The contributions take a variety of forms including fiction and nonfiction and cover topics ranging from sand dunes to sand mining, from seaside stories to shoreline architecture, from sand grains to global sand movements, from narratives of the setting up of bed and breakfasts to stories of seaside decline.

1. Introduction: Sandscapes, Jo Carruthers and Nour Dakkak.- 2. Tide Wrack and Sand, Jenn Ashworth.- 3. An Eclectic A-Z of Sand: Removing, Treasuring, Recreating and Protecting, Peter Coates.- 4. An Englishwoman’s Home is her Castle: Social Morphologies and Coastal Formations, Sefryn Penrose.- 5. Sand, Good Sands, Excellent Sands: Writing and Ranking the British Coastline in the Middle of the Twentieth Century, Tim Cole.- 6. Queer Sands: Passion and Dynamic Sexualities in the Edwardian Sandscape, Nour Dakkak.- 7. On the Sound-Sea: Fifteen Ways of Thinking about Sand and Sound, Brian Baker.- 8. Rough and Smooth Sands: Social Thresholds and Seaside Style, Jo Carruthers.- 9. A Morecambe Mystery, Angela Piccini.- 10. Map of the Quick, Shona Legaspi.- 11. “Over Sands to the Lakes”: Journeys over MorecambeBay before and after the Age of Steam, Christopher Donaldson.- 12. Sand’s Immense: A Fool’s Errand. Jean Sprackland.- 13 Confounding Cartography: The Sandscape Diminution of Hayling Island, David Cooper and Michelle Green.- 14. Drifting in a Cemetery of Sandscapes, Julian Brigstocke.

Sandscapes: Writing the British Seaside reflects on the unique topography of sand, sandscapes, and the seaside in British culture and beyond. This book brings together creative and critical writings that explore the ways sand speaks to us of holidays and respite, but also of time and mortality, of plenitude and eternity. Drawing together writers from a range of backgrounds, the volume explores the environmental, social, personal, cultural, and political significance of sand and the seaside towns that have built up around it. The contributions take a variety of forms including fiction and nonfiction and cover topics ranging from sand dunes to sand mining, from seaside stories to shoreline architecture, from sand grains to global sand movements, from narratives of the setting up of bed and breakfasts to stories of seaside decline. Often a symbol of aridity, sand is revealed in this book to be an astonishingly fertile site for cultural meaning.

“This book leads us down to the shore along many criss-crossing pathways, turning our attention from the horizon towards the sandscape—an unruly, granular, shapeshifting zone—to explore its ingrained mysteries and materiality. Precise and curious as a strandline bird and playful as a beach burial, it’s a book for anybody who has ever absent-mindedly tipped sand from their shoe and allowed a sun-burned day to unspool.” (Paul Farley, author of Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (2011)) “As Sandscapes recognises, British identity is built on sand. For two hundred years, nation, family, and community were affirmed at the seaside. Individual lives were etched in the space between the tides. This fascinating collection responds equally to the public and the personal, the unmistakable, and the uncertain in the meanings of sand. Its own variety of forms—fiction, criticism history, and autobiography—brilliantly reflects the multiplicity of this shifting and central, fluid substance.” (Ralph Pite, Professor of English, University of Bristol, UK, and author of Hardy’s Geography: Wessex and the Regional Novel (Palgrave 2002))  “Sandscapes is a richly diverse collection in which scholars and creative writers explore how sand shapes and disturbs our imaginations. The book attends to the vibrancy as well as poignancy of estuaries, dunes, and shorelines. Memory plays a strong part, as does the culture of the British seaside holiday. Morecambe Bay provides a central locus, with all its significance. Literary geographies, mapping, and environmental history add just the right balance of theoretical methodology along with science.” (Susan Oliver, Professor in Literature, University of Essex, UK)

Features nature writing and ecocriticism from literary scholars, sociologists, archaeologists, creative writers and more Draws on the fields of new materialism, ecocriticism, affect theory and other theoretical threads related to the environment Joins creative and critical writing to chart sands’ significance in science, literature, politics, and culture