The scourge of the beach tent land grab

‘Ah,’ says my husband at the top of the cliff path at Overstrand, ‘it’s just like a Shirley Hughes illustration.’ There are sandcastles, wooden groynes, children and dogs running in and out of the waves.

Then his eye falls on the first land grab of the day. Three generations of the same family are hard at work constructing their citadel: popping up polyester tents to form a wide arc, shovelling shingle into the flaps to secure them, unfurling windbreaks across either end to mark the outer limits of their encampment.

We – like the family in a favourite Hughes picture book from my childhood, Lucy and Tom at the Seaside (1976) – have travelled with just ‘the picnic things and bathing bags and buckets and spades’. The seven-year-old brings the bodyboard he got for his birthday, which has been manacled to his leg ever since. And that’s it.

But we’re part of a dwindling breed. Pop-up tents appear like a plague of jellyfish on beaches up and down the country as soon as the sun comes out. And this year in our part of north Norfolk, I’ve noticed a new and insidious trend: multiple pods strung together with other beach paraphernalia in increasingly elaborate formations (sometimes a completely closed-off circle) to demarcate their owners’ personal fiefdom.

Last week at Overstrand I observed one large group with a string of seven tents, their territory extended by the judicious use of windbreaks and parasols. Another family’s kit for the day included three beach tents, two windbreaks, two parasols, one double and one single airbed for reclining and two collapsible wagons in which to transport all their gubbins to the beach, one of which contained an additional four windbreaks – presumably in case of a dust devil blowing in from Cromer.

They remind me of the extensive Bedouin tents with generator and satellite dish tacked to the back that I used to see in the Judean desert when I lived in Jerusalem. Those, however, blended into their surroundings; these edifices are garish eyesores.

That these beach bivouacs were constructed on one of the stillest, most windless days of the summer is irrelevant. ‘It’s the English desire to conquer,’ sniffed a visiting Scotsman, taking in the beach at Cley-next-the-Sea. The shingle shelf at Cley is usually a blissfully tat- and tourist-free haven (never mind ice-cream vans and loos, it doesn’t even have a bin). But now, like everywhere else on this coast, it is littered with plastic UV-protective pavilions.

Perhaps their occupants are worried about UV rays (they shouldn’t be: an estimated one in six British adults is Vitamin D deficient and the health visitors’ current hobby horse is whether you are siphoning sufficient Vitamin D supplements into your child). But I don’t think sun protection it’s what at stake here.

One of the many, many online articles rounding up the best beach tents to buy in 2022 – ‘Best all-rounder beach tent! Best baby beach tent with splash pool! Best beach tent for dogs! Best Instagrammable beach tent!’ – cites the ‘privacy and protection’ that your purchase will guarantee.

Protection from what? The ‘very special seasidey smell’ that Lucy and Tom enjoyed? Surely the feel of sun on your face and wind in your hair is one of life’s greatest and most simple pleasures. And who needs the privacy of a tent (an unforeseen descendant of the Victorian bathing machine) when you can get in and out of your swimmers under a towel?

One tented village on the edge of Cley beach certainly afforded its occupants the protection they needed to have an illegal barbecue. Eyeballing anyone who looked like they might challenge them, they cracked open crates of Kronenbourg and sizzled sausages, either ignorant or oblivious to the strictures of this nationally important nature reserve – and the tinder-dry surrounding marshes and arable fields.

Cordoning off and hogging a chunk of the beach is an enabler of aggressive and anti-social behaviour. Sound systems are cranked up; rubbish and dog poo bags left behind. And none of this is limited to Norfolk. Holidaymakers in St Ives struggled to get across Porthmeor Beach with a buggy after a group cordoned off a large section with tents and windbreaks, going down early to secure their spot. With the monstrous mentality of those who go to the pool first thing to put their towel on a sun lounger and then scarper, they then disappeared, before sauntering back later.

The jewel in the coastline here is Holkham Beach – a vast, windswept sandscape backed by dunes and pine woods. I recall the odd striped windbreak from childhood holidays; harmless and peculiarly British, the sort of subject to inspire one of George Orwell’s more whimsical essays, but nothing like this.

Taking a horse through the surf at Holkham, as the Household Cavalry do on their annual holiday, used to be on many riders’ bucket lists. Now, the frequency with which these flapping, fluorescent enclaves are encountered mean that it’s become an extreme sport.

As we walk back up the cliff path to the car after our day at the beach, we overtake several red-faced patriarchs standing puffing beside their wagons and piles of paraphernalia. It’s like passing VW campervans conked out on the hard shoulder of the M3 after Glastonbury. I’d give them a shove, but I find that my hands are full, with a damp beach towel and an empty picnic bag.