This Side of the Pond

A tiny building hit the news last week when it went on sale for more than the price of a family home. The structure in question is a beach hut in my home county of Dorset, and to explain why it’s so expensive is going to take some unpacking.

Beach huts are a quintessential part of the seaside in my part of the world, and also a uniquely British phenomenon. You’ll find them scattered across other nations’ shores, but nobody else loves them quite like the Brits do.

Beach huts are teeny cabins arranged in rows along the edge of the sand, often painted in bright and cheerful colors. They’re usually connected, and they’re always very small.

Most beach huts are a single room, lacking in most facilities. We’re talking about a shed by the sea by another name, if I’m going to be honest.

Some have basic food preparation equipment, and the odd few do have electricity, but seldom do they have bathrooms or bedroom areas or much of anything else at all – not even running water.

You can sit down for a while in your beach hut, maybe make a cup of tea if you’re up for a stroll to fill the kettle at a public faucet, and it’s a great place for changing in and out of your swimwear and storing the deck chairs you plan to use for a sunbathe. Other than that, though, they aren’t a lot of use.

So why are beach huts such a phenomenon? Some say it’s because British weather is so unreliable that everyone wants a place to hide from the rain, but I think it has more to do with convenience.

It’s nice to have somewhere to put the cooler while you’re taking a paddle in the sea, and changing out of your soggy swimming costume in the confined stalls of a public bathroom is enough to put anyone off a swim.

You can keep a sweater in there for the evening chill and, of course, not even the beach in a heatwave is an inappropriate venue for a nice cuppa. You can’t use one as a hotel, though, because in most places it’s illegal to stay overnight, at least in some months of the year.

Many people simply have one in the family, passed down through the generations and made use of by pretty much every extended aunt, uncle and cousin throughout the summer. Others are owned by the council and can be rented out for the season – there’s 520 of them in Bournemouth, my home town.

Actually, you could argue that beach huts were born in my home town. The first purpose-built beach huts appeared on either side of Bournemouth Pier at the beginning of the 20th century, rentable by the year.

Versions did already exist, because the beach hut evolved from something only the Victorians would ever have thought was a good idea. To preserve the modesty of Victorian ladies, they were wheeled down to the sea in bathing machines.

These carts had roofs and walls and could literally be trundled right into the water, because heaven forbid anyone see a woman’s ankles. The genders were segregated at the seaside at that time, because it simply wasn’t proper behavior to gaze upon another human in a bathing suit.

At first, the stationary beach huts were old fishing huts or boat sheds and they were regarded, in typically snooty British form, as “holiday homes for the toiling classes”. Then King George V and Queen Mary spent the day in one, the posh folk ate their words and everyone rushed out to buy their own.

Sadly, I’ve never had my own beach hut, although I did spend one hugely enjoyable summer borrowing the keys to one that belonged to a family friend. A teenager at the time, I found exquisite joy in not having to blow up my tubes every day.

Had the family friend popped in to inspect the state of it, I suspect they wouldn’t have been nearly so happy. When you’re young and carefree, sweeping sand off the counters at the end of the day isn’t exactly your top priority.

Beach huts are in huge demand, with waiting lists all over the country, which means it’s quite a status symbol in Britain to be able to say you own one. The average selling price of these four small walls was £20,000 to £40,000 last year.

So, we’ve established why beach huts became iconic, even though they’re fundamentally silly, so what about the one that’s on sale for ridiculous amounts of money? It’s located in Mudeford in my home county of Dorset, and it’s just gone on sale for £440,000.

The average price of a home in the county is, incidentally, £368,614. Mudeford is a gorgeous beach, it’s true, but I think this might be the sort of investment to avoid.

The world’s most expensive beach hut (for now, at least – this sort of story crops up every couple of years) does have some advantage over its less spendy peers: solar panels, and alleged sleeping facilities for up to eight people (so apparently those sleeping laws are more lax in Mudeford than some places). Snoring family members are not the only downside, though, because like most beach huts it does not have a toilet – you’ll have to share one with the neighbors.

I know, it’s all really quite ridiculous. Sometimes you don’t realize how daft a tradition is until you try to explain it to someone else, which is exactly what happened when I mentioned this beach hut craze to a friend. But while I’ll forever be fully on board with the concept, I am pleased to say I’m not so far gone that I’ll be dropping half a million on a glorified garden shed at any time soon.