On a sunny day last week I sat outside The Regency Restaurant on the seafront at Brighton, opposite the skeletal remains of the West Pier, eating fish and chips and contemplating that life doesn’t get much better. The crumbling fabric of this fashionable Regency spa town reminded me of the seaside towns in the United States along Boston’s South Shore, in Norfolk and Plymouth counties. We make bi-annual visits here to see my wife Sarah’s mother, an artist, and her family in Hingham and Cohasset. Originally this was the eastern part of an early Puritan settlement, but now it’s a separate and very fashionable enclave made famous as location for the movie The Witches of Eastwick.
Among the first Puritans to take flight from East Anglia was Abraham Lincoln’s ancestor Samuel Lincoln who landed in Hingham in 1637. Three centuries later, when the Irish Americans left Boston for the South Shore, the area became the ‘Irish Riviera’, with six of the United States’ most Irish towns. Locals on this part of the east coast are intensely loyal to the Boston Red Sox baseball team and the diverse population, as it grew into its white timber clap-boarded homes, had to be supported by a new social infrastructure of pubs, pleasure parks and fish restaurants to keep it entertained.
Nowadays this mix of Puritan and Irish cultures, together with a unique seafaring history, defines these run-down weather-beaten South Shore towns. The coastal wetlands have a unique geography with a constantly changing character thanks to the impact of Atlantic tides and weather fronts. The network of estuaries provides an important environment for its varied marine and bird life, but the area remains untainted by mass tourism. We have quietly enjoyed holidays in Scituate and Hull on Nantasket Beach while American and European summer tourists in their thousands bypass these decaying towns as they head for the more fashionable Cape Cod.
Scituate (right) sits around a natural harbour and boasts one of the many historic lighthouses that pepper the South Shore coastline. It’s one of the fishing ports mentioned in the fact-based movie The Perfect Storm and its small fishing fleet now competes with the large vessels kitted out for tourist fishing excursions and, if you time it right, whale watching. The Irish sports bar on the sea front can get a bit rowdy when the World Series reaches its climax, and in any case I prefer the music shop on Main Street where you can browse for hours through rows of second-hand CDs. My best finds so far are albums by Canned Heat and Chet Baker.
A few miles south east along the coast another favourite, Nantasket Beach in Hull, consists of a series of islands connected by sand bars which form a peninsula. The Plymouth Colony established a trading post here in 1621, and by the 1820s it had become a resort and steamboats ferried pleasure seekers back and forth from Boston. Here was the ‘marvel of fantasy’ that was Paragon Park, a giant amusement complex of which, in another parallel with Brighton, only remnants remain: a lonely carousel, a clock tower and a shabby promenade. But it still has one of the finest sandy beaches in New England and I have spent many hours walking here at low tide, working up an appetite for fish and chips, New England lobster or deep-fried oysters at Jake’s Seafood Restaurant on the way in to Hull.
Preferring New York to Boston we normally fly in to spend a few days there before heading north. Catching the Boston train from Penn station during daylight hours, we wind our way up through Connecticut and Rhode Island, taking in previews of the stunning coastal scenery to come. We then board a commuter train via Quincy, home of Dunkin’ Donuts, and now that the line has been extended as far as Scituate you don’t even need to hire a car. Should you chose to drive from Boston to the South Shore, however, this is the opportunity to visit IM Pei’s John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum at Columbia Point, an impressive building next to the University of Massachusetts campus overlooking the Atlantic, where you can marvel in admiration at the quality of the concrete finish… then head off to Jake’s.

Founder with Nigel Greenhill of Greenhill Jenner Architects; currently also a member of Cabe’s school design panel, he was once an assistant to Cedric Price.

AT197/April 09 p72