“You may travel the world over but you will find nothing more beautiful,” wrote Augustus John about his home town of Tenby in south-west Wales. “It is so restful, so colourful and so unspoilt.”

In its heyday Ventnor was primarily a winter resort, its season lasting from October until June or July. The sheltered, south-facing town was said to be sunnier and warmer than anywhere else in the country, and when Sir James Clark (later Queen Victoria’s doctor) published a treatise on the influence of climate in the prevention and cure of chronic disease, Ventnor’s popularity soared

Out on the front, Weymouth is glorious, with a long graceful bay of the finest pale sand. It faces east, protected by high hills, its bay sheltered by the strange jutting wedge of Portland’s peninsula.

Blackpool is gaudy and straightforward and affords as much entertainment as you can pack into a town. It is not for the faint-hearted: though she rather enjoyed it when she stayed here in 1980, Mrs AJP Taylor pronounced: “In Blackpool everything serves low tastes.” Blackpool is Lancashire’s answer to Brighton: there is a constant party atmosphere.

Everything about Northumberland is grand and bold. Even the Tyne seems to cut deeper through the heart of Newcastle than do rivers in other cities. At its mouth, the mighty northern headland of Pen Bal Crag juts out impregnable into the North Sea, surrounded on three sides by high cliffs.

In complete contrast to the Edwardian splendour of Frinton-on-Sea’s posh southern end, a daring modernist scheme was planned for the northern end in 1934. The architect Oliver Hill was commissioned to design the Frinton Park Estate, which was to be a showcase of the very latest jazz modern style. The public were not ready for it,

From the ordinary High Street, skinny alleys lead off to the sea where the sound of the waves dragging the shingle back down the sloping beach is pleasurably loud. Mid-front, what must be the ugliest pier in Britain strikes out for 102 feet towards the wreck-strewn Goodwin Sands

Skegness has no pretensions, no claim to fame through royal visits, on which so many other English resorts have hung their hats in the past. It is a happy-go-lucky sort of place and was designed to be just that.

When you get out at Southend Station and start the short walk down the stretch of High Street towards the water’s edge, and see the longest pier in the world venturing out into the North Sea, you feel you are on holiday – even if you are just taking an afternoon off from the metropolis.

There is a clarity and neatness about Budleigh Salterton’s beach. But everything about Budleigh is neat – even its perfectly smooth, soft-to-touch pebbles, which can be traced back 440 million years. In shades of mauvish and pinkish grey, some of them are as big as goose eggs.