Coastlines review – accessible and poignant
It is often said that Britain is a maritime nation but, writes Patrick Barkham in his new biography of the British shore, we might be more accurately described as "a coastal nation, happiest when looking seaward".
Examining our enduring love of the seaside, Coastlines addresses themes of childhood, passion, war, industrialism, art and faith, and the ways in which each has coloured perceptions of the shore. Alongside lurid tales of Cornish wreckers and chronicles of the first saints of Lindisfarne sit skilful pen-portraits: an account of the painter Rex Whistler creating his grandiose symbolic panorama at Plas Newydd in Anglesey during the 1930s is brilliantly evocative, while one of the book's most moving passages tells the story of Keith Lane, whose wife's suicide at Beachy Head prompted him to become an unofficial counsellor to others he encountered on the Sussex cliffs. Barkham is adept at capturing the genius loci of a landscape, too: Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, built by the Earl of Lancaster in the 14th century, is "a dark Avalon of colossal ambition", while the dreadful "pagodas" at the abandoned MOD facility on Orford Ness are memorably described as "psychotic cathedrals of Mutually Assured Destruction".
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