Normally shingle is your lot Littlestone and Dymchurch where the tide reveals clean fine sand beneath the sea wall

Normally, shingle is your lot), Littlestone and Dymchurch, where the tide reveals clean, fine sand beneath the sea wall. This is a blessing in disguise, as the beaches, some of the cleanest in Britain, are free from Victorian over-development and remain quiet and friendly. Actually, garden is not a bad word, as much of this Kentish coastline was long ago domesticated and made suburban with acres of the dreaded bungalows. The main bathing beach – the long, clean shingle stretch from the pier to Wish Tower – is a Seaside Award winner.EAST FROM HASTINGSA FEW MILES out of Hastings you leave what the tourist boards call “1066 Country” and enter “The Garden Coast” – the long sweep from the great shingle spit of Dungeness up to the Channel ports. At weekends, brass bands play under the Art Nouveau turquoise dome of the Grand Parade Bandstand.

Even on off-season wet Wednesdays, much of the three-mile promenade is dotted with elderly coach parties, shambling along at low velocity towards the fragrant Carpet Gardens, fish and chips and oblivion. A small flock of grannies in dayglo floral-print blouses pick a cut-price clothing shop bare, Burger King touts its Chicken New York burger and the Fantasia entertainment centre beckons with bingo and video games. In town, trendies slurp cappuccinos in the post-modern surroundings of the Coast and Aroma cafes, and fritter money at Next, Jones footwear, the cavernous Boots, or the ominously-named Crumbles shopping centre (Six-screen multiplex cinema).On the front, however, it’s business as usual, with the elegant pier, currently undergoing a pounds 1.5m improvement, a clutter of low-budget browsing. Then nothing but cliffs, lush fields, mist, and gulls.EASTBOURNEVictorious in the bitter “sunshine war” with Jersey, Eastbourne is officially our sunniest resort It’s also one of the most confident and busy. Just a few years ago, the town was in danger of sleeping its way into deep decay – hotels crumbling, shops ailing or boarded up. As long ago as the 1850s Dickens called it “that sink of deep disgust”, but in recent years urban improvement schemes and cash from tens of thousands of German, French and Italian language students have greatly improved shopping and eating, making it a contender, in consumer terms at least, for promotion to the Brighton league.There’s still a way to go before it regains the cachet it enjoyed when it attracted visitors such as Debussy, who composed La Mer at the Grand Hotel, or Swinburne, who confessed “I am very much in love with Eastbourne”, but it’s drifting in the right direction For now, there’s enough to both love and disgust.

When we visited, the surrounding hills were shrouded in sea mist. Rising by the precarious funicular railway to the country park on East Hill, Old Hastings receded, then vanished, in a thin film of white. On the Stade, the Old Hastings front, fishermen from the last south coast fleet which is winched ashore tinker with their tackle amid the tall, surreal net huts or talk turbot with the fishmongers on Rock-a-Nore street. In 1860, Dante Gabriel Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal – his doomed Ophelia – at the medieval St Clement’s church, William Holman Hunt painted Our English Coasts and Whistler’s mother lived at St Mary’s terrace, while this century Lucien Pissarro and Edward Burra worked here. High Street boasts an excellent fish restaurant at the Jenny Lind Hotel and a damn fine tapas at Harris’s, while junk and antique shops abound Painters adored Old Hastings.

The pier ballroom now accommodates raves, which, one pier worker said, “keep the place going” Sadly, the tiny garlic museum was closed. Just a short walk along the broad, shingle seafront things are very different. Old Hastings, comprising a jumble of tiny streets and over 600 listed buildings squeezed into the narrow valley between West Hill and East Hill, is a great place to spend a day or two or – as a growing band of arty refugees from pushy Brighton are finding – live. Glory of a kind survives too in the shape of the pier, built in 1872, which extends 910ft out over the grey sea. Here, Sharon the Clairvoyant – “of Romany origin” – will read your palm for pounds 2.

Conceived and built by the man who constructed much of regency west London, this huge, stuccoed, pillared enclosure was intended to be a Kensington-by-the-sea, centrepiece of a decidedly upper- crust resort. Nearly two centuries on, it’s still standing, amid seedy holiday flats and boarded-up shops. Between the delights of the Nothing Over A Pound emporium and a clutch of house clearance “specialists”, Warrior Square is the British seaside at its most grand. If you find beauty in decay, then Hastings is one of our most beautiful towns. Oddly, the town is also rich in men hobbling around on crutches Still, don’t let that put you off.