Methodology
Beach Matters documents beaches by geography, coastal form, marine environment, development and experience. It does not rank every beach on a single universal scale, because the qualities that make a beach worth the journey are not commensurable: a black basalt shore you cannot swim at and a reef flat you can wade across for two hundred metres are not two positions on one list.
One world each
Every beach is assigned exactly one Beach World — the single answer to what kind of shore this is. Where two could apply, the tie is broken by rule rather than by taste: a physical property (black sand, a reef) beats a shape (a cove, a strand), and a shape beats a mood (remote, romantic). A natural world beats a developed one. Within developed worlds, heritage beats promenade beats icon.
Nine layers, not one list
Underneath the world sit eight further layers: coastal form, surface, marine setting, development, experience, access, facilities and seasonality. Each draws on a fixed vocabulary rather than free text, so that two beaches described by different writers remain comparable.
A page has to earn itself
A place appears in the register whether or not it has a page. It gets a page when it holds enough documented beaches to be worth comparing and when someone has written an account of how its coast is actually organised. A heading over a list of links is not a page.
What is dated, and what is not
Sand, form and exposure are properties of a beach. Water quality, closures, seaweed and access restrictions are conditions on a day. Conditions carry the date they were checked and a link to the authority that publishes them; nothing conditional is written as though it were permanent.
Every entry names who it is wrong for
The last paragraph of each portrait says which travellers this beach will disappoint. A register that only praises is a brochure, and a brochure cannot help anyone choose between two shores that both photograph well.