The seaside is easy to imbue with a mythic significance. Its
allure is visceral – we are an island after all – but also deeply cultural. From today's perspective, and with our knowledge of their subsequent fate, resorts from the 1950s have the look of
a prelapsarian realm ... Perhaps every trip to the beach as an adult is an attempt to recapture lost innocence, or at least to
feel as carefree as a child

At the start of the 1700s we had the sickest royals in Europe. An enterprising doctor began to peddle the notion that the sea water in Scarborough was the cure.

A century later in Brighton, the Prince Regent was pioneering the idea of the dirty weekend: the seaside as a place of escapism and fantasy. Travelling from Blackpool to West Wittering, Travis finds donkeys and Dracula, Austen's satire and Brighton Rock's razor gangs, mods and eco-tourism, Billy Butlin and Basil Fawlty and discovers that English attitudes to just about everything - class, humour, modernism and identity - were forged by our relationship with the seaside.

Descending from a line that pioneered pirate-themed eateries and shell-shaded electric lamps, Travis grew up in Worthing.

'In this brilliant book, Travis Elborough does a wonderful job of analysing the history of our masochistic love affair with the seaside.
It would have been so easy for this book to have been stitched together
from a few light-hearted anecdotes culled from some casual reading. But Wish You Were Here is much more than that. Elborough, who grew up in the West Sussex resort of Worthing in the Seventies, has done his
research thoroughly and writes with enormous wit and feeling. His book
punches far above its weight in both style and substance.'
Kathryn Hughes Mail On Sunday

‘Elborough is an English nostalgist in the mode of John Betjeman, and
his new book is about the tacky, wistful, sticky, glitzy, gloomy heap of
deckchairs, boarding houses, pinball machines and glitterballs we call
the English seaside. Elborough, who was raised in Worthing, in West
Sussex, is more interested in the culture of the seaside than its
history, and as a cultural commentator he is a terrific companion. Wish
You Were Here is quirky, chatty, charming and optimistic – an ideal
read for the English beach.’ Frances Wilson Sunday Times

'Elborough shows a subtle understanding of the charms and allure of the
seaside holiday. Perhaps, he reflects, "the true magic of the seaside
is that its pleasures are individual and fleeting." Meticulously researched and trenchantly expressed, Wish You Were Here is as bright and breezy as a trip on a pleasure steamer.' Daily Mail Book of the Week

'Elborough's overview of our lasting love of fish and chips, Brighton
rock and paddling is the perfect beach book.' Marie Claire

'Technically, Travis Elborough is a cultural historian, although that seems too pompous a phrase for such an amusing and sprite-like writer. He is the author of entertaining histories of the Routemaster bus, and long-playing records. He is attracted to a certain kind of minor key Englishness, poised between dowdy and romantic. Teddy boys, the Shipping Forecast, caravanning … all would be good subjects for Elborough. Here, he chronicles our love (or otherwise) of our seaside, and his elliptical approach, his wit, and the exuberance of his prose marks this book out from a hundred others on the same subject. Timely, bittersweet beach reading for a nation that is, once again, "all at sea".' Andrew Martin Sunday Telegraph

Sceptre UK.