Now the exhilaration kicks in, the lightness of heart, a joyfulness surging along the warmed blood vessels and tingling extremities: every cell feels as if charged with new life. There has been a ritual, a sacrifice, an offering to the waves of flesh and pain, and in return, there is restoration, life given back.

Thus Madeleine Bunting describes the bliss, not of swimming, but of having just emerged from the icy British sea into which she is addicted to plunging in winter as well as summer. In this fizzing state, having pulled her clothes back on, she goes straight to the nearest steamy café for fish and chips and tea.

Tempted? I’m certainly not out of season (delicious though the fish and chips and tea sound). But I do like to read about the contemporary British seaside as experienced and described by this thoughtful, investigative writer who, post-swims, takes off her rose-tinted specs. We follow her clockwise, in stages, between Covid lockdowns, as she travels round the coast from Scarborough to Morecambe, where she visits 40 resorts, swims, sometimes stays the night in a hotel and once in Butlin’s, and then examines what’s really going on a few streets back from the sea fronts. Chatting to residents, holidaymakers, local councillors and optimistic people involved in regeneration projects, she paints a poignant picture of life on the edge of England.

A resident of Hackney and a former associate editor and columnist of the Guardian, Bunting makes no secret of the fact that this is primarily a work of journalism by a Londoner. She loads it with statistics, such as that the suicide rate in Scarborough is 61 per cent higher than the national average; that youth unemployment in Thanet was twice the national average in December 2021; and that there’s a ten-year difference in life expectancy between Weston-super-Mare (67) and the more upmarket Clevedon a few miles along the coast (77). Witnessing the effects of poverty and rapacious landlords in Blackpool and Morecambe, she doesn’t conceal her fury at ‘entrenched Conservative complacency’, or at how the deprivation in these resorts ‘magnifies the harshness of national policies which assume, manifestly, that some lives don’t matter’.

Expecting a cheerful, beach-hut-based homage to the seaside, I soon realised that this is a much darker book. It’s compelling, because Bunting snoops around where most of us don’t bother to look. ‘I became intrigued by the idea of what gets exposed at the edges, what unravels and frays,’ she writes in her introduction. While politicians bluster about levelling up the inner cities, the coast, by contrast, is ‘missing a narrative that can command attention’. It is all too easy to forget about the reality of life in these seaside towns, full of very old residents. Bunting quotes Matthew Parris’s memorable observation about Clacton, written just after Douglas Carswell became its Ukip MP in 2014: ‘Only in Asmara, after Eritrea’s bloody war, have I encountered a greater proportion of citizens on crutches or in wheelchairs.’

It turns out that a great deal is unravelling and fraying if you look behind the scenes. In Margate, for instance, the opening of the Turner Contemporary art gallery in 2011 was a fine stroke for the cultural regeneration of the town; but its success caused house prices to rise by 24 per cent in one year. Now on one side of the street you’ll see a house painted in Farrow & Ball while on the other is one in multiple occupation, with families struggling with overcrowding and unsafe conditions. Behind closed doors, prostitution and drug dealing are still rife.

The decline of these wonderful places with their grand hotels and palm tree-filled Victorian gardens set in from the moment the British started going abroad on package holidays in the 1960s. As one adviser on cultural regeneration tells Bunting: ‘Blackpool moved lock, stock and barrel to Benidorm.’ Who can blame the British, when you contemplate their weather? Bunting gives an evocative description of her journey in the driving rain from Ilfracombe to Minehead, when she could barely see beyond the windscreen. Those continental-style parks and exotic gardens in resorts such as Skegness and Morecambe ‘incubated the taste for the foreign’ – so as soon as it was possible to go abroad cheaply, off everyone went.

I salute the heroic people Bunting met who are trying to reverse the spiral decline, such as Ian Treasure, who led a project on homelessness and substance abuse in Blackpool, helping people in small, kind, practical ways, such as buying one traumatised homeless man a fishing rod; and lovely Nicky, who has set up a project for young people on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Rhyl in Wales. When it comes to the dilapidated town centres, though, Bunting wryly reckons that ‘the £1.6 million to renovate the centre of Bognor Regis can do little, given the scale of the challenge’. The Eden Project North is due to open in Morecambe next year. Good luck to that.

What survives is a strong seam of nostalgia for these seaside resorts. Millions of us visit them to relive the thrill of childhood holidays. In New Brighton on the Wirral, Bunting goes to a tea shop called ‘Remember When’. That sad name sums up the nostalgic gene in all of us. And in every resort she goes to, the fish and chips taste as good as ever – even if they now cost four times as much in Torquay as they do in wind-blasted Skegness.