Not tourist trap, you say??? Grangemouth, obviously not England or Wales (and some even question Scottish!), but it is by the sea and not a tourist trap.
Or if that doesn't tick all your boxes...Kincardine, just across the Firth of Forth from Grangemouth.
Clacton id imagine
Budleigh Salterton
Handy for The Twilight Rest Home for the terminally short of cash.
I hear room 12 is nice.
North Berwick!!??!! Chuffing busy in the summer.
Tynemouth and North Berwick would be on my list to check out.
Did the OP say they were a milionaire?? 😉
@mintyjim you lucky so and so. We holidayed in Aberporth a couple of years ago (just post covid) and thought it was fab. Wife would like to move there, but it is a long way from anywhere really.
Porlock, North Somerset coast. Walking distance to the sea, but doesn't feel like a seaside place. Nice pubs, cafés, basic shops, coffee roaster. Easy (if a little steep) access to Exmoor by bike, car, or on foot. On the south west coast path. Never seems massively busy, and although it has a "main" road through it you can often walk along the middle of it with almost zero chance of getting squished.
I do love Cardigan but being 40odd mins away from the nearest train station could make it feel pretty remote at times! That bakery almost makes up for it, mind
@willard Whenever I go back to visit my mum I'm told that Felixstowe is the next Southwold. Obviously it's nothing like Southwold but I do appreciate that there aren't really any other towns along that stretch of Suffolk cost for people to invest in so apparently the money is coming (you can already see money being spent in some places) and then who knows...
It is at the end of a road though albeit one that provides pretty good transport links until high winds close the bridge. Then you're not going anywhere
We've been to Aberaeron 2 or 3 times and it is a lovely area. But as crazy legs mentioned it'd be Arnside/Silverdale area for us.
Croydon
Fleetwood
Machynleth.
Weston Shore, Southampton 🏝️
Ignoring all your criteria bar the 'seaside but not tourist trap'.
Hull?
Campbeltown?
Workington?
Stranraer?
Peterhead?
Port Talbot?
Carrickfergus?
somewhere on the left of the A1 between Alnwick and Berwick.
pretty empty all year round, with no more than a 10 minute drive to the countries finest beaches.
Above post re Arnside Silverdale is a good shout, a bit dependent on 1 rail line though. I d go Kents bank though, rail station on the same line so you can get to Manchester and airport, incredibly peaceful, really nice houses and views but no supermarket, you have to go to Ulverston.
Problem with any seaside town, soon as sun comes out everyone piles in, even morecambe, you can't park, takes ages to drive through.
How about Lytham.
If I was thinking about this for me, for retirement and wanting not just seaside but also local facilities and transport links
Area around arnside, grange over sands, ulverston is fantastic for a number of reasons.
Saltburn also very nice with lots to do on the doorstep.
Berwick upon tweed is ace.
I like North Norfolk but it's a very long slow trek over the fens to anywhere else interesting
@mintyjim i still remember holidaying at aberporth in the early 1960 s, in that train carriage overlooking the sea, dixie it was called. I live close to tenby and saundersfoot now, busy in the summer season would be an understatement. There are usually less visited spots around to find, @teenrat haverfordwest area good shout, the beaches in the freshwater area are grand.
I can't see any way that close to a city plus by the sea isn't likely to equal rammed at half term and on sunny summer weekends.
But what about somewhere like Topsham in Devon. You're on the river, you've got train access to the beach and to Exeter which is pretty well connected to other areas.
Obviously lots of people know this, so you will need a whopping great bag of cash.
Thanks everyone, I've really enjoyed reading the responses over the day.
I like the idea of Arnside / Silverdale / Grange-over-Sands. I'm originally from East Lancs and spent quite a bit of time walking with my Dad over that way as a boy / teenager, and I would like to return to the North (my wife might feel differently about that!). The train line is appealing - you can get to Morecambe and Lancaster and onto Manchester pretty easily for gigs and other fun.
I also know Lytham reasonably well, but I think I'd prefer around Morecambe Bay.
I'd like this to be a thread for everyone, so my suggestion to throw into the mix is Burry Port just west of Llanelli in South Wales. The beach is pretty nice, there's the Millenium path along the coast to Pembray / Pendine sands, and a train line to Carmarthen or Cardiff one way, and Pembroke and Haverfordwest the other way. The town is a bit tired but still has pubs and convenience stores (and a good Greek restaurant), and Llanelli has loads of supermarkets and some shops left.
I like it around there, Burry point, Pembrey, Pendine and over to Tenby, nice areas, and you have Saundersfoot and Tenby as smallish towns, other side as you say Llanelli, probably best to be inland by a few miles for ease of logistics and then just simple journeys to the coast, winters a bummer over there though!
Also quite like the Devon coast, think Burgh Island is up for sale just now 😋
so many options!
Well thats STW for you. They've narrowed it down to 80 possibilities.
Define ‘seaside’. Greenock has the Firth of Clyde, fast train to Glasgow, the outdoor pool on the front of the last Blur album (also featuring the dentist I went to as a kid swimming) is in Gourock a couple of miles away, there is or was decent MTBing in the hills behind.
In the winter it can tend towards bleak though, and unrelenting rain and getting dark at 1530 wears a bit thin.
And there is something uniquely depressing about seaside towns in winter wherever you are.
Felixstowe. Certainly not touristy, but 100% fails the test for “never live anywhere at the end of a road”
Having spent a winter in Felixstowe, just don't. Divorce or suicide may be preferable for you and Mrs Nerd after 2! This applies double for HArwich and Dovercourt.
I probably shouldn’t give this secret spot away
I know exactly where that is...grew up just along the coast 😁
Moray coast. Beautiful empty coastline, but there’s a good local quiet pride and buzz about the place. Check out the average rainfall maps too.
Cycle through the woods (for erm…45 miles) and you’re in the Cairngorm mountains.
Plenty of civilisation and services, 20mins from Inverness and there’s an airport. Scotland is great.
Another vote for Wirral.
Great beaches on the west and north sides of the peninsula, but oddly all the tourist traffic from Liverpool/Manchester drives right by and goes to Blackpool or north Wales instead on the sunny days.
Plenty of decent road cycling around; north Wales for mountains and Liverpool, Chester and Manchester are all easily accessible for city pursuits.
Saltfleet
the bus depot used to be lovely until it was destroyed in the early 80’s.
That deserves more credit 😜
I'm not telling any of you lot.
Last thing I want is this demographic ( https://singletrackworld.com/surveys/) competing with me for housing there 😉
One of the issues of living by the sea is the reduced number of places to cycle or walk from the door.
If you live inland you can set off on any point of the compass (path permitting) but by the sea you halve the number of directions (the other half can be good if you sail, canoe or surf). This is more so if you are on a geographic shoulder or peninsular.
From Saltburn (mentioned a couple of times above) you can go South or West but to go North you need to travel 12 miles West first in order to cross the Tees. Travel East and next stop is Denmark.
Also check out local geography before moving somewhere. Skinningrove floods so often that the village has a warning siren to warn residents and the hotel in Scarborough my gran used to like is now in the Sea!
Fife, Scotland. It’s lovely here
Or more precisely, the Neuk of Fife. You do have to live with Fifers though 😜 But at least the view of Edinburgh, East Lothian and the islands in the Forth are worth it.
It's also tremendous for gravel riding, I often call it the Kingdom of Gravel.
Hornsea.
I miss living by the sea. Up to a point. Sea frets are utterly crap though. My parent’s house in Sunderland was almost exactly 1 mile from the beach and about 40m elevation. You could see the fret rolling up the street at about 2pm on what would otherwise be a beautiful sunny afternoon. Almost with the inevitability of the tide. It would usually co-inside with the BBQ getting up to temperature. You’d lose up to 5°C in a matter of minutes.
For some bloody stupid reason I bought a house in Blyth. Lovely house, again a mile from the beach but this time at 6m elevation. The frets wouldn’t just roll in, they’d simply switch on. Like the dimming during an eclipse. You’d be sat there, beer in hand in the garden, in the sun and suddenly you couldn’t see the roof of the house, the end of the garden, the bottle opener. You could go and get a hoodie, but what you really needed was a ski jacket and a torch and a towel to wipe the instantly deposited moisture off everything.
If you drove inland just a tiny bit it’d clear off. Even Cramlington which is all of a mile further inland would be basking in sunshine and several degrees warmer than we were.
We had a week in Weymouth over half-term, with the kids, and loved everything except the traffic – it was brutal, especially coming home.
Yeah, well, once you get south of Warminster, the roads are all narrow and winding, with very few places you can get past anything slow moving, and that’s pretty much true of the whole of the south of England; get below the A30/303, and you’re stuffed. I drove those roads many times for two years, and it’s pointless being in a rush. On my way back up the M5 once, there had been an accident between the entrance and exit to Taunton Dean services northbound, and someone had put a car and caravan across all three lanes southbound a bit further down. It added three hours to my journey home from wherever I’d picked the car up from, a five hour journey home. It involved trying to get through Taunton then up over the Blackdown Hills. It wasn’t a fun day.
All along the south Devon coast around South Hams is lovely, but if you wanted to go from, say Kingsbridge to Dartmouth, find a bus or truck to follow, ‘cos everyone else will have to give way to it.
I like it around there, Burry point, Pembrey, Pendine and over to Tenby, nice areas, and you have Saundersfoot and Tenby as smallish towns, other side as you say Llanelli, probably best to be inland by a few miles for ease of logistics and then just simple journeys to the coast
Llanstephan’s a nice little place, or was when I stayed there many years ago. Back then, the pub always closed on a Sunday, and the locals spoke Welsh. Fairly easy to get around to Pendine, and Laugharne, and the beaches between Amroth and Saundersfoot.
@swdan The thing is, Felixstowe was huge in Victorian times and a lot of the older areas and buildings are really nice. The only problem is that no one wants to visit the place any more and so it is chronically under-invested. It is literally _just_ the port now.
As you say though, there are relatively few places on the coast in Suffolk that you can have a beach experience. Southwold and Aldeburgh have huge issues with second home ownership and gentrification, Orford and Woodbridge too (even though they are more estuary than coast) and the smaller villages are just not suitable. Leiston has Sizewell and significant problems and, before you know it, you're either in Norfolk or Essex.
Portobello in Edinburgh.
Not a tourist trap, nice, 15 min on the bus into Edinburgh, 45 min to tweed valley in the car, 1h on thr bike to the pentlands
I grew up there and question why I left every time I go home to see my folks.
Relatively expensive housing?
@willard absolutely, as a child growing up there in the 80s I didn't really realise how run down it was getting as I just enjoyed being by the sea but as I got older you could just tell it was falling apart. I left properly just over 20 years ago and didn't really miss the place apart from being close to my family. However in the last few years there has been money flowing back in, the seafront is improving with new things being built and the town is getting a better high street albeit The shops reached a proper low a few years back so anything is an improvement
The joys of Weymouth, a poor road network, it's about 13 miles from my house, and I try and avoid going there in the summer of school holidays.
I live 2 miles from Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door, we venture to the coast outside of school holidays and it isn't too bad, we went to Studland last week at 7:30pm and shared the beach with a handful of others for a couple of hours, whilst the dogs played and the daughter swam.
I work in Bournemouth and am lucky I can walk along the seafront back to the train station, and decompress if it's been a tough day.
Whilst I love the coast, I find that most of what I like is available from a nice river or two, luckily we have a nice river on the edge of our village, has a little sandy bit like a mini beach, clean, deep parts so you can swim and not many people to disturb you.
In reality how many times would you go to the coast if it was more accessible? If only a few times a month or less, what about looking at somewhere close but with decent transport links which tends to lack in seaside locations.
It's 15+ years away but if we were retiring now I think we'd go for a nice caravan on a seasonal pitch for April to Oct, which would have the advantage of being able to move every year so as not to get too bored with one particular area.
Then back home for some cosy winter vibes until Christmas followed by a lengthy long haul holiday to the tropics in Jan/Feb time, back in time for the nights to start getting longer and almost ready to get back out in the caravan.
Why not Morecombe?
