Everybody has a beach memory. Whether you are from Ballymena or Bun doran, Allihies or Athlone, whether you recall innocent bucket-and-spade labour, sensual plunges or moody walks, you have probably spent your happiest and most miserable moments on that narrow margin of land where summer occasionally reveals itself, an act of faith transformed into a reality.
But the beach, like nostalgia itself, is not what it used to be. Your neighbour, two towels down, now holds a cellphone to his ear, not a radio that leaks Micheal O'Hehir, and the field where you used to brush the last of the sand from your feet has become a holiday village, complete with tarmacadam, streetlights and fast food.
Ireland's seashore, long untouched, has never been more intensively developed, thanks, among other things, to a tax incentive scheme for "traditional seaside resorts" launched in 1995 and examined last summer by Frank McDonald in an Irish Times three-part series. The equation is simple: more money, more leisure-time, more cars equals fewer empty places, particularly on the coast.
Faced with the "new breed of Bungalow Blitz", as McDonald termed it, where can you turn, besides inland? To the Phoenix Seagaia in Japan, perhaps, the world's first "beach in a box", completed in 1993 and containing a 462-foot-wide ocean with 280 feet of shoreline under a 660-foot retractable roof. Its crushed-marble "sand" beaches and surfable waves can accommodate 10,000 visitors every perfect, sunny day.
The Beach: A History Of Paradise On Earth delights in such excesses as it chronicles human behaviour at its most peculiar, on the fragile sands where our first scaly ancestors crawled ashore and where we most nakedly declare our desires and aspirations.
"It is to the beach . . . that we go to re-invent ourselves," authors Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker write in their introduction. And anyone who remembers the photograph of Bill Clinton and his wife dancing on the Caribbean sand earlier this year would have to agree. That wasn't just marital recreation, cynics argued, it was the public re-creation of a marriage, staged to counteract "bimbo eruptions". If so, the beach was the perfect setting, the place where we are at our most vulnerable and romantic. "The beach is at once escape valve and inspiration, symbol and playground," the authors write, "a piece of blank real estate on which each wave of colonisers puts up its own idea of paradise".
But the history of the beach is not simply the history of fun. For fun only recently became the point, in historical terms. "Long before it became a narcotic for holiday masses, the beach was a sacred site, a testing ground of humanity's fitness for survival and capacity for spirituality," Lencek and Bosker explain. Most ancient civilisations invented sea myths to explain creation and sea monsters to account for sudden disasters. The sea, after all was where people disappeared or lost their wits.
"In classical myth, the shoreline is typically a place where identity itself is imperiled and the self becomes unrecognisable . . ."
Beach development, however, is not a uniquely modern concern. In the sixth century AD, the demand for coastal vistas forced Emperor Justinian to pass the first beach zoning law, banning construction within 100 feet of the shore. So taken were the Spartans and Athenians with beach athletics that they defined an imbecile as a person "who could neither read nor swim".
The Middle Ages brought a distrust of all things watery which persisted into the 17th century. "An aversion to baths gradually came to encompass an aversion to immersion in any kind of water," the authors write, "and thence erupted into a generalised horror of the beach."
Even when voyages of discovery had tempered this beach-phobia, the bodies congregating there were mostly diseased. "Sea bathing as a form of therapy and penance was invented by the British," the authors note, "the same nation that gave the world, nearly simultaneously, the cold bath, the steam engine, and the Industrial Revolution". The practice of "immersion-cum-drowning," particularly in frigid waters, was believed to cure a host of maladies from nymphomania to kidney stones. "Cold baths cause a sense of chilness," Sir John Floyer helpfully explained in his 1701 History Of Cold Bathing, "and that, as well as the Terror and Surprize, very much contracts the Nervous membrane and tubes . . ."
The British were, of course, considered insane by most Europeans. And further evidence of that insanity surfaced in the 19th century when they took to long-distance swimming as a patriotic and poetic exercise. In 1822, the poet Shelley even died for the cause, drowning in the Ligurian Sea, clutching a volume of Sophocles. The Duchess of Berry took a different approach two years later, when she introduced the French to the British bathing craze by being carried into the Normandy waters, dressed as an Amazon, on a gilded sedan chair.
Scarborough became an established bathing place in 1736 but seaside etiquette remained a loose affair as late as 1789 when gentlemen and ladies alike bathed naked at Scarborough, Margate and Blackpool. Decorum and fashion, however, soon clothed the waterbound in a succession of voluminous casings. "The stripes on your clothes strongly suggestive of Sing-Sing," Demerest's Monthly Magazine lamented in 1891, "you wander up and down the beach a creature that the land is evidently trying to shake off and the sea is unwilling to take."
THE beach itself was also being clothed - rather more splendidly. The Royal Pavilion at Brighton was completed in 1820, signalling the "architecturalisation " of the seashore and the triumph of fashion. Fishing villages on the Baltic, Adriatic, Mediterranean and Atlantic became ornate promenades where dandies, aristocrats, social climbers and consumptives kept to their assigned lanes.
And the more you paid, the better the view. "Sea views are only for urban folk, who never experience its menace," Jane Austen wrote of the new summer cottages, "The true sailor prefers to be landlocked rather than face the ocean."
When Lord Henry Braugham was detained by quarantine in the village of Cannes, he commissioned a villa overlooking the bay and launched an era of outlandish Mediterranean beach architecture. Russian izbas, Renaissance pa- lazzi, Moorish kasbahs and other fantasies sprang up on parched hillsides that were soon carpeted with water-hungry lawns.
The Impressionists, it seems, have a lot to answer for in this popularisation. "In a way, works by Monet, Renoir and Degas created the most compelling - and expensive - travel brochures in the history of tourism," the authors write. The locals also played their part in the 1860s, staging quaint tableaux of boatlaunching and net-mending for the unsuspecting visitor's benefit. Tourism had turned labour into a spectator sport.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, coastal palaces for the rich and fun-palaces for the poor began to appear. In 1895, "The Breakers", a marble Renaissance palace, was completed at Newport, Rhode Island for Cornelius Vanderbilt, causing Henry James to dismiss the resort as "a breeding ground for white elephants". The masses got their playground in 1903 when Luna Park, the "Electric Eden" flaming with 1.2 million light bulbs, opened on Coney Beach. Immigrants from Europe now saw its gigantic Ferris wheel before they saw the Statue of Liberty.
"The sun healed their bodies of the years of war," Stephen Spender wrote of young men in the 1920s, and 20 years later, tourist postcards and holiday snaps, discreetly solicited in BBC broadcasts, helped the British to plan the invasion of Normandy. Even that least combative of garments, the bikini, was named after the first, post-war atom bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. The following year, novice model, Norma Jean Baker, later known as Marilyn Monroe, modelled the "Double Dare" swimsuit and exhibitionism became the newest water sport.
"The beach is no longer the site of the natural, but of the artificially shaped and surgically carved body," Lencek and Bosker conclude, adding that the beach itself is increasingly "enhanced," even "user-friendly". Thanks to an array of "electronic prostheses," we can now carry on not only our lives but our work there and those in search of the truly "unspoilt" must, ironically, be prepared to pay for the deprivations.
But The Beach reminds us that nature can have the last word. An 1835 tsunami destroyed the Chilean city of Concepcion in six seconds when "the sea drained out of the harbour and then, with a hideous roar, rushed back in as looming walls of water". El Nino eroded thousands of miles of seashore from California to Oregon and it would take just one good storm and the right tide for half of Nantucket to disappear. Something to ponder when the wind changes.
Beach: The History Of Paradise on Earth, by Lena Lancek and Gideon Bosker, is published by Vi- king Penguin in New York and due to be published next month in the UK by Secker & Warburg