Great Yarmouth

We went to Great Yarmouth today (Friday). It’s nothing like that other seaside town, Sheringham, which I found delightful. Yarmouth is seedy, verging on sleezy, and looks in need of a good cleanup in many areas. The beach was mostly empty, in spite of it having a lovely long stretch of white/yellow sand. Admittedly it was windy, but it wasn’t too cold. But the main pedestrian mall, a long street that stretches up from the beach front to the town centre and consisting of old shops in run-down buildings, was packed with visitors, though many of the shops were more like market stalls in fixed locations than real shops.

However, for all its look of not having been given a good coat of paint for a while, Yarmouth is alive. Maybe it’s just my dislike of this kind of town (it has a lot in common with Blackpool, a place I wouldn’t visit if you paid me), but it’s certainly not the worst town in the world. I just don’t enjoy places that have a seemingly endless run of cafes and restaurants and bed and breakfast places and amusement arcades all taking up the main beach front area. There are so many eating places in Yarmouth I think it would take you several months to visit each one of them for a meal.

It didn’t help that our first main impression of Yarmouth was from a parking area on top of the Atlantis amusement arcade. We were the only people parked there initially, and in the middle of the parking area was a three or four storey apartment block that looked as though it was abandoned. It was certainly very much run-down. This apartment block was on top of a three storey building. A rather odd place to put it, I thought. Next door was a building with dormer windows that were all shut up, making the place look a bit like a film set from a gangster movie.

When we went down the stairs to get out of the building we found the stairs had picture after picture of nearly naked young ladies (they were being promoted for some contest in the Sun newspaper), and we wondered if we’d strayed into something iffy altogether! Obviously some sort of over 18 shows take place somewhere in the building – we didn’t wait around to discover where.

All this negative view of Yarmouth was thoroughly displaced by the fact that we happened in on a session at the Yarmouth Docwras Rock Shop – a family business that’s been going since the end of the 1800s. It was busy, and got busier, but besides the enormous array of rock on display, we got to see the production of rock by two men, one of them no chicken. (And with parts of two fingers missing, a Glaswegian visitor beside me pointed out.) I’ve written about this on another blog, but being there watching these two professionals at work made our day.