Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

And yet Morecambe has its charms. Its seafront promenade is handsome and well maintained and its vast bay (174 square miles, if you're taking notes) is easily one of the most beautiful in the world, with unforgettable views across to the green and blue Lakeland hills: Scafell, Coniston Old Man, the Langdale Pikes.

Today almost all that remains of Morecambe's golden age is the Midland Hotel, a jaunty, cheery, radiant white art deco edifice with a sweeping, streamlined frontage erected on the seafront in 1933. Concrete structures were all the rage in 1933, but concrete apparently was beyond the capabilities of local builders, so it was built of Accrington brick and rendered in plaster so that it looked like concrete, which I find very endearing. Today the hotel is gently crumbling around the edges and streaked here and there with rust stains. Most of the original interior fittings were lost during periodic and careless refurbishments over the years, and several large Eric Gill statues that once graced the entranceway and public rooms simply disappeared, but it still has an imperishable 1930s charm.

I couldn't begin to guess where the Midland gets its custom these days. There didn't seem to be any custom of any sort when I went in now and had a cup of coffee in an empty sun lounge overlooking the bay. One of the small endearments of modern Morecambe is that wherever you go they are grateful for your patronage. I enjoyed superb service and a nice view, two things wholly unobtainable in Blackpool as far as I can tell. As I was departing, my eye was caught by a large white plaster statue by Gill of a mermaid in the empty dining room. I went and had a look at it and found that the tail of the statue, which I presume is worth a small fortune, was held on with a mass of sticky tape. It seemed a not inappropriate symbol for the town.

I took a room in a seafront guesthouse, where I was received with a kind of startled gratitude, as if the owners had forgotten that all those empty rooms upstairs were to let, and spent the afternoon strolling around with Roger Bingham's book looking at the sights, trying to imagine the town in its heyday, and occasionally bestowing my patronage on pathetically grateful tearooms.

It was a mild day and there were a number of people, mostly elderly, walking along the promenade, but little sign of anyone spending money. With nothing better to do, I took a long walk along the front nearly to Carnforth and then walked back along the sands since the tide was out. The surprising thing aboutMorecambe, it occurred to me, isn't that it declined, but that it ever prospered. It would be hard to imagine a less likely place for a resort. Its beaches consist of horrible gooey mud and its vast bay spends large periods devoid of water thanks to the vagaries of the tides. You can walk six miles across the bay to Cumbria when the tide is out, but they say it is dangerous to do so without a guide, or sand pilot as they are known hereabouts. I once spent some time with one of these pilots, who told alarming stories about coaches and horses that tried to cross the bay at low tide and disappeared into the treacherous quicksands, never to be seen again. Even now people sometimes stroll out too far and then get cut off when the tide comes in, about as disagreeable a way to finish an afternoon as I could imagine.

Feeling daring, I walked a few hundred yards out on to the sands now, studying worm casts and the interesting corrugated imprints left by the receding waters, and keeping an eye out for quicksand which isn't really sand at all, but silty mud and it really does hoover you up if you blunder into it. The tides at Morecambe don't rush in and out like the Severn bore, but creep in from various angles, which is all the more menacing since you can easily find, if you are the sort to get lost in thought, that you are suddenly stranded on a large but insidiously shrinking sandbar in the middle of a great wet bay, so I kept my eyes out and didn't venture too far.

It was quite wonderful certainly better than anything Blackpool could offer. It is an odd sensation to be walking about on a seabed and to think that any time now this could be under thirty feet of water. I especially liked the solitude. One of the hardest things to adjust to, if you come from a large country, is that you are seldom really alone out of doors in England that there is scarcely an open space where you could, say, safely stand and have a pee without fear of appearing in some birdwatcher's binoculars or having some matronly rambler bound round the bend so the sense of aloneness on the open sands was rather luxurious.

From a few hundred yards out, Morecambe looked quite fetching in the late afternoon sun, and even up close, as I left the sands and clambered up some mossy concrete steps to the prom, it didn't look half bad away from the desolate bingo parlours and novelty shops. The line of guesthouses along the eastern length of Marine Road looked neat and trim and sweetly hopeful. I felt sorry for the owners who had invested their hopes and found themselves now in a dying resort. The decline that began in the Fifties and accelerated out of control in the Seventies must have seemed bewildering and inexplicable to these poor people as they watched Blackpool, just twenty miles to the south, going from strength to strength.

Foolishly, but not unnaturally, Morecambe responded by trying to compete with Blackpool. It built an expensive dolphinarium and a new outdoor swimmingpool, and recently there had been some halfassed plan to open a Mr Blobby amusement park. But really its charm, and certainly its hope, lies in being not Blackpool. That is what I liked about it that it is quiet and friendly and well behaved, that there is plenty of room in the pubs and cafes, that you aren't bowled off the kerb by swaggering youths and don't go sidewalk surfing on abandoned styrofoam chip platters and vomit slicks.

One day, I would like to think, people will rediscover the charms of a quiet break at the seaside, the simple pleasures of strolling along a wellkept front, leaning on railings, drinking in views, sitting in a cafe with a book, just pottering about. Then perhaps Morecambe can thrive again. How nice it would be if the Government actually erected a policy to this end, took steps to restore fading places like Morecambe rebuilt the pier to its original plans, gave a grant for a new Winter Gardens, insisted on the restoration of seafront buildings, perhaps moved a division of the Inland Revenue or some other bureaucracy to the town to give it a bit of yearround life.

With a little priming and a thoughtful longterm plan, I am sure you could attract the sort of people who would want to open bookshops, little restaurants, antique shops, galleries, maybe even tapas bars and the odd boutique hotel. Well, why not?

Morecambe could become a little northern English equivalent of Sausalito or St Ives. You may smirk at the thought of it, but what other possible future is there for a place like Morecambe? People could come for weekends to eat quality meals in new seafront restaurants overlooking the bay and perhaps take in a play or concert at the Winter Gardens. Yuppie fell walkers could spend the night there and thus ease pressure on the Lake District. It would all make eminent sense. But of course it will never happen, and partly, if I may say so, because you smirk.

I HAVE A SMALL, TATTERED CLIPPING THAT I SOMETIMES CARRY WITH ME and pull out for purposes of private amusement. It's a weather forecast from the 'Western Daily Mail and it says, in toto: 'Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.'

There you have in a single pithy sentence the English weather captured to perfection: dry but rainy with some warm/cool spells. The Western Daily Mail could run that forecast every day for all I know, it may and scarcely ever be wrong.