Deauville Beach

Deauville sits on the Côte Fleurie in Normandy, two hours from Paris, and its beach is a wide flat expanse of pale sand with a tidal range that takes the sea out several hundred metres. The town behind it was built as a resort and has never been anything else.

It was founded deliberately. The Duc de Morny, half-brother to Napoleon III, laid out the town in the 1860s as a seaside address for Paris, and the railway made it a weekend rather than an expedition. Coco Chanel opened her first boutique here in 1913. Les Planches, the boardwalk of 1923, is lined with bathing cabins bearing the names of American film stars who attended the town's festival, and the whole arrangement has been maintained rather than modernised.

The shore is fine sand with a very large tidal range: at low water the beach is enormous and shallow, at high water it is a strip. The Channel is cold — mid to high teens Celsius in August — and the swimming is bracing rather than pleasant. Sand yachts and horses use the flats, and racehorses from the local stables are exercised on the sand in the morning.

The town is intact nineteenth-century resort architecture: half-timbered villas, two grand hotels, a casino, a racecourse and a marina. The season is short and social, structured around the racing calendar and the American Film Festival in September; out of season the beach empties completely and the walk is the better for it.

Parasols with film stars' names on them, a 1923 boardwalk, bathing cabins in a row, and a casino that has outlived the reason it was built. Deauville is a hundred and sixty years of the French seaside kept deliberately intact, and the Channel is seventeen degrees in August. Come for the architecture and the horses, not for the swim.