Weston-super-Mare Beach

Weston-super-Mare faces the Bristol Channel in Somerset, about forty kilometres south-west of Bristol. The beach is three kilometres of fine grey-brown sand, and the defining fact about it is the tide.

The Bristol Channel has the second largest tidal range on earth after the Bay of Fundy — around fourteen metres at springs. At low water the sea withdraws well over a kilometre and leaves an expanse of sand and mud flat; at high water it returns to the sea wall. The mud beyond the dry sand is genuinely dangerous and people have to be rescued from it regularly, which is why the walkable area is marked.

The sand nearer the wall is firm and dry and is what the town is built around. The water, when it arrives, is heavily silted and brown — the channel carries an enormous sediment load, and the colour has nothing to do with pollution, though it takes some explaining to visitors. Donkey rides have operated on this sand since the nineteenth century. Brean and Berrow, a few kilometres north along the same shore, are the same tidal flat with fewer people and a road onto the sand; the whole coast here behaves as one system and the mud warnings apply along all of it.

Development is a Victorian seaside town: the Grand Pier of 1904, rebuilt after a fire in 2008, a promenade, amusement arcades, and a marine lake that holds water when the tide is out. The town declined with the British seaside generally and has been partly reinvented; the pier and the beach remain busy on any warm weekend.

The tide goes out a mile and a half and what it leaves is mud, not sand — people become stuck in it and are pulled out by the lifeboat crew every year. The donkeys, the Grand Pier rebuilt after two fires, and Banksy's Dismaland in 2015 are the town's other claims. Swim at high water or not at all.