10 Abandoned UK Seaside Towns The Postcard Didn't Show

The British seaside was supposed to be the great escape — donkey rides, candy floss, ballrooms by the sea. For a century, working-class families saved all year to spend a week breathing salt air at Britain's grand resorts. The postcards captured it perfectly. What they did not capture was the sewage on the beaches, the boarded-up boarding houses, the piers that burned to waterlines and were never rebuilt. From Margate to Morecambe, Rhyl to Hastings, Britain's coastal towns have stories the brochures never printed. And in some of them, what happened in the off-season was worse than anything the day-trippers ever saw. TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 — Introduction 0:57 — #10 Butlin's Holiday Camps 3:43 — #9 Margate 5:02 — #8 The Sewage Crisis 6:35 — #7 Morecambe 7:56 — #6 Rhyl 9:12 — #5 Pier Fires 10:32 — #4 Scarborough 11:42 — #3 Blackpool 12:35 — #2 Brighton West Pier 14:48 — #1 Jaywick abandoned UK seaside towns, British seaside decline, Margate decline, Morecambe Bay regeneration, Rhyl decline, Blackpool tourism collapse, Hastings pier fire, Brighton West Pier collapse, Weston-super-Mare seaside, Jaywick Essex deprivation, Skegness Lincolnshire, Clacton-on-Sea, Cleethorpes decline, Great Yarmouth seafront, Scarborough Yorkshire coast, Bognor Regis, Southend-on-Sea, Tenby Wales, Llandudno Welsh coast, Aberystwyth, raw sewage British beaches, British piers burned destroyed, Victorian seaside resorts, Edwardian holiday resorts, Butlins holiday camps, British boarding houses, package holidays Spain Britain decline, deindustrialisation coastal Britain, British holiday camps abandoned, UK working-class holidays, faded English seaside, lost British resorts, postcard Britain history, abandoned Victorian piers, British promenades decay, English coastal poverty, EU bathing water directive, golden age British holidays