Weymouth, Dorset

Weymouth has been getting away with it since George III took his royal body into the sea in a wooden box on wheels and started a tourism industry that has never quite stopped apologising for itself. The Georgian esplanade curves like something out of Bath that got lost, then behind it the town gets on with the business of being a working port with a chip shop problem and a genuine fishing fleet, which is more than most seaside places can say between the arcade machines. The beach really is that good, and the town knows it, which is why nothing else has had to try very hard for about two hundred years.