It’s nearly sixty years since my family emigrated, but I still have golden memories of the family trips to the seaside, although my family went to Scarborough, Whitby, and Redcar rather than the Bournemouth of Pimlico Journal‘s childhood:
“Harvester at Durley Chine” by David Lally is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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At every possible opportunity in the summer weekends of my childhood, my father would take our family down to the coast. Our route to the sea was normally through the medieval city of Salisbury, across the chalk downs of Hardy’s Wessex, and into the piney moors of the New Forest. The destination would nearly always be Bournemouth, the prim, stately model of the British seaside town, perched magisterially on Dorset’s sandstone cliffs, above a long golden strand lapped by the warm waves of the Channel.
Our favourite beach was at Durley Chine, where we could park (for free, greatly appealing to my father) among obscured mansions in the shade of thick-smelling conifers, and make our descent to the shore, where the chine gives way to the rows of huts that line the promenade, and a reassuringly lower-middle class Harvester restaurant. We would while away the hours on the sand until the sky was orange, my mother reading, my father swimming, and my brother and I playing whatever games we could devise, mostly involving the throwing of sand. The day would end with fish and chips under the pines, watching the sun sink over the jurassic cliffs past Poole harbour, the gateway to King Alfred’s stronghold at Wareham.
These were among the most precious times of my early life, and the sights and sounds and smells of that part of the world and the accompanying hazy, worriless bliss are cherished sensations. Though the beach is public, it was one of those places that felt special and individual to my family, as if we had somehow carved out our own summer fief on the crowded shore.
It was on Durley Chine beach, on 24 May 2024, that two innocent women, Amie Grey and Leanne Miles, were attacked by Nasen Saadi, a criminology student from Croydon of Iraqi and Thai heritage. Saadi murdered Grey and left Miles in critical condition, and was sentenced this year to thirty-nine years in prison for his crimes. The incident was part of an escalating pattern of violence, particularly sexual violence, in the Bournemouth area over the past few years, with the beach as the focal point, a pattern which had begun in July 2021 with the brutal rape of a 15-year-old girl by Gabriel Marinoaica, a young man from Walsall who dragged his victim into the sea to commit his attack. Another notable incident occurred eight months later. Afghan asylum seeker and convicted killer Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai (he had shot two fellow Afghans while living illegally in Serbia in 2018, before fleeing to Norway, where his asylum claim was rejected, then travelling to Britain and successfully claiming asylum by pretending to be an unaccompanied fourteen-year-old, despite being an adult) stabbed Thomas Roberts (a local man and qualified precision engineer who had recently applied to join the Royal Marines) to death outside a Subway in the city centre, in a dispute over an e-scooter.
The news stories become relentless from that point. Among many depravities are the sexual assault of a 17-year-old boy by a group of Asian males on 17 June 2023, accompanied the same day by an attempted assault on a 16-year-old girl outside the fish and chip shop on the seafront. A week later, two girls, aged just 10 and 11, who would have been in primary school at the time, were sexually assaulted while swimming in the sea. As far as I can tell, none of these crimes have yet been prosecuted.
Two months after the murder of Amie Grey, on 19 July 2024, a day of delirious warmth culminated in violent clashes between youths, many coming in from London, on the seafront — clashes which were filmed and circulated on social media. In the chaos, a teenage girl was sexually assaulted. Jessica Toale, the freshly-elected Labour MP for Bournemouth West, a seat which had been Tory since its creation in 1950, said after the events of 19 July that crime and anti-social behaviour had become a ‘huge issue’ in contrast to the safe Bournemouth she remembered as a girl, stating that ‘… parents had told [her] that they are concerned about letting their daughters go to the town’. These are almost reactionary words from a Labour MP, and reflective of the mood of anxiety and decline that seems to have enveloped the city, a mood founded on the series of despair-inducing events plaguing residents and visitors. On 30 June, disorder similar to that witnessed in July last year returned to the seafront, with police making arrests across the country in the aftermath.
A week later, on 6 July, a young woman was raped in a public toilet adjoining the beach. The police have charged Mohammed Abdullah, a Syrian asylum seeker living in West London, with the crime.
