beach. They need apps like Raya and Dion just to locate someone who can actually settle the bill without asking the table next door to split it in stablecoin. The French Riviera was built on good people like Taki and me. Not enough of us are left, is what I say.

Greece is lucky. It has a practically unlimited number of islands for people with taste to set up shop and hop from one island to the next before the hoi polloi arrive and turn it into Santorini. Who remembers Santorini before it became yer ma’s destination of choice and they had to start painting everything white? Mykonos is now also on its way out, and deservedly so. I’ve never been, but you can infer enough from the multitude of female travel vloggers on TikTok. Seven nights at an Airbnb, a spaghetti on the first day for the pics — but what they don’t show you is the €2 souvlakis they eat for the other six. Having stolen a reservation at Scorpios via concierge or a promoter (you need this in certain London spots now, too), they’ll take up two hours of the reservation for pictures of a Greek salad with feta cheese from Bulgaria. It is the same thing as eating a cheese and tomato sandwich in the back of your dad’s Austin Allegro in Scarborough in 1980, except you didn’t have to fellate anyone to have the choice to buy it. If you’ve ever wondered how your female colleagues can afford ten holidays a year despite being on a lower salary, it is because they eat like serfs, sponsored by the loser she sublets her flatshare to whenever she’s gone.

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In light of this grim picture, I have crafted a policy to improve the British coast and its constituent towns and cities. Actually, I’m stealing policies from other places that have successfully implemented them. It will involve repealing every piece of legislation that turned paradise into a festering shithole and replacing them with already proven projects. The English once looked upon the sodden, useless Fens and declared that no Englishman should be prisoner to a marsh, and used Dutch engineering to turn a swamp into a breadbasket: the greatest geoengineering project of its time. The Dutch became masters of their land and export more food abroad than the entirety of Africa, while Britain lost its way — but no longer. We will name our eco-revolution ‘The British Seaside Act 2025’.

We begin, as all revolutions must, with arson. The Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 is the first to the pyre: no more compulsory cliff-top footpaths for people from Nuneaton carrying sausage rolls and righteous indignations. Greece ignored similar obligations in the eighties and now has half the Cyclades ring-fenced for people who can spell ‘yacht’ without sounding it out. We shall endeavour to do the same. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, at least where it applies within sight of salt water, is next: seagulls, terns, and rare orchids have had seventy years of diplomatic immunity, but their visas are being revoked. They have been blessed with the ability to fly, and they can go elsewhere. The Dutch shoo’d the birds away when they built the Sand Motor in 2011 and ended up with 40km of perfect dunes and water so clear you can read yesterday’s Volkskrant on the seabed from space — we shall scale this experiment to match my ambition and pettiness.

The Bathing Water Regulations 2013 are to be repealed with extreme prejudice. Instead of spending £14bn a year making sure the sea is ‘good’ rather than ‘adequate’, we are going to spend it on something far more useful and green-friendly. 1200km of closed-loop heat piping will be laid 15m beneath the sand from Flamborough Head to Lands End, with every spare watt from Hinkley, Sizewell, and the impending SMRs being bled straight into the tide. From the first of May to November, the surface layer will be locked at 26 degrees, warmer than the Med in August and at 14 degrees during the winter, so that, come Boxing Day, you can nurse your hangover with a quick dip in the sea without going into cardiac arrest. The water will turn the impossible turquoise of Cala Macarella on a calm day. If you think this is science fiction, there have already been over a thousand similar projects globally since 1993.

Denmark’s Oresund Bridge geothermal loops have warmed coastal waters by two or three degrees since 2008, using waste industrial heat, which I can attest to; France has been doing this at La Rance, right across the Channel, since 1966. If this isn’t enough, we defer to the Dutch again and their ‘TideShell’ structures: 80,000 reef-ball clusters made of pH-neutral concrete mixed with crushed Menorcan limestone can be sunk in staggered rows between four and twelve metres depth along the entire south coast. Each cluster will be seeded with Posidonia Oceanica cuttings imported from Formentera and fast-growing mussels from Sardinia. The mussels can filter four hundred Olympic swimming pools of water every hour; every harbour from Padstow to Aldeburgh will turn from ancestral dishwater to the colour of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire so that in the future, as you lie in Margate, you won’t be able to tell where the sea separates from the sky. America already does this at scale.

One of the recurring themes when I’d survey people about the British seaside was that of ‘space’. ‘Southend is too packed whenever it’s sunny’ — to which I’d retort, ‘Well, let’s extend the beach’ — and they’d respond with unearned condescension, ‘Mate, what do you mean extend the beach, how are you going to extend the beach mate.’ Well, just buy sand, ‘mate’. The Canary Islands have been importing sand from the Western Sahara since Franco, and they have turned a barren volcanic archipelago into a money printer. We shall need sand, obviously, and we can get it from the Caribbean or France (whoever needs it more). Twin 48-inch pipelines will run from the Baie de Seine directly to Dungeness. 18 million cubic metres of 0.2mm pure white Normandy sand delivered every year, creating uninterrupted coastlines between every port, 50 to 100m in depth, and Southend will glow so bright it’ll look like we gave it Turkey teeth. Pebbles will be bulldozed into elegant breakwaters faced with pale Purbeck stone, forming half-moon coves anywhere we like. There is a raft of other proven projects for a future government to commission, like carving out tidal lagoons and parabolic acrylic wave lenses that would allow us to sculpt the tide itself. But that is beyond the scope of this article.

The fat elephant in the room is the weather, and there is no obvious solution to it for the time being, which may make this article redundant altogether. But the weather isn’t so different from the Hamptons, and yet you’d never knock anyone for buying beachside property over there. However, a Cirriform Veil programme, spraying high cirrus clouds with silver iodide or bismuth tri-iodide (less toxic), scatters golden hour sunlight downwards for hours. China’s ‘Blue Sky’ programme over Beijing has worked, quite literally, to force sunlight through clouds and smog for tourist purposes. UAE cloud seeding operations accidentally created the same effect, with pilots reporting ‘never-ending sunsets’. In Australia, the Great Barrier Reef marine cloud brightening trials demonstrated they could quite literally control the optical depth of clouds at will. The same trials also reduced cloud cover by 30% over test zones for weeks at a time. Serious countries all have actual weather machines. We might secretly have one too, judging by this year’s weather — but we live under a despotic government that uses it to try to affect the polls rather than for the prosperity and good life of its citizens.

Of course, we’ll need actual facilities to match the neo-Maldives we’ve just recreated. We must start with hotels. I don’t think the mega hotels in Britain’s seaside towns merit the amount of criticism so often levied at them. Visually, they look good, if a bit dated, but I don’t think anyone is in the business of counter-signalling old architecture. In any case, aside from council estates, this country doesn’t really have an architecture problem. You could turn Birmingham into a poor man’s Venice if you scrub off the pollution from the walls, add a lick of paint, and deport half the residents. Granted, the interiors haven’t been refurbished in decades, but that is merely symptomatic of the general decline rather than any conscious neglect. They serve their purpose and have been kept afloat by older clientele who prefer carpets with umbrella patterns, antique furniture, and wallpaper. It’d be unfair to knock them on these grounds, given that people fly abroad to North Cyprus, only to sleep in concrete boxes with Turkish squat toilets.

We need an immediate 40-room cap on all new hotels: we aim to recreate the grand Victorian beachfront at Llandudno, but for the entire south coast (besides the sleepy fishing villages in Devon and Cornwall). The Portuguese turned the Algarve, a coast of barracks, into Britain’s favourite holiday destination. Let these new terraces be hotels or even properties, ideally second homes for people with money. It is time we stopped being guilt-tripped by mentally ill communists into believing we should fill second homes with smackheads. We should also think about sequestering the great houses and mansions that currently sit empty, owned by cash-poor rich kids who’d much rather have the money and convert them into hotels. I will accept Connor Lynch blowing my kneecaps off with his shotgun — that’s how important this all is to me.

Scrap all VAT on refurbishments to existing hotels with more than 100 rooms and scrap any planning law that forbids them from making changes to their own buildings. Fast track listed-building consent for full 1925–1938 restoration of every Regency, Victorian, and Art-Deco seafront terrace, do away with ‘viability assessments’ and negotiating with terrorists (parish councillors who live 80 miles inland). Scrapping VAT on improvements is its own magic trick. Turkey eliminated the VAT on refurbishment costs and gave these hotels a ten-year business-rate holiday. The 1970s, Soviet-style apartment blocks full of Turks in Antalya, are now five-star resorts full of dimes from all over in 2025. Turkey is a serious country. Turkey didn’t listen to post liberals like Aaron Peters, who would fill those apartment blocks with Kurds. Turkey also didn’t listen to racist post-liberals like Zoomer Historian, who’d have had them teeming with single mothers to satisfy his kitsch Strasserism. All caravan sites must be levelled by a squadron of F-35s, and we should embark on a Hoxhaist-style programme to plant Aleppo pine trees everywhere so our coasts can stop smelling of vinegar and piss. Denmark, another much more serious country, banned caravans in the 2000s and replaced them with eco villas straight out of a design magazine.

Food is sacred. I know many of you are tired of food writing at this point, and I am somewhat sympathetic. In the attempt to rehabilitate the perceptions of British food, we’ve overcorrected. Now you have cattle waiting outside for pie and mash, and Lee Anderson having chips and salad with his fry-up and calling it a patriotic breakfast. Brits have been on so many package holidays that they’re now bringing their habits back from them. I needn’t even get into whatever the hell ‘SpudBros’ is.

Let’s say fifteen years from now, the repatriations are complete. What then? You will be short hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hospitality hands who staff most restaurants. The Guardian will chide, ‘Who will cook our brunch?’, and it is a completely reasonable question. Unless you’re willing to employ the most Victorian of methods to get Brits to work as line cooks, they won’t, because the Brits who are supposed to be working as line cooks are hosting podcasts about the friend-enemy distinction and selling first-year algebra courses, despite having never studied maths. Grandiose statements about ‘selling the country out for a takeaway’ are not only untrue, but ignorant of the importance of dining out in Britain. It is often the springboard for everything from relationships to client deals, and this will go over your head if you earn a living from making 8-hour-long videos on SS divisions that didn’t even matter.

Per head, Brits spend more than double on food and drink outside the home than their peers in the EU, and it is an integral aspect of British culture. Mass deportations are fine, but they are not an excuse for us to create relegate the British dining experience to Birdseye fish fingers because provincials have no taste. Anyway, we can stop pretending to like fish and chips. It’s never as good as you think it is, and it is only the tartar sauce that redeems it. In sunny 27-degree Britain, beer batter simply isn’t appropriate, nor are fish finger sandwiches and ketchup stains on every bench. Spain has a billion chiringuitos around its entire coast, but a thousand will suffice for us, staffed by South Europeans on a new, temporary, culinary visa. Ideally, we’d want chefs who actually know how to fillet fish rather than serving it as it is. I remember some Brit being mocked online for staring at his seabass not knowing how to eat it because it still had bones in it (‘Have Brits never seen fish before?’). I felt for him, because one shouldn’t be expected to conduct surgery before every bite simply because the chef's laziness is being sold as an authentic experience.

We can choose between Iberico ham that melts on your tongue or ‘Eating With Tod’ style food vans selling cancer in styrofoam boxes and getting skinned by mullets selling ‘gourmet’ burgers. The ‘Hitch’ is probably prediabetic, and if the top brass at this publication continue to go on more of those office excursions, there won’t be a top brass left.

Something that really grates on me is the vitriol British tourists are increasingly subjected to by locals in Southern Europe. Brits are the most visible demographic abroad, and clearly the biggest spenders compared to other Europeans, especially locals. The average Brit probably racks up a bigger booze tab abroad than an Italian family of four spends on dinner, and I have seen couples from the continent stare at menus for half an hour only to share a pasta and a bottle of Krombacher. Anti-tourism protests and tightened rules in British tourist hotspots like Magaluf, El Arenal, and San Antonio left them “devastated”, according to some hoteliers, who saw a 10% decline in revenue as a result. Please note that the people protesting are hardly concerned locals. The people who have a problem with Brits sinking 2 Euro pints are the same ones pining for a million Moroccans to occupy the same apartments they want British pensioners to vacate. It has an anti-white bent, and we cannot be expected to believe hotel owners want their best customers turned away.

This is not unique to Spain; you get this sort of nonsense in Greece and Albania, whose economies depend entirely on tourism, with “natives” moaning about the number of tourists jacking up the price of everything. In Albania, the worst cargo-cult libtards are calling Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump “land-thieving devils” for buying out the (barren) island of Sazan to build a Trump resort. Albania is also dependent on money from its British diaspora lest its property bubble collapse. I have been reliably informed that in both countries, the detractors are assets of the other’s intelligence agencies, trying to divert tourists to their own countries. You’d think they’d be occupied with Iranian cyber attacks and stirring up agitation in North Cyprus, but alas, these are two of the most petty countries on Earth.

If they truly have a problem with Brits, then allow us to reclaim the night. Extended licences within half a mile of water first and foremost. Pubs and bars will be open until the first glimmer of sunlight. I’m ambivalent about the future of nightclubs, principally because it’s a dying institution that in its current state deserves to die, but that topic merits an article of its own. The kids today want basement raves and festivals, and we shall oblige firstly by repealing the Noise Act 1996. No job in Brighton genuinely requires cognition levels for which eight hours of uninterrupted sleep are essential. Besides, if you have such a job, then you probably don’t have time to sleep eight hours.

Instead of having people rolling around in the mud, off their nut on Gary’s in Creamfields, bring the festivals to the sea. There’s already a precedent for this: Fatboy Slim attracted 250,000 people to his Beach Boutique II festival on Brighton beach in 2002 (only 60,000 expected), doubling the population, causing a 25-mile traffic jam, and drinking every pub and off-license dry. It was a logistical disaster, and there haven’t been events like it since – perhaps for the better – but providing space for Britain’s biggest festivals to be held in fledgling seaside towns is free money and an improvement from having to sleep in a tent in a field in the middle of nowhere. The subsequent DVD about this incident became a best-seller in Brazil, where Fatboy Slim later performed in front of 360,000 people on Flamengo Beach, proving that my vision is completely viable. There’s no reason the Bibby Stockholm can’t be repurposed into a heterosexual Berghain. If people spent thousands to see Keinemusik and Black Coffee perform Afro-House sets that could have been mixed by a ten-year-old, they’ll come to our new and improved Boomtown.

Speaking of Brazil, we are going to turn the south coast into a cash machine via aesthetics if nothing else. Rio has mandated free gym equipment in Copacabana and Ipanema since the 80s, and if you have been, you’ll know nothing less than visible ab lines are permissible. The socially mandatory dress codes (bikinis, sarongs and ‘sungas’) create a “see-and-be-seen” culture in Rio, drawing in 7 million visitors to 20km of sand, generating more revenue per metre than the Balearics. The idea is to increase dwell time because why wouldn’t you loiter on the beach if you’re surrounded by pleasant, good-looking people? In 2022, bars and restaurants in Playa de Palma banned football shirts and cut brawls by 40%. “But we’re full of fat people”, you may retort – it doesn’t matter: the people who don’t go to Ibiza won’t be going to New Bournemouth anyway, so incidentally everyone will be in shape.

To start, we must abolish the Equality Act 2010. Establishments should have the right to refuse entry to people wearing Arsenal shirts, PSG tracksuits and “Trapstar”. The Public Space Protection Orders under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 that ban “inappropriate attire” in vague terms will also be shredded. It is never used to arrest nudists on their silly bike rides or perverts during Pride, so why shouldn’t people be allowed to walk up and down seaside promenades topless? I am currently torn on nude beaches. I always thought they’d be a vitalist haven for libertine young people, so you can imagine my disappointment to learn they’re basically a sort of Epstein Island but for every 40+ Eurotrash pervert and voyeur. In this case, let’s wait for the surplus boomers to die off before we make any rash decisions.

Pimlico Journal gets a lot of stick from drooling imbeciles for supposedly only appealing to yuppies who want their own subsidised housing in Kensington, but all they’ve done is reinvent politics from first principles. I have done an Anglo Futurism; a Woke compromise for workability: I have found growth that wasn’t on my prostate, and it did not take me that long. Do not confuse this for fanciful, AI-generated YIMBY fantasies like the Forest City or Maglev trains to nowhere. These are the sad little dreams of people who never grew out of playing with Hornby trainsets and Cities: Skylines in their parents’ loft. Unless by Forest City he means engineering a tropical microclimate in the temperate forests of Wales and building wooden holiday cabins on the trees and an eco-resort, being tended to by scantily clad, exotic-looking Welsh women, then yes, I do support the Forest City; otherwise, I do not care for building ‘gentle density’ neighbourhoods in places that don’t matter.

The aim of redevelopment is not a national suburb from which provincial midwits can commute to moderately-paid tech jobs in Waterloo. Britain must become a byword for ‘fun’ and ‘gluttony’ (in a boozy way, not a ‘Ciaco in Dante’s fourth circle of Hell’ way). A new Hanoverian age, finally eschewing the Victorian moralism which has dominated from Gladstone to Starmer, will come — and it will be inaugurated in Margate, Lyme Regis, and Weston-Super-Mare.

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This article was written by Henry Reynolds Skelton, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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