Labour's lesson in Aussie style
By Mark Jones
Published: September 24 2005 03:00 | Last updated: September 24 2005 03:00
New Labour is in Brighton next week, and there's no doubt that the faithful will find plenty to divert themselves in that fizzy and rocking city on the Sussex coast. But as they preach the message of regeneration and prosperity, they should cast their eyes away from the pebbly beaches of Brighton and up the coast to Camber Sands. For here they will truly see the word made flesh.
Camber Sands used to be about as Old Labour as you could get in the hostile Tory territory of southern England. Generations of eastenders came here to pick whelks, play beach cricket and do the picturesque things you see in old black and white photographs.Life for the locals was harder. One of the most sacred texts of the Socialist movement, Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists was written about the plight of painters and decorators in nearby Hastings at the turn of the century. In later years, whelks began to lose out to paella and chips, beach cricket to Costa Karaoke. The cheery snapshots of girls in billowing skirts and men in rolled-up trousers gave way to a bleaker kind of documentary photography: graffiti on concrete sea walls, boarded-up bed and breakfasts.
Camber Sands itself survived all that. In the grey expanse of pebbles that is the south coast, the two-and-a-half miles of broad sands and high dunes is as full and glorious as ever. There is nowhere better in the kingdom for letting dogs, children and elderly relatives off the leash and letting them run around in miles of empty Kentish ozone. The trouble is, there's nowhere decent to stay nearby.
At least, there used not to be. Even now, the more fastidious New Labourite might pass The Place on their way down from Islington and say to themselves: "There's a 1950s-style motel on a busy road. I expect they serve fried bread for breakfast. Pray, let us drive on until we find polenta." But if they pause to consult their New Labour Guide to Regenerated and Ethically-Responsible Consumer's Britain, they'll slam the brakes on, make a strategic policy u-turn, and check in fast.
In his wilderness years, Mr Blair spent many happy months in Australia honing his ideas for a fairer Britain where the sun always shone and the bread was never processed. The owners of The Place also appear to have done their time in the Antipodes. Drive along, say, the Great Ocean Road from the South Australia border to Geelong and you'll see dozens of places like The Place.
There's a glass-fronted, oak-floored restaurant humming with animated diners. There's organic food, fulfilled waiting staff and a chef about to be photographed with a lobster for Vogue Entertaining or Delicious magazine. They're everywhere in Australia, these places. Over here, you'd have to drive many hours west to Devon or north to Suffolk before you found another.
The Place really is The Business. You can't do much with bungalow seaside architecture, but they've done everything they can. The decor of the rooms is plain - cream, fresh with sisal floors and green and white ticking on the curtains. Rooms are amazingly quiet, with thick walls and double glazing. Obsession with detail is the unhappy condition of the hotel reviewer: unhappy, because so many details in so many British hotels, including the poshest, are so poor. Not here. In the room, there's a choice of three types of pillow, a digital wireless, a DVD player and a plate of excellent home-made cookies.
And, of course, the meal wasn't shoddy. The starter was local crab meat with basil and lemon infused olive oil and wild rocket - no weird extraneous tastes, nothing left out, no skimping. The main course was more ambitious: grilled fillets of gurnard with a saffron, garlic and shellfish sauce, harissa roasted potatoes and a summer leaf salad.
Forget the rhetoric and tax breaks. If Mr Blair sent every man, woman and child for dinner at The Place, we'd all believe the country really is doing all right.
Mark Jones is editorial director of High Life magazine
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