Charging Around

Prologue

I was never really a great fan of motoring holidays. I did try it once. It was a camping trip to the south of France. It wasn't a success. The idea that you can relax by staring at a strip of tarmac for several hundred miles, on the wrong side of the road, while at the same time trying to work out whether to go clockwise or anticlockwise at an approaching roundabout, struck me as delusional.

As if this were not enough, there were the priorité à droite signs to contend with. You could be chugging along on a busy road when, at any moment, one of those Deux Chevaux cars, with the canvas sunroof fully rolled back and loaded up with agricultural produce, might jump out a few yards ahead without any warning. I was in a perpetual state of alarm, fully expecting to collide with a ton of garlic or asparagus. My reaction to this absurd rule of the road was to crawl along at 30kph, as a result of which a long line of angry drivers built up behind me, unable to overtake because of oncoming traffic, but who, when they finally managed to pass, did so with fists waving and horns blaring.

Add to this the fact that your non-driving partner keeps up a perpetual eulogy about the wonderful landscape that you want to see but cannot, because you're trying to keep both of you alive, and you have a recipe for disaster. It was not a good way to impress a new partner. You could argue a case that this was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate coolness under extreme duress, but I failed the test comprehensively. The whole idea of a driving holiday, I concluded, was a contradiction in terms.

This explains why I've tended to turn to less conventional forms of transport when thinking about a holiday. So, when my brother invited me to visit him in the US, I booked a berth on a cargo ship bound for Chester, Delaware. It took eight days to get there, and was as tranquil and relaxing a journey as any I can remember. And a couple of years later, when Joan and I went to Hong Kong, we decided not to fly but to get on a train at Morpeth in Northumberland and get off ten days later at Kowloon.

We were regaling a group of friends with the details of these journeys while sitting round a dinner table after a particularly strenuous ceilidh dance, when Rob, who was opposite us and getting increasingly agitated, leaned across and said, 'Clive, for heaven's sake, why can't you just be normal?'

'Oh, normal is boring,' I said. 'It's much more interesting living on the edge.'

Which is why, several decades later, when there was a commotion from England's edges, I sat up and took notice. The prime minister of the day reckoned he had his ear to the ground and knew exactly which way the political wind was blowing. He was having to deal with an upstart from the far fringes of the right who was stirring up the people, making them feel disgruntled and blaming it all on our European friends. So Dave called a referendum about whether we wanted to stay friends or split up and go our separate ways. 'It's all right,' he assured his parliamentary colleagues, 'they know on which side their bread is buttered and would never dare to leave. Trust me, I know the people.' He didn't, and we did. As we all know.

His mistake was that he had failed to take note of what was going on, on our edges. The people who lived there were seething with rage because they had been ignored. 'Forgotten,' they said. So when man-of-the-people Dave asked them to support him in sticking with our friends across the Channel, they gave him a kick up the backside and sent him on his way. And when the new government came in, it promised it would look after all those people living on the edge. To prove it, they pronounced a sentence of death on the internal combustion engine. 'We're going electric,' our new man of the people told us.

The unlikely juxtaposition of the referendum and the announcement that we all had to start buying electric cars prompted me to revise my ideas about motoring holidays. Electric cars seemed to me - and, I might add, my long-suffering wife - just what we had been looking for. The previous year, we'd had solar panels put on the roof and part of the deal was a free charge point for the electric car we didn't have but would like to have.

'So,' we said, 'we've got the Pod Point, we might as well have the car.' And that was when we bought the Nissan Leaf. When the Government's bluff was called over the Brexit vote, and most of the 'No' votes seemed to come from England's edges, we were presented with a perfect opportunity to put the Leaf through its paces and find out what was going on around England's coasts.

England's edges seemed to be dying, yet for most of our history, they had been alive with activity. Economically, socially, politically, culturally, our edges had always mattered. Ports and harbours played a key role in the development of our national life. They were the hub through which all our comings and goings of goods, armies, traders, smugglers, priests, missionaries and ideas passed.

The edges of our country that were closest to someone else's edges saw the briskest trade, but also experienced the greatest vulnerability. That is why, throughout our history, the coast of England's south-east corner, just 21 miles from the European mainland, has seen the greatest comings and goings and the greatest change. Pretty much everything came to us through Dover or Sandwich, or other nearby harbours.

Unpredictable as they were, the waters surrounding us were the highways along which everything entered and left these islands. The North Sea was, in the words of Michael Pye, a 'web of connections' that 'made the modern world possible'.1 We would not be the country we are today without those toings and froings across the North Sea. And that is why our edges mattered: you couldn't to and fro without passing through our edges.

Another twist to the unfolding story of our edges was when people with money to spare turned them into playgrounds. When health-giving spa waters were discovered in Scarborough in the seventeenth century, the moneyed classes started 'taking the waters', and it soon became quite the fashionable thing to do. As did bathing, provided it was done modestly.

This necessitated the invention of the bathing machine. These beach huts on wheels made it possible for women to exchange their fabulous day clothes for equally fabulous body-disguising bathing costumes and to step fully-clothed into the water without exposing a single square inch of flesh. Men, apparently, had no such qualms. Further along the beach and, allegedly, out of sight of the sensitivities of the ladies, they stripped off everything and jumped in the sea in the altogether.

All these fun and games added up to the very first English seaside resort, at Scarborough. It was the beginning of a trend. George IV gave added impetus to this fashion for healthy, but modest, seaside fun with his frequent visits to Brighton, where the therapeutic properties of the sea - and a, no doubt, equally health-improving affair - prompted him to set up home there by the building of the grandiose house we all know today as the Royal Brighton Pavilion.

This idea of the seaside as a place of fun and relaxation was, for a time, limited to the moneyed classes, out of reach of the working masses. But the onward march of technology ensured they didn't have it all to themselves for long. The railway revolution of the nineteenth century brought rapid economic development to what had been inconsequential areas. Folkestone, Middlesbrough and Grimsby, for example, owe their explosive growth to the railway.

But what was truly astonishing was the way in which railways created coastal holiday resorts. Many hitherto insignificant fishing villages, such as Bournemouth and Blackpool, Cleethorpes and Clacton, boomed into life and exploded with fun-seeking visitors. Even isolated Aberystwyth on Cardigan Bay turned itself into Birmingham's favourite holiday resort. Railways made it possible for working people to get away from their factories once a year and enjoy a holiday by the sea. Suddenly, our coastal fringes took on a new significance. Going to the seaside became part of our culture.

Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside! ?

I do like to be beside the sea! ?

Oh, I do like to stroll along the Prom, Prom, Prom! ?

Where the brass bands play,

Tiddley-om-pom-pom!

Much to the discombobulation of the posh segment of society, who failed to understand why they couldn't have these playgrounds all to themselves, everyone could now join in the fun, even the hoi polloi. These developments were given a huge boost with the arrival of the affordable family motorcar. Millions could now take themselves to Britain's coasts for annual holidays, daytrips and weekend breaks, bringing prosperity to places such as Morecambe, Scarborough, Filey, Brighton, Margate and Whitley Bay. The hospitality and entertainment sectors had never had it so good. England's edges prospered.

But the seaside boom didn't last long. A tidal wave of technological change swept over our coasts. The development of telecommunications and air transport meant that, for the first time in our history, we were no longer dependent on the sea for travel and communications, and this meant that our edges could be bypassed; electronically or aeronautically, we were able to jump over them. Package holidays whisked holiday makers to the Costa del Sol, which boomed while our...