The waterfront of Folkestone would be almost unrecognizable to someone who knew the English seaside town 20 years ago.
Built in 1904 to dispatch trains full of ferry passengers or coal to the quayside, the harbor now houses restaurants and food stalls, its granite-faced lighthouse relaunched in 2015 as a champagne bar. Next door, a Scandinavian-style sauna that opened this spring perches directly on the beach’s broad shingle, from whose plunge pool France is visible as a blue ribbon on the horizon. Splashy public artworks from the likes of Anthony Gormley and Yoko Ono line the promenade, while a recently completed crescent wedged between the beach and cliff offers two-bedroom homes for up to £1.1 million ($1.5 million). The port and resort town 112 kilometers (70 miles) southeast of London used to be known for some of Southeast England’s cheapest housing.
For international visitors, the buzz and polish in the region might come as a pleasant surprise. For British people, brought up on old-school images of coastal gray weather and grayer food, the glow-up can feel uncanny — a bit like seeing your old socks walk down the Oscars red carpet.
The transformation of Folkestone’s seafront is no outlier. Around England’s southeastern coastline, towns such as Hastings, Margate, Whitstable and Broadstairs have all been experiencing dramatic revivals after years of decline. More affluent visitors are arriving — and spending more — and new residents are calling these towns home, taking advantage of house prices still lower than London’s. Some major new art galleries — and in the case of the Isle of Thanet the promotional efforts of locally born artist Tracy Emin — have fostered a creative scene that led Madonna to call the town her “idea of heaven” earlier this year.
Fresh investment from new visitors and residents is welcome, but the resurgence comes with trade-offs. Joining quasi-metropolitan Brighton (where gentrification began in the 1990s), these places have in recent years seen steep rises in visitor numbers and housing prices, as well as increased financial stress and poverty levels that have worsened in some areas. The region falls far short of having enough affordable and public housing — the latter’s share of the market having halved to 16% since the 1980s — to cushion lower-income locals against rising housing costs, increasingly forcing many into overcrowding, displacement or even homelessness. Wages have stagnated, and while local boroughs are building more affordable housing, the shortfall between their capabilities and actual need is creating a sense of hopelessness for some.
These issues aren’t specifically coastal problems — they’re national ones writ slightly larger than normal. That makes the South East a potent place to catch the flavor of contemporary Britain: its pleasure-loving sophistication and widening social gulfs, its ever-clearer displays of both affluence and its absence, its mix of elegance and rot.
These conditions seem set to continue. While coastal tourism levels have fallen elsewhere in the UK, visitor numbers at southeastern resorts rose year-on-year in 2024, the last year for which figures are available, including notable increases in overseas guests. Four of the region’s seaside towns were named by Time Out as among the UK’s best to visit in 2026, and with inflation, fuel prices and the ongoing likelihood of drivers facing queues due to more stringent border checks at the Port of Dover, the appeal of the area’s proximity to London could be stronger than ever.
Europe’s First Beach Resorts
While Britain may not be the most obvious location for waterside hedonism, the UK is actually the birthplace of the modern seaside resort. Britain didn’t just build beach towns — Scarborough, in Yorkshire, has attracted bathers since the late 1600s — it lined its coast with them in numbers unparalleled elsewhere in Europe until the late 20th century tourism boom.
It was Victorian and Edwardian affluence that powered this beach craze, the country’s early industrialization spawning middle and upper working classes that — unprecedentedly — could afford to travel for leisure. All classes went to the beach, even if just for the day. While lower-income Britons might head for Blackpool and Southend, the palace hotels of elegant Torquay and Bournemouth were considered aspirational and even chic well into the 1950s.
Cheaper international flights killed this boom. From the 1960s, Britons increasingly abandoned their own coast for newly affordable, more reliably sunny places such as Spain’s Andalusia and Portugal’s Algarve. As their customers thinned, seaside towns fell back on retirees, day-trippers or people who couldn’t afford Spain. With revenue falling, the elaborate architecture of many resorts took on a rundown look or faced demolition and replacement with poorer quality buildings. Despite their faded gentility’s bittersweet charm, these towns often felt like the end of the line — literally, as the last stop of slow trains; and figuratively, as retirees’ final stop before the great hereafter.
From around the turn of this century, visitors started returning in greater numbers, perhaps seeking something their parents might have thought unappealing: proximity to their homes.
“Higher stress levels mean that people prefer regular breaks throughout the year rather than having to wait until summer for one longer holiday,” says Dimitrios Buhalis, a tourism and hospitality professor at Bournemouth University. Now that short breaks are the most common form of British holiday and — as Buhalis puts it — “many people feel they can’t leave their emails unchecked for too long,” shorter travel times have added appeal for time-poor people who don’t want every trip to start and end at an airport. Better food and more sunshine have helped, as has a seaside festival boom feeding the national mania for lighthearted public giggles. Thousands now flock to South Coast events where you can dress up as a pirate or pretend to be Kate Bush, products reflective of a growing yen for experiential travel and young people’s shift from weekly nightlife to a few party weekends a season.
The southeast’s coastal towns are also reviving because they retain real charisma. Typically combining historic high-ceilinged villas and charming villagelike hearts with forlorn 1970s shopping precincts and careworn penny arcades, they embody that most English of aesthetic categories: the almost-beautiful, a heady, characterful mix of elegance and decay that recalls an antique lace blouse with grease stains on the cuff. Parents return wanting their children to experience sensations they’ve stored from their own childhood beach days: the smell of sea air and fry, eating psychedelically lurid ice lollies while dodging crashing breakers on the sand or pebbles.
Londoners aren’t just visiting more. They’re also staying. Freed by remote work and pressured by the lack of affordable places to live in the capital, Londoners have been leaving the city. Between 2010 and 2020, tens of thousands more UK residents migrated out of London than into it each year, although fewer have left in more recent years as price increases nationally have outpaced the capital’s. Figures from around the pandemic suggest that around 60% of those leaving London during that period relocated to the wider Southeast. This exurban drift isn’t new, but it was previously far less driven by London’s unaffordability. From 2013 to 2025, the proportion of first-time buyers among those leaving London and purchasing homes in the wider southeast almost tripled, from about 12% to 31%.
New arrivals are not, however, confined to one income bracket. At the top of the scale, wealthy people seeking some loose approximation of the Hamptons — ocean views, gorse-scattered dunes, few neighbors — might head to Camber or Pett Level, where humble interwar bungalows are being remodeled or removed to create Scandinavian-accented beach palaces. People with similar means seeking more traditional homes and a small-town feel might head for Whitstable and Deal, with their cottagey historic houses, oyster stalls and traditional good looks.
Ex-hipsters, a generally less affluent group, tend to choose Margate, which retains a nighttime buzz and LGBTQ-friendly community feel that recalls East London’s now-fading glory days. Hastings is another option, especially westerly St. Leonards-on-Sea, whose Italianate stucco architecture, small galleries and beach cafes give it the feel of a quieter, cheaper Brighton. Bargain hunters seeking older affordable homes of character might still have luck in Dover or Ramsgate — historic but gritty port towns with some of the southeast’s cheapest remaining Georgian and early Victorian housing. Finally, for people who yearn for the pregentrification days when the coast’s character leaned older and less fashionable, Herne Bay and Eastbourne are still options.
Fifty-two-year-old arts worker Rhidian Davis is part of this wave, having moved from London with his partner to a battered but fine-boned Victorian fixer-upper in West Folkestone in 2022.
“We’d been thinking of moving to the coast for some time — I felt like my friends in London were always too busy to meet, and while I loved living a short ride from theaters and concert halls, tiredness and a tight budget meant they were often missing out to Netflix,” he says. “The cost of the long daily commute meant it didn’t add up financially until the pandemic, when rules around home-working in my organization changed.”
While Davis bought a flat needing renovation — a few doors away from a building so dilapidated locals referred to it as “the pigeon hotel” — the upgrade was clear. While in London, his budget might have just about covered a small, drab, inconveniently located two-bedroom flat; in Folkestone, it allowed for a very spacious, elegant high-ceilinged Victorian flat in an area once known as a popular getaway for the aristocracy.
The more visible inequality that greater investment brings highlights a quirk of England’s social map: The Southeast in general may be the UK’s richest region after London, but its coast is an exception. Too far from London to fully tap its job market and overly dependent on seasonal work, the southeast’s coastal towns contain some of Britain’s most deprived areas. As of 2023, Britain’s coastal dwellers earned almost £3,000 less annually that their inland counterparts.
An injection of wealthier people might seem just the ticket to improve things, but the jobs these new residents generate tend to offer more of the same: lower-paid, often seasonal service work. Meanwhile, housing costs have skyrocketed — in Margate, they have more than doubled in the past decade, according to one property portal, against a corresponding national rise of 53%. Short-term rentals have exacerbated the situation by depleting the housing supply for full-time residents. One local in Whitstable complained hyperbolically that the seafront was now colder in winter because so few people lived there during the darker seasons.
Local boroughs are building public and subsidized housing units across the region but — with land costs high and available funding low — not in sufficient number to meet growing need.
Some have been targeting scapegoats such as asylum seekers. Reform, Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party, which now controls Kent County Council, where these towns are located, has fueled this with claims that asylum seekers were being prioritized nationally over locals for social housing, though asylum seekers, who comprise less than 0.2% of the region’s population, are not in fact eligible for that sector. (It should be noted that while Reform runs Kent at the county, it does not control any boroughs containing the towns discussed here, which play the primary role in local government.)
Michaela Mckenzie, a 45-year-old Hastings native who until earlier this year worked as a housing support officer, has witnessed some of the stresses this has brought. “When I first started the job — providing assistance and guidance to people at risk of homelessness — the people we worked with tended to have complex issues such as disabilities or addiction. That has started to change, because rents around here just aren’t within a lot of people’s range anymore, so people outside the groups classically at risk are coming into the system.”
With housing costs more of a headache, the new cafes and restaurants around town are “leaving a slightly bitter taste” with some locals aware that they are not their target customers,” says Mackenzie. “The term DFL — Down From London — used to be a more neutral description,” she says, “but now I’m hearing it used a bit of a slur.” This isn’t as bad, she notes, as the acronym FILTH — “Failed in London, Tried Hastings” — a catchy but harsh acronym for DFLs that has even spawned a run of T-shirts.
Davis feels some sympathy with this reaction. “I think one reason we decided on Folkestone is that it still had a less obviously London-y feel than other places on the south coast. But I grew up partly in Broadstairs, and I remember the old days — everything was vandalized and boarded-up, and even the roller coasters were rotting,” he says. “People might forget that that decay was also a temporary state of affairs, caused by the collapse of British holidays. Things change — and then they change again.”