I want to live in a city by the sea in the UK. Any suggestions?

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richardmsteed

Brighton is fantastic - quite an old fashioned sea front, but with loads to do - great nightlife and fab shops.

steve c

There are not many actual cities by the sea. (Cities have a cathedral).
Try Newcastle upon Tyne, it is near the sea, is a proper metropolita city and has many bars and clubs. The sea is only a matter of minutes away using the excellent Metro syatem. There is also a ferry terminal for when you want to get away from it all to Holland or Norway.
Also omly three hours from London on the train.
Seaside towns within minutes are Whitlety bay, Tynemouth and South Sheilds, although they are quiet.

eponymouswhitey

How about Whitby ? Fantastic fish and chips, lively fishing town and beautiful sandy beaches.
Very romantic too....

simon

bournemouth, good night life and the best beaches

quierounvaquero

It must be Brighton. Great night life, good job opportunities and easier to get around than the major big cities.

Alicat

West Kirby on The Wirral is nice. It's a view of the river Dee but there are seals and you can see w(h)ales!

Andrew

Great Yarmouth

Bovril

Depends so much on what you are looking for. The nicest ones in my opinion are Bristol, Southampton, Fife, Aberdeen, Brighton, Liverpool (in parts) and Newcastle. All of those have plenty of positives and some negatives. You're going to have to be a bit more specific to get a really useful answer.

675

Brighton, though it's pricey

Whitstable, more appropriate because of lower house prices, but very scenic and less crowded

Alex

Swansea in South Wales. They are building new appartments right on the front is called the SA1 development.

RODERICK D

I agree with Iregan7,i am cornish, but sadly do not live there anymore.

emmalp75

I would recommend Portsmouth and Bristol. Both are nice cities, have good travel connections, good shopping good resturants and night life.

sandy

Brighton, hands down.

deadly

Are you legal? if so Liverpool.

MLaw

I understand that no part of the UK is more than 60 miles from the sea.

Alutiiq Beauty

I would recommend living in Porth Cawl, South of Wales. I also think St. Ives, in Cornwall Southern England is quite nice. If you like a bit colder winters then another beautiful seaside home would be
Fort Williams in Scotland. They all have there own unique seaside character. I am American but lived over there(UK) for nearly 5 years and on my time off, like bank holidays and such I
utilized my time and learned as much about the UK as possible.
Out of all three countries in the UK, I found Wales to be the Most Beautiful, not to mention the Welsh are nicer. Best wishes to you, and hope I helped. = )

Mark R

Filey is terrific - and bracing

GASTON

Aberdeen (Scotland) is a great place to live, it has a wonderful night life, fantastic job oppurtunities, friendly people, plus the country side is just ten minutes away if you feel the need to escape for a few hours

Evie

Why not choose a town/village by the Sea near a city. The Norfolk/Suffolk coast has many such places that are beautiful - Lowestoft, bonus you are also near the Broads, Gt.Yarmouth/Gorleston, Cromer, Sheringham. All these places are within close proximity to Norwich - a fine City.

Millsy

How about Grimsby?

It's a real classy place and hardly smells of fish at all....honest....

smiler

Portsmouth - not only will you live by the sea but can watch premiership football!!

deano2806

Dogger Bank lies twenty-five miles out in the North Sea between the winkle-stalls of Great Yarmouth's seafront and the towering drilling-rigs of the Hewett offshore natural gas fields.

Man is fast running out of living space. Only a quarter of our planet is dry land; the rest is ocean. And our growing numbers are filling that quarter to bursting-point. We have to find a new place to live if we are to survive. There are three choices: on other planets, underground, and on the sea. The last of these seems the easiest choice. With this in mind, the idea of Sea City has been born - and what a fantastic idea it is! The architects who have planned this amazing place have built beautiful scale models to show what they have in mind. Looking at the models, our thoughts catapult us into the future - to the day when Sea City could be a reality ...

Clouds superimposed on a screen behind the illuminated model give a realistic impression of Sea City at dusk.

The hoverferry from Great Yarmouth skims across the choppy sea and within minutes of embarking the gaunt outline of Sea City appears on the horizon. Our first impression is of a great curving concrete wall, stark and white, sweeping upwards and outwards from the grey sea. How beautiful it is-but how grim and inhospitable, too! Surely, 30,000 people can't live in a fortress like this?

Artist's impression of an inside view of Sea City, with islands and terraces.

But then the hoverferry reaches a gap in the wall of concrete-and we see how wrong our first impression was. Inside the egg-shaped outer wall, sixteen tiers of gleaming, glass-fronted houses curve dramatically down to the smooth surface of the water. Their glittering lights reflect like a fireworks display on this sheltered lagoon. Dozens of triangular buildings float gently on the water, strung together by pedestrian walk-ways at first-floor level. All around us we see shopping centres, schools, churches and green parks. Sleek little water-buses dart about like dodgems at a fair.

The islands inside the lagoon would comprise of six triangles, each 120 feet long with flood tanks to keep the sections level according to the building load carried.

The air is clean and fresh as we walk from the ferry to one of the fast elevators that will take us up to our new home - a seven-room flat built high into the inside of the outer concrete wall. But it is a flat with a difference - quite unlike anything that we have seen on the mainland. One wall is built entirely of reinforced glass - giving us a fantastic view of the city. There is even a garden of our own in which to relax and sunbathe in complete privacy. Automation is complete; air-conditioning, central heating, TV in every room. There's even an automatic waste-removal system to save Mum the trouble of putting out a dustbin once a week. All she has to do is pop the rubbish down a chute in the kitchen and a conveyor-belt below takes it away silently.

Sea City would even have its own football stadium (to background) and a Marine Zoo (floating, wedge-shaped buildings, to foreground).

It doesn't take us long to realize what a wonderful place Sea City is for young people. Take youth clubs. Instead of the dingy old hall we were used to on the mainland there are no less than eight specially designed youth centres, each one with full sport and entertainment facilities built in. There is a huge football stadium with covered-in seating for all spectators, built on top of the outer wall. (With a ground like this, Sea City United will be top of Division One in no time at all!) Then there are the water-sporting facilities. Fabulous! A huge boating-lake covers part of the inner lagoon, and there are special mooring points under the houses for our yachts and motor-boats.

On top of all this there are many public gardens, two theatres, a cinema, six churches and no less than fourteen restaurants. (There are also twenty-seven schools, but you don't want to know about those!) The biggest attraction of all is the Marine Zoo, an extra-ordinary place built half under the water, where we can watch strange creatures of the sea living in their natural conditions. Sea City is a wonderful place for Mum and Dad, too. Gleaming shopping arcades span the south side of the city, all under cover so that Mum doesn't get wet when she's staggering home with the week's provisions on a rainy day.

There's plenty of work close at hand for Dad. In the city itself are fish-farming plants, sand and ballast centres (these valuable building materials are dredged up from the ocean bed below), freshwater production plants and Marine Study Laboratories. If none of these suit him, Great Yarmouth - with its growing industry - is only a few minutes away by hoverferry.

A cross-section of Sea City's wall revealing the power complex.

Life on Sea City sounds great, all right - but what about the howling gales and crashing waves that have made many a North Sea traveller never want to leave dry land again? Won't these things make life in Sea City impossible after all?

The answer is that they won't - for the architects who designed the city have learnt a lesson from the builders of medieval towns. Just as Sea City will be threatened from the outside by wind and waves, so towns in the Middle Ages were threatened by attacking armies. These armies were kept at bay by two lines of defence. The main one was a strong wall, twelve-foot thick and with firm foundations. In the same way, Sea City protects itself with that massive structure of reinforced concrete, specially curved to deflect the wind above it.

But the wall-builders of ancient times knew that one line of defence was not enough. However strong it was, attack after attack with a battering ram would eventually knock it down. So they devised a very clever way of limiting the force with which the attackers could strike their wall. They called it a moat.

In just the same way, the planners of Sea City knew that their wall of concrete would soon be brought down if the great waves were not checked before they crashed up against it. So they built a 20th-century version of the medieval moat.

All around the city, except for a gap to let ships through (just like a drawbridge), stretches a line of sausage-shaped canisters. These are positioned at some distance from the wall, and being part-filled with fresh water float low in the sea. They are enough to break the back of the giant waves coming crashing in, reducing them to harmless ripples by the time they reach the wall.

Oh, yes! Sea City is a possibility all right. It could be started tomorrow if the money were readily available.

lregan7

cornwall. its peaceful senic and very beautifull. with lovely sandy beaches and a lot of english history.

jbslass

i was going to make the same suggestions steve c did but he said it far better than i could have.

keefer

Plymouth. Great sea city, loads of history, loads to do, Cornwall one way, Dartmoor the other, mild weather...its fab.

migelito

Liverpool, Cardiff, Swansea, Southampton, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Newcastle on Tyne...
See the website below for a full list of cities.

galaxygirl

Dawlish warren, a tiny lil seaside village in Devon. beautiful,peaceful but close enuff to some pretty trendy towns like torquay!!

~ steph j ~

Brighton

melody3470

try south shields you have eveything there you will ever need sand sea fantastic shops and a huge excellent open market it also has a amusment park with cafes a lovely park and whats best of all is the people r so welcoming towards you aswell which helps alittle hope u find were you want to be good luck hunting.

NEIL H

Edinburgh is a really nice place. Good entertainment, clean air, the festival and Glasgow is not too far away. Excellent transport links the rest of UK and Europe.

RedCloud_1998

The UK is an island so you have a good chance of finding a city by the sea ..... lol

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