It’s been rated as one of the worst seaside towns in the UK – but I lived in Weston-super-Mare for three years, and there’s one thing tourists probably don’t know.
The little Somerset resort is a bit down on its luck these days, and consumer magazine Which? has rated Weston the eighth-worst seaside town in the UK, better only than the likes of Bognor Regis, which came bottom, Bangor in North Wales and Nigel Farage’s parliamentary seat, Clacton-on-Sea.
Weston has all the trappings of a classic British kiss-me-quick beach resort. It has a two-mile-long seafront, boasts the second-highest tidal range in the world, donkey rides, about a million chippies, ice cream parlours and, of course, the Grand Pier, most famous for having burned down in a huge fire and being rebuilt years later. It even has a Wetherspoon’s pub and a Premier Inn.
Another claim to fame is Banksy. The famous graffiti artist is from Bristol, but used to holiday in Weston as a child and several Banksy artworks have popped up in the town over the years. Most famously, Banksy held his ‘Dismaland’ theme park spoof in Weston-super-Mare, in a bid to boost its ailing local economy (it worked – thousands of people packed into Weston that month).
I headed to Weston-super-Mare as a fresh-faced 21-year-old, eager to make my mark in journalism, and got my first job as a local newspaper reporter on a title called The Weston, Worle and Somerset Mercury. Nothing gets you an insider knowledge of a place faster than covering it for a newspaper – I was sent to everything from cider festivals and parish councils to Banksy sightings and beachfront tragedies.
Weston-super-Mare, in my time there, was pretty much a ghost town for three quarters of the year. The high street, even back in 2011, was just charity shops, cafes and pensioners. Nightclubs were dank and dingy, and regularly saw fights spill out onto the streets outside from rowdy stag dos down from Cardiff.
And for the other quarter, it was rammed with day trippers who would completely gridlock every road, litter every inch of the beach and block every car parking space the whole town over.
Despite this drab description, it did have its moments. T4 On The Beach came to Weston-super-Mare in 2012 with the likes of Rita Ora and The Wanted adding some star power to this hard up seaside town. And Banksy’s Dismaland exhibition, in 2015, was a wonderfully dystopian take on Disneyland. And the locals are extremely proud of their town, and, honestly, the more run-down residential estates that people told me were ‘rough’ in my time as a reporter are positively posh compared to some streets I’ve walked in my home town of northern city Sheffield.
But one thing tourists should know about Weston is its hidden gem: Uphill. This is a tiny area with its own beach, just a stone’s throw away from Weston-super-Mare proper.
The town is picture postcard quaint, boasting a little beach, one small play park, two pubs and a cafe. It also hosts an annual scarecrow festival, and is the perfect definition of a ‘hidden gem’. In fact, the parish, thought to pre-date 1066, was popular in the 1700s as a ‘convalescence’ destination, its sea air and coastal beauty being prescribed by health professionals as a way to beat whatever ailed you.
No matter how choking and chock-a-block Weston-super-Mare became, I always enjoyed slipping away to this unknown slice of seaside just a few miles south. So 300 years on and it’s still doing the same job it did for anyone feeling jaded by Weston-super-Mare in the 18th Century.