Burnham-on-Sea

Burnham-on-Sea has the second highest tidal range in the world and spends most of the day with none of it, which leaves a town built on the promise of the sea staring at two miles of mud and calling it a beach. The pier is the shortest in Britain, a claim so thin that pier experts refuse to count it at all, and the town puts it on the postcards anyway. What sits behind the sea wall is a comfortable, low-slung place that stopped trying to impress anyone around 1988 and has been quietly content ever since. It knows exactly what it is, which is more than can be said for most of the Somerset coast.