I was going to write a comparison of British and Dutch beaches and then realised I’m the wrong person to do it. I grew up by the sea. That means my British beach isn’t a beach, it’s a childhood, and nothing gets to compete with it on fair terms.
So this isn’t that post. This is about how I actually use a coastline now.
Twice a year
Summer, or New Year. That’s the pattern.
The summer version is obvious enough. The other one is Zandvoort on the first of January, if we’re in the country, which we often are, for the specific purpose of clearing our heads. There’s no swimming involved. Other people do the New Year dive and they’re welcome to it. This is a walk into a cold horizontal wind until the previous evening has been removed from you, followed by something hot, and it works every single time.
An October promenade in the rain sounds like the more literary choice and I want to be honest: I’m not there in October. I’m there when the year has just turned over and there’s something to be walked off.
We did see all of them, though
During covid we had a car, which we no longer do, and that combination of a car and a great deal of nothing else to do meant we worked our way along most of the Dutch coast. It’s a small country with a lot of edge. You can be at a completely different beach every weekend for a summer and still not be doing anything ambitious.
That period did something useful. It taught me that the Dutch coast isn’t one place with regional variations, it’s a series of quite distinct decisions about what a beach is for, sitting within an hour of each other.
Kibbeling wins
This isn’t a close contest, and I have an emotional stake in fish and chips.
Kibbeling is better because of the geometry. Bite sized chunks means more surface area, which means more batter, and the batter is the entire point of the exercise. A piece of battered fish the size of a shoe has a poor ratio and gets worse as it cools, because you’re eating your way inward through something that stopped being crisp several minutes ago. Kibbeling never has that problem. Every single piece is an edge.
It also comes with sauce as standard and in a paper tray you can eat from while walking, which is the right way to eat any of this. Zandvoort is where we go for it. I have no interest in defending this position, and I’d like it on record that I gave up ground on the fish of my own homeland without being asked.
What the buildings tell you
There are promenades here, and some of them are perfectly good, but the promenade isn’t the organising idea the way it’s in a British seaside town. What you get instead are the beach bars and the terraces, and those are a different institution.
A British seafront is largely Victorian, built when the sea itself was the attraction and the done thing was to walk along looking at it in a coat. The infrastructure is therefore permanent and pointed outward. Here, a good number of the pavilions are seasonal and simply disappear for the winter, and the ones that stay are set up so you can sit in them facing the weather rather than enduring it. The structure exists to let you stay, not to let you pass through.
And you don’t need the coast anyway
The thing that took me longest to understand is that the beach is optional. We use local swimming spots far more than we use the sea. There’s an urban beach at Marineterrein in the middle of Amsterdam where people swim in monitored water on a weekday lunch break, which would be regarded as an eccentric act of trespass in most cities I have lived in.
So the answer to which coast I prefer is the Dutch one, and the reason isn’t the sand or the water or even the kibbeling. It’s that there’s something to do in any weather. A British seaside town in bad weather is a town waiting for the weather to improve. Here, bad weather is just one of the conditions the place was built for.
