Seaside rocks

Could the tide at last be turning for Britain's seaside resorts? As Brighton's West Pier progressively sinks into the English Channel, less than two miles westwards along the seafront in Hove, two celebrity architects are competing for what is shaping up to be one of Britain's grandest, most avant-garde developments. Next week, Brighton and Hove council will choose between competing schemes by the American creator of the swirling Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Frank Gehry, and Britain's double Stirling prizewinner, Wilkinson Eyre, for a cluster of 40-storey tower blocks and a sports complex.

Further to the east, in Hastings and Bexhill, plans are being drawn up for one of Britain's most ambitious urban regeneration schemes, which will include one the government's nine trailblazing Millennium Villages with 2000 homes. Other resorts are sprucing themselves up with smaller projects, such as the "surfing academy" on the beach in Newquay, Cornwall, Blackpool's swivelling wind shelters by architect Ian McChesney (pictured), and a modern pavilion on to Southport's Victorian pier.

When it comes to urban regeneration, however, seaside resorts bring their own peculiar set of problems. This week, CABE and English Heritage wade in with the publication of a report entitled Shifting Sands: Design and the Changing Image of English Seaside Towns. Their central argument is that, to regain their status as tourist attractions, seaside resorts must reinvent the bold, inventive, fizzing seaside architecture that put those towns on the Crest of a wave for most of the 19th and early 20th centuries but has since sunk into the sands. On top of that, regeneration projects must come to terms with uneasy mixes of permanent and transient populations and other specific challenges of seaside resorts.

Largely a Victorian invention that reached its heyday between the wars, the British seaside resort has suffered from a mass switch in allegiance by native holiday makers. As recently as 1968, seaside resorts still accounted for 75% of all main holidays taken by Britons, but by 1999 more than twice as many Britons were holidaying abroad than at the British seaside.

However, the story of British seaside resorts is not simply one of economic decline. Seaside resorts have already undergone their own forms of regeneration – but in ways that were not always planned and not always welcome. Peter Hampson, director of the British Resorts Association, points out that a new form of tourism has evolved: in what he calls benefit tourism, unemployed people and asylum-seekers migrate towards resorts to occupy the old boarding houses abandoned by holiday makers. Prosperous neighbourhoods lie alongside wards that appear high on indices of social deprivation. And where private developers have moved in, their schemes are often of the cheap-and-nasty amusement-arcade variety.

The Civic Trust first drew the nation's attention to the plight of declining seaside resorts in the late 1980s, when they were not eligible for government urban renewal funds. The big – and welcome – change is that many resorts have in recent years become eligible for government regeneration grants, including the single regeneration budget, European Union assisted area status and National Lottery grants. Merseyside and Cornwall lie within EU Objective One and Objective Two designated areas respectively, which in the case of the Merseyside resort of Southport alone has helped generate some £100m of development.

What sets seaside resorts apart from other towns is their public spaces on a grand scale

Peter Hampson, British Resorts Association

In their report, CABE and English Heritage list a range of measures for seaside regeneration, including transport infrastructure, a mix of visitor attractions and the proper management of public amenities. This often requires a complex public–private partnership to be set up between local and regional agencies and private entrepreneurs, as in Hastings and Bexhill.

Seaside resorts that have undergone successful regeneration can become victims of their popularity. As in Brighton, they attract a new prosperous class of residents, but the rising house prices that ensue can squeeze out the indigenous population reliant on lower-paid employment in the tourist services sector. According to the Shifting Sands report, "the answer lies not in preventing progress, but in ensuring that, coupled with the development of an appropriately skilled workforce, it creates better paid, sustainable jobs and encourages the building of affordable homes and the perpetuation of town and villages that people not only want to visit and but where the residents can afford to stay". Creating better-paid, sustainable jobs depends on developing a sustainable year-round economy, combining tourism with other industries.

Above all, CABE and English Heritage make the case that quality of architecture and public spaces is a central issue if seaside towns are to regain their original raison d'être as visitor attractions. "Imaginative architectural conservation and design lie at the heart of the rebuilding of confidence of the seaside town," their report maintains. It points to the swagger exhibited by generations past in building Blackpool's answer to the Eiffel Tower, the confectionary of Brighton's Royal Pavilion and Bexhill's pioneering De La Warr Pavilion, all of which we still find irresistible.

Creating seaside architecture that is suitably exhilarating brings special design and development challenges, which the two architectural watchdogs feel have not been properly grasped. First, though many resorts have a proud legacy of large historic buildings, they are rarely put to inventive new uses. Second, they highlight the fact that harsh, corrosive seaside environments demand durable materials and detailing, and regular maintenance.

Third, as the British Resorts Association's Hampson points out: "What sets seaside resorts apart from other towns is public spaces on a grand scale", including beaches, promenades, parks and squares. However, these public spaces are ageing, and tend to be exposed to inclement weather. "Most local authorities struggle to maintain them," he asserts. But the real challenge is to inject them with an imaginative dynamism to appeal to 21st-century visitors.