Our love affair with all things coastal shows no sign of ebbing away, so much so that even as financial markets implode the world over the humble beach hut still holds its own.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Bournemouth, where Glynn Evans, of Savills, is the estate agent handling the sale of a luxury beach chalet on the market for £45,000. Evans agrees that the Royal Balcony chalet, which is fully equipped for up to eight people, “isn't the typical Savills property” but says that feedback so far has been encouraging.

“It has a full inventory of cutlery, plates, wine glasses and the like, as well as two sunbeds, six reclining chairs, a parasol, table and private terrace,” he says. “The chalets came on to the market in 2005 and have since been extremely sought-after. This one is available on a 22-year lease and, while it could be considered a luxury, for some people it might make more sense in a volatile property market than spending £200,000 on a holiday home.”

Evans sums up the allure of beach huts: “They put a smile on your face. You can so easily imagine a day by the beach, with children running around and playing in rock pools as Mum and Dad stretch out in deckchairs in front of the family hut.” In Bournemouth, whose council lays claim to having invented the beach hut in 1908, the traditional hut to which Evans refers is soon to be complemented by an array of “surf pods” as the town becomes the first in the northern hemisphere to have an artificial surf break, at Boscombe.

BACKGROUND

• The cost of a sea view

• Bargains on the coast

• FOCUS ON . . . TRURO

• Do floods scupper sales?

• Once more unto the beach

Seaside house prices soar

City-dwellers driving up property prices by the sea

• The boom town rocks

BACKGROUND

• From winos to wine bars

BACKGROUND

• Ramsgate rules

• Shoreham gets trendy

• The coast’s next wave

• House Hunter: Sideways to Brighton

• A change in the tide

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Sarah May, leisure services manager for Bournemouth Borough Council, sheds light on what, at first glance, seems counter-intuitive. “We commissioned research into the number of days the area's surfers could go surfing, and found that there were 78 surfable days a year,” she says. The council has sought to capitalise on the growing popularity of surfing and a healthy indigenous population of surfers by building an artificial reef near Boscombe Pier. May says that on completion, which is expected in December, the reef will double the number of days when surfers can ride waves.

If Bournemouth's artificial reef is innovative, so too are the surf pods being built to accompany it by Hemingway Design. Upon completion in February 2009, 31 of these huts will be for sale on a 25-year lease and another 28 will be available for short-term rentals. The pods adopt the style of the 1958 Overstrand building in which they are housed and, says May, “represent the modernisation of what the beach hut can offer. Each one is individually designed and overlooks the surf reef.” The price of the finished pods has yet to be decided, but May expects them to be between £50,000 and £80,000.

Perhaps the classic example of the beach hut town is Southwold, Suffolk. There are 300 huts, one of which, the Corner Hut, featured in the film Iris, starring Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent. All are brightly painted, and most have been handed down through families over generations. When they do come on the market they can fetch about £35,000 but - with the exception of Tracey Emin's beach hut in Whitstable, Kent, which she famously sold to Charles Saatchi for £75,000 - two communities elsewhere in England continue to command the highest prices for beach huts: Mudeford, in Dorset, and Gwithian Towans, in Cornwall. At Mudeford Spit, a sandbank bordered on one side by Christchurch Bay and the Solent and on the other by Christchurch Harbour, a community of devoted beach hut enthusiasts has grown up. The huts here are unusual in that, between March and November, it is permissible to sleep in them overnight. Here the owners' lives are irrelevant; what counts is the sense of nostalgia, of recapturing tranquillity in a quintessentially English beachside setting. For this, you can expect to part with well over £100,000.

Dr Kathryn Ferry, an adviser with beach-huts.com, says that beach huts are popular because “they're receptacles of people's memories and ingrained as a symbol of our collective love of the seaside”. She says that we have also become much more attuned to what is on offer on our doorstep. “There's a general surge of interest in the UK coastline, helped by programmes such as the Coast TV series and a number of dedicated books and magazines. People are realising that they don't need to travel abroad when they've got a beautiful coastline here. The beach hut gives them the perfect room with a view.”

But at Gwithian Towans, that room comes only with the kind of money you might spend on a house. As Zoë Kent, of Marshall's estate agents, says: “You can live in these huts year-round and, combined with their much larger design, they're more like a house than the stereotypical image of the beach hut.”

However, Elliot Caldwell, the head of Colliers Capital and an expert in property investment fund management, sounds a cautionary note. “Beach huts are wonderful things but in the current market I wouldn't see them as anything other than for family use. They're certainly not an investment product.” Wise words, but if anyone is likely to ignore them, it is the beach hut aficionados of the kingdom by the sea.

Contacts

www.savills.co.uk

www.marshalls-estate-agents.co.uk

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