UK’s best seaside towns

If you want the perfect UK seaside holiday you need to look beyond the traditional favourites on the South Coast or Cornwall.

The towns with the best beaches are in Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, and Wales.

Our survey of almost 4,000 Which? members – who took around 9,000 trips to British seaside towns – shows, once again, that holidaymakers prefer the unspoilt sand, gorgeous scenery and peace and quiet that you only find away from the biggest tourist hotspots.

For the fifth year in a row, Bamburgh, a Northumberland village with a population of around 400 people, can celebrate. It beat more than 115 other UK towns and villages to get the highest destination score and top our table.

Three Welsh towns – Portmeirion, St Davids and Tenby – appear in the top 10. Also featured are two towns in Devon – Beer and Sidmouth – but none in Cornwall.

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The UK's best seaside town

The best seaside towns in the UK all got five stars for either their beaches, seafront or scenery.

Only one of them, Bamburgh, got the full five-star ratings for all three – plus peace and quiet. It also clinched an outstanding 84% overall destination score – higher than anywhere else. Visitors loved the spectacular views of Bamburgh Castle, which stands guard on a rocky outcrop above miles of sand and windswept dunes.

One visitor described it as 'a spectacular stretch of coastline with beaches that are second to none'. 

Another said that, even though it's got busier in recent years, the beach is so big that there's still space for everyone, even in summer. 

Stay at one of the UK's best seaside hotels

The UK’s worst seaside towns

At the opposite end of the table was Bognor Regis. It received just one star for its seafront, food and drink, tourist attractions, scenery, shopping, parking, peace and quiet and value for money.

It was described as 'dirty', 'run down', 'depressing' and as 'a seaside town that's forgotten it's next to the sea'. A destination score of just 36% meant it was the lowest-ranked town in our survey – quite a comedown from the days when it boasted of being the favourite resort of King George V.

However, some visitors had a more positive view. One said they loved the 'lights along the pier at night'. More than one visitor said that, with investment, it could recover its glory days.

Bognor was joined at the bottom of our table by some other famous names – Bangor in Wales, and Southend and Clacton on the South Coast.

Famous resorts such as Bournemouth and Brighton appear mid-table, although Bournemouth does get four stars for its beach and Brighton gets five stars for food and drink.

Wales’ best seaside town

There's no dividing two fabulous Welsh seaside towns, Portmeirion in Gwynedd and St Davids in Pembrokeshire. They both got a 79% destination score. 

If you've never been to either, Portmeirion wins out on tourist attractions. It's one of the UK’s most unusual holiday villages, dreamed up in the 1920s by Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who described it as a ‘home for fallen buildings’.

Inspired by Italian towns such as Portofino on the Mediterranean, Williams-Ellis designed extravagant, Italianate buildings complete with brightly coloured domes, colonnades and towers.

Visitors loved the architecture and its setting above a wide, sandy estuary – giving it five stars out of five for its tourist attractions, scenery and seafront. However, it did only get two stars for value for money. St Davids got four stars for value for money.

Scotland’s best seaside town

Nairn's position near the start of the Coast 500 scenic driving route – close to Inverness Airport – is why so many people have visited this Highland jewel. 

But it's worth a visit in its own right. Its four white beaches, backed with dunes, scored four stars in our survey and it garnered five stars for scenery, with the Cublin Forest nearby.

There's nothing to choose between it and the equally lovely St Andrews for a Scottish seaside break – both get a destination score of 76% – but Nairn also gets five stars for peace and quiet.

Northern Ireland’s best seaside town

This year, we didn't get enough responses to include any Northern Ireland towns, but Portstewart in Londonderry/Derry was the highest-rated town last year. It got a score of 76% and five stars for both its two miles of beach and its scenery. 

It’s equally popular with families and surfers. Cars can park directly on the beach, allowing easy lugging of windbreakers and picnic hampers. The town itself was also popular, with half-timbered, pedestrianised streets lined with small shops. It ‘has a lovely feel to it’, one visitor told us.

Inspired to stay in a seaside town hotel? These are the best seaview hotels we've reviewed in the past three years

The seaside town with the best scenery

Another Welsh town – Beaumaris – also got five stars for scenery. And, when we looked more closely at the data, we saw that it was the only one of our 118 towns where 100% of visitors gave its scenery a high rating.

Its location gives it quite an advantage. It has sweeping views of the Eryri range (Snowdonia) rising beyond the Menai Straits and the Great Orme.

It was also praised for its seafront, unsurprising considering its elegant, candy-coloured houses along the shoreline and its Victorian pier.

The UK's best beaches

Just three towns got the full five stars for their beaches, but Tenby in Pembrokeshire stands out even among them. 

Almost everybody loved its four, family-friendly beaches, with the views of Goscar Rock rising up from beyond the north shore.

Its charming Georgian lanes have a reputation for being overcrowded but, despite this, it even got a respectable three stars for peace and quiet. Many respondents said they visit out of season. 

The UK’s best and worst seaside towns: the full list

Find out how your favourite coastal town fared in our table below.

How to book your seaside town hotel

The highest-rated accommodation booking site in our annual survey is Booking.com

It gets an excellent, four-star score for functionality and price transparency. 

However, it's not necessarily the cheapest way to book. We've found that it's usually cheaper to look on a range of booking sites, as well as the hotel's own website, then phone up the hotel to see if it can match the cheapest deal you've found.

We've also reported that some people have been defrauded or ended up booking properties that don't exist on Booking.com.

While these issues are extremely rare, always remember to look at the most recent reviews (not those on Booking.com's default view shown as the 'most relevant') to see if other visitors have had issues. 

If you do book with a booking site, beware of unexpected emails asking for more money or for you to confirm your details. 

How the scores are calculated for the best and worst seaside towns

Which? Travel works on behalf of UK holidaymakers. We carry out surveys of both companies and destinations to provide advice on the best holidays and the best holiday providers.

For this survey we gathered the opinions of thousands of Which? Connect panel members about recent trips to UK seaside towns. To calculate overall customer scores, we asked the members if they recommend the town and how satisfied they were with their trip.

We also asked about specific aspects of the towns – such as the beach or the scenery – to calculate star ratings.