I once met a man who had been the “Reveille Rover”. Over a long drive across the Tunisian desert, he told me about the 1950s summers he spent touring Britain’s seaside resorts.

Employed as a “mystery man” by Reveille, a now-defunct magazine full of tasteful pin-ups and showbiz gossip, he lurked in cafés and fairgrounds waiting to be recognised and challenged. It was the racy world of Kolley Kibber in Brighton Rock.

“You are the Reveille Rover” people would say, and he would doff his trilby, hand them a fiver and move on. “I’d do Ramsgate one day, Weston-super-Mare the next and Bridlington and Filey the day after that,” he said wistfully.

We’ll come back to Filey, but the important word here is “wistfully”. The Fifties were the Indian summer of the big raucous resorts, with their candyfloss and their Kiss Me Quick hats. For generations, everyone had taken seaside holidays and had taken them for granted. There was no alternative until cheap Mediterranean packages promised dawn-to-dusk sunshine to roast you a vicious shade of pink.

Many British seaside towns spiralled into a decline that seemed terminal. They became last resorts, interesting only to anthropologists. I remember a day-trip to one such place in the early Eighties. On an August afternoon, I had the beach to myself. “One thing visitors like,” a tourism official explained, “is that they can go for long walks here without meeting other people.”

Over the past decade, though, the seaside has enjoyed an unexpected renaissance. It has shaken off complacency and is reinventing itself for a different sort of holidaymaker: more upmarket than mass-market, more weekend than Saturday-through-to-Saturday.

There’s Newquay for surfers, Padstow for foodies, St Ives for art-lovers. Salcombe and Sidmouth appeal to part-time Devonians. The Burnham area of north Norfolk has become “Boden-by-Sea”.

Whole swaths of Suffolk have been resprayed in Farrow & Ball colours, as once-quiet resorts are colonised by holiday-home owners with canvas deck shoes and cars bigger than their cottages. Spot them by the dried starfish in their windows and the Lady Grey tea in their beach huts.

For entrenched seasiders like me, this is mostly good news. As a Fifties child conceived (I reckon) in Ilfracombe, I knew the seaside almost before I was born. My grandmother was once, she sometimes claimed, Billy Butlin’s nanny; my cousin Mona was a wall-of-death rider on a Skegness fairground; family holiday snaps show me on the beach in Scarborough, Folkestone, Llandudno, Torquay or Blackpool (just the once: my mother thought it “common”). Around me are obsessively perfect sandcastles adorned with paper Union Jacks.

I’m still a sucker for booths plastered with fading black-and-white photos of fortune-tellers, with the young Ken Dodd or Morecambe and Wise. I have fearlessly bought dentures and fried eggs made from seaside rock. The Eighth Wonder of my World is the Fairy Glen at Douglas in the Isle of Man.

And now I’m vindicated. The seaside is no longer naff. Resorts are smartening themselves up. Hotels have realised that guests expect more than “en suite” , “TV lounge” and “hot and cold running water”.

In Morecambe, great hopes are pinned on the dazzling white Midland Hotel, the Thirties haunt of Coco Chanel and Laurence Olivier. Sleekly restored, it’s luring visitors with more on their minds than hot dogs and chips’n’cheese. Its menu runs to ham hock with foie gras, “Lancastrian tapas” and a trio of wild mallard, red partridge and wood pigeon.

The danger lurking in the all this revival is over-sophistication. Too chi-chi, too many Art Deco tearooms and bijou clothes and art shops, and you risk a self-consciousness that can destroy the essence of the British seaside, which is spontaneous and full of misrule.

To remind myself, I had at a day by the North Yorkshire coast last week. Not at one of the bigger resorts, whose honky-tonk can get oppressive, but at Filey, where there’s little honk and absolutely no tonk. Easily overlooked, this is one of those charming places — such as Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria or Saltburn-by-the-Sea in the North East — that (happily) haven’t really changed since 1957 because they’ve never needed to. Like many of the best resorts, they’re proper little towns by the sea, not just glorified holiday camps.

Filey, where Delius and Charlotte Bronte spent holidays, still has a pleasantly Edwardian feel, reflected in its annual festival, which ends tomorrow with a Last Night of the Proms. The town is naturally a stronghold of Alan Bennett-ism, the world of sitting on a bench staring stoically out to sea, with a folded mackintosh to hand.

In an art gallery just up the coast, I meet an elderly lady who launches a diatribe against ready meals and the fast food culture. “Do you know,” she concludes with a flourish, “I wouldn’t know what to do with a frozen sausage!” Down on the beach, a man shouts to two boys: “Sebastian! Horatio!” Boden beckons.

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