Hunstanton is a seaside town at Norfolk's northwest tip and reputedly the only resort on the East Coast that faces west. It's like Great Yarmouth in that it boasts amusements, tattoos and chippies, but also smaller, newer, remoter, genteeler, cliffier and less likely to return a Reform MP. To get there head for King's Lynn and keep going along the side of The Wash until you can see Skegness. I'd recommend visiting before the school summer holidays, but you're just too late for that sorry. [Visit Hunstanton][8 photos]
✉ The resort of Hunstanton was the brainchild of the gloriously named Henry L'Estrange Styleman Le Strange, a young Victorian local nobleman. In the late 1840s he eyed up a patch of land south of the cliffs, built a hotel and then a surrounding cluster of Old-English-style buildings, before luring in punters with a convenient railway. Henry died just as things were picking up but so successful was his project that the medieval village of Hunstanton soon became Old Hunstanton while New Hunstanton became plain Hunstanton.
✉ Hunstanton's railway connection ended in 1969, the alternative now a 50 minute bus ride from King's Lynn, but if you want to relive the branch line's twilight years Sir John Betjeman obligingly made a celebrated 10 minute documentary in 1962.
✉ The heart of the town is The Green, a large wedge of greensward sloping down from the Town Hall and the aforementioned hotel, now The Golden Lion. The medieval cross at the top of the lawn was filched from Old Hunstanton in 1846 as an initial act of placemaking and is now sadly topless. Close by is a statue of Henry Le Strange, phenomenally bewhiskered in a pose that would have made many a Victorian lady tremble. The town sign is a bit lower down and depicts St Edmund and a little wolf.
✉St Edmund was teenage East Anglian royalty, reputedly landing below the cliffs in Hunstanton in 855 to claim his crown. His elevation to sainthood came after he was defeated by a wave of Danish invaders in 869 and executed for refusing to denounce his Christian faith. Legend says a young wolf was found nuzzling his decapitated head, or some such romantic fiction, hence a small lupine statue now sits beside the remains of the memorial chapel on the clifftop. Follow the Wolf Trail along Cliff Parade for the full story. Also I suspect everybody takes this photo of the lighthouse through the arch and I was no exception.
✉ Hunstanton's had a lighthouse since 1665 because manoeuvring into The Wash can be very dangerous. An earlier version contained the world's first parabolic refractor, or so the plaque says, this back in 1776. The latest white tower was decommissioned in 1921, then turned over to the Royal Observer Corps and is now used for self-catering. Hunstanton's land train turns round here and heads back to the town centre and Searles Holiday Resort, but only hourly and not on Fridays so don't rely on it.
✉ The cliffs are splendid, maybe 80 foot high and unusually stripy. They run for a mile with a layer of white chalk on top of red chalk on top of brownish sandstone, like a stretched-out frothy coffee or a massive neapolitan Viennetta. The red layer brims with tiny fossilised squid and shellfish, not necessarily visible, and the brown layer gains its colour from the presence of iron ore. To see them properly you have to walk the beach, there being no promenade below, and best come nearer low tide so you're not restricted to a thin shoreline strip.
✉ At the northern end the white layer is by far the thickest, and the beach is broad and encouragingly sandy. Keep heading south, past occasional piles of collapsed chalk, and the red gradually rises to almost nudge out the white. The beach simultaneously gets rockier with little pools, nothing overly challenging but enough I suspect to dissuade the geologically apathetic. Less adventurous souls can instead choose a £10 shoreline chug aboard The Wash Monster, an amphibious vehicle painted with shark's teeth, or alternatively go on a longer seal safari (tide permitting).
✉ Hunstanton used to have a pier but it didn't have a lot of elemental luck. Fire destroyed the pavilion at the far end in June 1939, a storm destroyed most of the rest in January 1978 and a fire in May 2002 finished the job. Today the site is occupied by an arcade and bowling alley complex which, though elevated, fails to jut out beyond the shoreline and is a Pier in name only.
✉ North of the pier are the formal gardens, the crazy golf and the bowling green, i.e. the Cromerier side of town. South of the pier it's much more Great Yarmouthy, a long promenade lined by tacky kiosks and unhealthy food outlets leading to an amusement park with spinning rides. If you want a 50p stick of rock, a bag of candy floss and a slab of nougat before a walk through the Crazy House and a splash down the waterslide then head south.
✉ If the weather's less fabulous than it's been this week, the chief indoor attraction is the Sea Lifecentre where penguins, piranhas and rescued seals are amongst the highlights. If the tide's in and the beach has disappeared then the Oasis pool offers seal-free splashing and a long swooshing slide. Elsewhere in town you'll find Britain's Largest Joke Shop, called World of Fun, and for something a tad more cultural the Hunstanton Heritage Centre (but this only opens four afternoons a week so quite possibly not).
✉ As you'd expect there are a heck of a lot of fish and chip outlets from lowly takeaway cubicles to proper sitdown restaurants. Henry's proudly boasts across its frontage that it earned third place in the National Fish and Chip Awards 2023, while Fishers on Greevegate has just been listed by The Times as one of the 23 best chippies in the country. I thought Fishers' cod was proper tasty but their chips were stodgy, undercooked and disappointing, indeed unfinishable, and the gull eyeing up my greasy box nearly got the remnants.
✉ Fish and chips aside I rather liked Hunstanton, a layered resort with a prim end and a common end both firmly anchored in the seaside tradition, and some special stripy cliffs to boot. It's just a shame it's so far from anywhere I'm likely to be, so if you're any nearer best take advantage.
