ABSTRACT
The study of coastal resorts has been a long and enduring topic in tourism geographies, starting with the early works on British resorts by Doughill (1935), Gilbert (1939, 1949) and Pimlott (1947). As a consequence, coastal resorts have been viewed through an increasing variety of lenses from urban morphology (Pigram, 1977; Smith, 1992), historical development (Britton, 1982; Gormsen, 1981; Stansfi eld, 1993; Turner and Ash, 1975; Walton, 1983), resort planning (Dredge, 1999; Goodey, 2003), sustainability (Bramwell, 2004a; Priestley et al. , 1996) and economic restructuring (Agarwal, 2002, 2005; Beatty and Fothergill, 2004; Beatty et al. , 2008; Rickey and Houghton, 2009), through to a growing number of more cultural perspectives (Crouch and Desforges, 2003; Gale, 2005, 2007; Webb, 2005).
