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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. My guest this week is Madeline

Bunting, whose new book looks at the English seaside and also its sorrows. It's called Seaside England's

Love Affair. Madeline, welcome. Can I ask just what got you started on this? I mean, apart from,

as it seems, a weird enthusiasm for swimming in the freezing sea. It was a comment actually

that my sister made about she'd done one of those long-distance walks in Yorkshire

and she said she'd walked along Scarborough's seafront and she just was saying, you know,

so, so, so sad. And it instantly took me back to those childhood memories that I talk about in the

book of, you know, on the primary school trip to Scarborough. It was such a magical

place. I grew up about 40 miles away in the countryside. And Scarborough, I can't tell you how

exotic and exciting and glamorous it was as a six-year-old to go to Scarborough. And it got me thinking

about how, you know, that's my memory, of course, and it's the memory of millions and millions of other people that the seaside resort. And I'm particularly interested in these resorts rather than, you know, the whole of the coastline, how they were places of such enchantment, really, for the best part of 150 years. And several of my other books have thought and I've spent a

lot of time thinking about place and its importance to us and why we become so deeply attached to

places. And this seemed to me such a sort of particular type of attachment. They're very, very

distinctive places. And so I just got grit, you know, I was kind of like,

I can see exactly how one could begin to sort of mine this territory.

That territory, that enchantment, which you describe and I, you know, I baked into my own

memories as well, we're probably pretty much of a generation. Is that something that just stops?

You know, those childhoods that are of, I guess,

the late 70s and early 80s will still have that memory of the seaside.

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