Daniela Blei on Robert C. Ritchie’s *The Lure of the Beach: A Global History*

According to a 2023 report by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, sea level rise poses “unthinkable” risks to the safety and security of societies around the world. Roughly 40% of humanity lives within 60 miles of a coast, a figure that jumps to nearly 80% if freshwater coasts are included. By 2050, extreme storm surges and an estimated ten times more flooding will wreak havoc on coastal property and infrastructure, and wash away entire beaches. Anticipating the future, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is going digital to preserve its culture. Major port cities from Tokyo and Guangzhou to New York and Miami are pursuing different strategies to combat rising waters. As the climate crisis comes for the coasts, historians have responded by shining a spotlight on the social and economic forces that have remade them. In recent years, new research on beaches, coasts, bodies of water, and even sand has enriched our understandings of the many places where land and water meet.[1]

Robert C. Ritchie’s The Lure of the Beach (2021), a sweeping history of the seaside resort, is one such example. Beginning in 18th-century England with the scientific “discovery” of the salutary properties of cold seawater and invigorating coastal breezes, Ritchie traces the rise of the beach as a popular destination, first for European aristocrats and then the masses. In Ritchie’s telling, medical discourses put England’s first resorts on the map, with Scarborough, Brighton, and Margate catering to elites who traveled by carriage from London, seeking to treat conditions ranging from gonorrhea to the common cold. They heeded advice from medical experts who claimed that plunging into the chilly Atlantic was the antidote to life in the modern city, where diseases festered and noxious sewage, hazardous noise, and overcrowding conspired against health and wellness. By the mid-19th century, hotels and resorts dotted the British coasts, multiplying as the railroads brought holidaymakers eager to engage in new forms of leisure. Restaurants, shops, new promenades, and piers sprang up like weeds.

Ritchie documents the gender and class divisions that arrived with them. Tensions erupted between locals and visitors––Jane Austen skewered the takeover of a fishing town by bourgeois beachgoers in Sanditon (1817), her final, unfinished novel­­––and between moneyed long-term vacationers and workers enjoying fresh weekend air. Beaches became class signifiers: Blackpool, the closest to England’s large industrial towns, became the “people’s beach,” while Brighton attracted the “beau monde.” Others served a more specific clientele, such as Torquay in Devon, the preferred beach of retired army officers and civil servants.

But everywhere Victorian standards of decorum prevailed. The bathing machine, a contraption resembling an upright coffin on wheels, was designed to protect women’s modesty. For some English resorts, supplying the machines proved as consequential as beds and other basic amenities. Even after the swimming costume, varying in style and coverage, replaced the bathing machine (not without controversy), strict gender norms continued to safeguard propriety at beaches across northern Europe. “Civilized” visitors to the United States expressed their surprise, sometimes horror, at the “wild” practices they encountered, especially mixed bathing. Describing the scene at New Jersey’s Cape May in 1850, a Swedish author and self-declared feminist recalled: “The presence of the great and august Ocean, makes you make light of the crowd of men, women, children, black and white, dogs, horses, carriages in whose company you must take the baths here” (130).

In the United States, the beach was less about seeking therapeutic relief than recreation and entertainment, Ritchie shows, a process nowhere as visible as Coney Island, the country’s most popular seaside destination for nearly a century. Famous for its boardwalk and roller coasters, Coney Island ushered in a new era of amusement parks, mechanical rides, and music halls at the shore, all under the glow of electric lights. Despite widespread images of the beach as a playground for all Americans, and the impressions of traveling Europeans, the US beach was a racialized landscape. Ritchie offers glimpses of segregation on the sand in the 19th and 20th centuries but leaves room for a fuller picture of how beaches, both private and public, contributed to racial and social exclusion in America.

In subsequent chapters, Ritchie explores the beach as a cultural phenomenon in the post-World War II period (think: The Beach Boys, spring break, and the rise of surfing). He writes that “beaches, as much as any place, are a mirror of the strains and stresses of society” (221). And yet other scholars have demonstrated how the beach was more than just a mirror. Elsa Devienne, for example, has uncovered how urban renewal projects in Los Angeles remade the coast for upwardly mobile White families.[2] Bruce’s Beach, a thriving resort for Black families, built in 1912 by Willa and Charles Bruce, was seized twelve years later by Manhattan Beach officials responding to complaints from local Whites about Black beachgoers. These cases, among others, demonstrate how White Americans constructed the beach––and the wellbeing and leisure it afforded––along racial lines. In the popular imagination, the beach has long existed as a place apart, or a respite from the world. Ritchie’s lively narrative illustrates how the beach became synonymous with health, leisure, entertainment, and recreation, but misses how the modern meanings of the beach as an “escape” have obscured its role in effecting social and environmental change.

The work of the late John Gillis, the author of The Human Shore, dwells in these coastal contradictions.[3] With the Industrial Revolution, Gillis tells us, the beach––once a source of food, temporary dwelling, and where journeys began and ended––was reinvented as a “natural” place in ways that were anything but natural. Even today, the beach is celebrated as pristine and elemental, and the “purest” expression of nature, effectively blinding us to a few centuries of human development and its costs. Regrettably, John Gillis, who has been called “the father of coastal studies,” appears as John “Ellis” in Ritchie’s book, one of a few typographical errors. The climate crisis makes an appearance in the final two of Ritchie’s ten chapters, in a survey of problems now piling up at the coasts, including sea level rise, erosion, sand mining, and chronic pollution. But rather than building on the insight that Gillis left us––that modern beachgoing is a form of environmental neglect––Ritchie’s framing is to ask whether the resorts will be able to overcome the challenges that overtourism and climate change have wrought.

And yet Ritchie’s vivid storytelling captures the beach’s importance as a site of self-discovery, much of it European. Even a cursory glance at the works of Romantic writers and Impressionist painters, which Ritchie discusses in detail, leaves no doubt of the role of the sand and surf in the minds of Europeans who saw nature and the modern world as separate, even oppositional, forces. As depictions of ships tossed by pounding waves gave way to women gazing out at the sea under the shade of a parasol, the taming of the coasts, a cultural process as much as a physical one, is abundantly clear. In Ritchie’s book, we observe how the beach contributed to the making of class, gender, sexuality, race, and ideas about the body, as Alain Corbin[4] and Lena Len?ek and Gideon Bosker[5] have also shown in their own grand narratives.

These are global histories in the sense that beaches on every habitable continent are accounted for, but European beachgoing, born in industrializing England, is the normative model. Readers move across Europe and its colonies to the Americas, Australia and Oceania, the Caribbean, and southeast Asia, with developments everywhere amounting to variations on a similar theme. The modern beach, as we know it, was invented by European elites in the 18th century. Readers might be left wondering what stories remain untold.

For Rachel Carson, another chronicler of the coasts, “the edge of the sea” is “an elusive and indefinable boundary” that exists outside normal time and space.[6] The beach is always changing and never stable or fixed, Carson reminded us. Moving with the tides and storms, and according to the rhythms of geology, the coasts are where the earth becomes fluid; their permanence is an illusion. From this perspective, the rise of the seaside resort is a story about how the beach was made into an exception in nature, where capitalists and engineers drew a line in the sand, attempting to make the world conform to it. The lure of the beach was always a flight of fancy. But the consequences are all too real.

[1] See for example, David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019);  Andrew W. Kahrl, Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline; Carina Breidenbach, Tamara Fröhler, Dominik Pensel, Katharina Simon, Florian Telsnig, and Martin Wittmann, eds. Narrating and Constructing the Beach: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2020); Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2021); Traci Brynne Voyles, The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism; Jamin Wells, Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[2] Elsa Devienne, “Urban Renewal by the Sea: Reinventing the Beach for the Suburban Age in Postwar Los Angeles.” Journal of Urban History 45: 1 (2018): 99–125.

[3] John Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

[4] Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Ocean: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

[5] Lena Len?ek and Gideon Bosker, The Beach: A History of Paradise on Earth (New York: Penguin, 1998).

[6] Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 1.