Sunny Hunny

Hunstanton (pronounced "Hunstun" apparently) is that rare jewel, a west facing east coast resort. I arrived very early on a Sunday morning before most places were open, and had a good mooch round. It's a Victorian Gothic model seaside village, built in 1846 by a local landowner with the splendid moniker of Henry Styleman Le Strange.
Later sixties and seventies accretions dominate the seafront, but the centre is pure C19th English seaside. P G Wodehouse set his comic country retreats hereabouts, and characters are named after local villages.

The Golden Lion - formerly the Royal Hotel and more commonly Le Strange's Folly - looks over the sloping green and mini roundabout. The bin men are on an early round.

The Entertainment Centre marks the spot where a Victorian pier, complete with miniature railway stood. It suffered two fires in 1939 and the 1950s before the entire structure was swept away, along with a number of other English piers, in the storms of 1978. The new structure dates from early in the millennium.

The pier was the setting for the 1957 Ealing Movie "Barnacle Bill" starring Alec Guinness.

The war memorial and gardens overlook The Wash, beyond which the distant Lincolnshire coast can be seen. Seafront gardens evoke the shade of E M Forster, and unbridled passion among the geraniums.

A small children's playground. The rocking horse took me back half a century. The reproduction railings are unnecessarily robust, but the putting green cabin is delightful.

The Princess Theatre, previously the Capitol Cinema of 1932, is a splendid modernist-vernacular mix, boasting the largest Carr stone gable in the world. A poster suggests The Bachelors are playing and a Helen Millen film is in the offing.

Hunstanton town hall and tourist information centre.

The Tamworth Tea Rooms. John Betjeman would have appreciated them.

Hunstanton has the finest joke shop in the country, according to a chap who stopped me by the sea front. I wouldn't argue.

There's really no excuse for this kind of thing. A grim brick edifice totally out of keeping with the town.

Hunstanton is something of an anomaly in North Norfolk, a place mostly defined as genteel and elegant, with London second homers and quiet yachting harbours. I liked it very much in spite of its faded glamour and vulgar architecture, and would certainly return.