I love our loud, cold beach towns – that’s why I would stop anyone from owning a second home there | Nell Frizzel

Owhipped sand, gray seas, people sitting in beach huts under blankets with hot water bottles, donuts, bare trees, hot chocolate, strolls on the empty pier: there’s a special flavor to a British seaside town off season that few places can match. A melancholy specific to the peas and the packaging of the condom that, personally, I adore.

But the news that the coastal areas have now three times the number of Airbnb listings per accommodation as non-coastal areas threatens the very future of these places, not to mention the lives of their inhabitants. Housing campaigners point out that the sheer number of “whole places” listed on the website shows how landlords have been drawn to short-term vacation rentals precisely when people need affordable homes. They’d rather rent out their spare house — you know, just that other house they have — to 50 wealthy families for the weekends rather than one local family for the year.

Last weekend my partner and I went to Bournemouth to stay in the kind of hotel where you hope there is at least one semi-aristocratic murder, to be solved by a stocky little European pain in the ass or a knitter nosy of St Mary Mead. Just a little vile thing in the billiard room. We actually arrived to find a freshman party in one of the conference rooms, which meant the place was on fire with local teenagers in neon Lycra and plastic sunglasses, vaping furiously in a cold salty wind. I saw more goosebumps than in my previous six months of outdoor swimming.

Which is exactly as it should be. The towns and cities lucky enough to be ravaged by this particular British combination of fierce weather, greasy chips and portable speakers must, above all, be homes for their year-round residents. I may not have spent my childhood by the sea, but I grew up in a city where about 20% of the population are students and in the summer tourists flock to town like sugar on cornflakes. I know what it’s like to live in a place where locals are pushed off the sidewalks by passing visitors. I have seen what it can do to homes, town halls, recreation centers, schools and shopping streets.

A city needs long-term citizens in order to maintain the kind of infrastructure that makes it a city, rather than an unloved collection of empty houses, phone accessory shops, and fancy penguin-shaped trash cans. You need space to maintain bus services, libraries, chip shops, cafes, dentists, playgroups and football pitches during the off season, so that there is something worth keeping. be visited in the sun.

No one is saying beach towns should shut down tourism; rather that tourism should never be just one of many local industries instead of swallowing up a whole place. And a very direct and extremely effective way of doing this would be to ban the ownership of secondary residences altogether. I know, it sounds crazy, but imagine: you could have a house and you would live there. All the time. And someone else could buy and live in the spare house you use as a cash-generating storage facility. If I was in charge (and we’re all probably lucky I’m not), I’d make it illegal to own more than one property. I should arrest my own mother, of course, but hey ho.

During an absolutely immersive stint in the city, outside the Court Royal Hotel in Bournemouth, I was reminded of what makes off-season British seaside towns so appealing. A man with a microphone and a mobility scooter sang Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All alongside a Bible band; the beach – which is indeed open to dog poo from October 1 to April 30 – was full of people chatting and exercising in raincoats; co-workers ate in shed-sized restaurants while gazing across the road at patios dappled with disco lights. It was fun and it was quiet and felt like I was at a house party after most people had gone home.

Then we ended up on Sunday waiting over an hour for a rail replacement bus service to Eastleigh as all trains had been canceled at short notice. That’s what happens when you put profit before people.

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