The Tourists Took Everything

The Beach Was Never mine, But It Sure As Hell Wasn’t Theirs

It was the kind of day that seduces even the bitter-hearted—28 degrees and climbing, the sun slow-roasting my shoulders in the most forgiving way, like it wanted to make amends. The water was obscene. Not blue. Not green. Just clarity—pure, liquid glass that shimmered with every lazy pulse of tide. I could see everything beneath the surface: ribbons of kelp dancing in the undertow, pale stones smoothed by centuries, sand eels glinting like living needles. The smell was sea-salt sharp with a top note of sun-baked rock and old driftwood. That mineral tang that makes your mouth water without knowing why. Gravel crackled underfoot like slow-burning paper. The sea hissed in and out, never in a rush, whispering its promises. Gulls called somewhere far off—faint, like they respected the mood. Even the flies were on their best behaviour. I stood there, skin humming with heat, everything quiet but the rhythm of breath and tide, and for a moment I believed the world could be simple.

But…

Let’s start from the beginning. I had a plan. One glorious, stupid, salt-rinsed plan. Roll the swag out. Spearfish my dinner. Eat it under the slow collapse of the sun. Fall asleep on warm stones. Wake up with the tide nibbling my toes and the seabirds whispering approval. That was the dream. The covenant. Just me, the ocean, and enough gear to make it romantic without being efficient.

But no. They came. The summer infestation. Pop-top vans and roof tents stacked like metal ticks in every layby. Awning sprawl like a fungus across the car park. Windbreaks jammed into every grain of public sand. Not a square foot of beach left—not for walking, not for sitting, not for laying out your soul. A phalanx of sunburnt flesh and Aldi wetsuits and people who’ve never heard the word “quiet” without asking Alexa to define it. The great migration of people who hate silence.

It’s not even a pretty beach. Just a functional, slightly gravelly cove, decent for fish and forgotten by most maps. Or it was. Now it’s got influencers drinking lukewarm prosecco and toddlers shitting in the dunes. One bloke was flying a drone with one hand and feeding his sausage dog hummus with the other. A woman asked if she could plug in her e-bike “just for a minute.” I nearly choked on my own disbelief.

I left. Walked four miles to a different cove. Hoped for emptiness. Prayed for it. But it was the same story. Campers. Paddleboards. A man playing Ed Sheeran from a speaker inside a dry bag. There should be laws.

Back to the first spot thinking maybe I could just scramble over the rocks at the peninsula, hide in the shadow of the cliff, spear a fish and pretend the world hadn’t melted. But no. Two people clocked me. One barked something about “meat is murder.” The other said “my kids are swimming—you better not be killing anything in there.” First of all, I’m not hunting in the shallows. I go where your spawn won’t, our kids aren’t freediving 20ft with a spear in kelp forests.

Second, I wasn’t killing. I was eating. There’s a difference. And third—go fuck yourself and your half-boiled morality. If I wanted a sermon I’d go to church, not the tide pool.

I pressed on anyway. Found a rock ledge just wide enough for regret. And then came the music. Thump. Thump. Thump. Not even a song. Just the kind of bass loop that makes your spine fold in protest. Like someone gave a metronome to a demon with no taste. You know what’s worse than hearing someone’s shitty music in nature? Hearing just enough of it through the wind to never escape it. I sat. I stewed. I left.

Didn’t swim. Didn’t fish. Didn’t cook. Just walked home with too much salt and not enough blood pressure medication. The worst part of living in a tourist hotspot isn’t the queues or the litter or the mid-season existentialism—it’s the noise. The presence. The fact they colonise the silence and repurpose it for Instagram. I’d pay a tourist tax. Hell, I’d happily be taxed to leave a place like that in peace. Why aren’t we charging people to ruin things?

I’ll try again in autumn. When the air bites back. When nobody wants to sleep on a rock. When the sea’s mine again. Until then, I hope their windbreaks blow away, and their speaker falls in a rockpool, and every one of them gets sand in places sand was never meant to be.

I went back this week. Of course I did. And the cove was wrecked—broken glass in the shallows, a disposable BBQ fused into the stones like some crude altar to apathy, crisp packets drifting in the tide like plastic sea-stars, and—because the gods like to mock me—a fucking Costa cup jammed between two rocks. Not even a black coffee, no. It was something unspeakable. The sticker was still on it: iced decaf oat-milk caramel matcha with vanilla sweet foam and two pumps of seasonal delusion (I may have stretched the truth a little there) Who takes that to a beach? Who looks at a coastline that’s survived Viking raids and winter gales and thinks, yes, this sacred place needs a lukewarm dessert beverage in a waxed paper tomb.

Final Note (or: Salt, Spite, and the Sound of a Man Unravelling)

Look. I know I don’t own the beach. I know it’s not mine. I know the tide doesn’t answer to locals, and the cliffs don’t keep guestbooks.

I know tourists have every right to exist, to visit, to bring their children and their sausage rolls and their windbreaks the size of medieval siege equipment. I know that.

I know people are allowed to be loud. Allowed to swim. Allowed to picnic like they’ve never seen the sea before.

I know.

But for the love of sea foam and cracked rock—I just want it back.

Back the way it was. Before the plague of pop-up tents and GoPros. Before the age of basslines and Bluetooth. When the only sounds were gulls and gravel and that deep, hollow breath the sea makes when it drags the stones just right.

Before the grockles. The blow-ins. The emmets. The city-fleeing, Range-Rover-driving, second-home bastards who now own every cottage within 10 miles and turned them into Airbnbs run like vending machines.

Before the government started greenlighting entire villages of soulless bike houses—£800,000 for a “starter home” made of grey plastic and recycled marketing lies.

Before I had to compete for parking with someone named Hugo who parked sideways across three spaces so he could unload his paddleboard and existential emptiness.

I know it’s not mine.

But I want it back.

I want a tourist tax so high it makes your ears ring. I want every second-home owner to pay rent to the sea. I want a burning ban on Airbnbs and a five-year curse placed on every estate agent who said “up and coming coastal gem.”

I’ll pay the tax when I go away. Gladly.

But give me back my firepit beach.

Give me back the silence.

Give me back the place where I could sit in the salt, spear in hand, and pretend the world hadn’t gone entirely to shit.

I’m sorry.

But also—no, I’m not.

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