In Strangers on the Shore, Michael Smith - author of cult classic The Giro Playboy - journeys through the uncanny psychic landscape of St Leonard's in an astonishing work of autofiction that explores the experience of becoming a father and the strange grief of leaving your youth behind.
The flâneuring Michael at the centre of the book has checked out, started a family and moved to the coast 'where all alcoholics go to die': he has both given up and started anew. Obsessed with Aleister Crowley and the 'shabby magic' of this seaside place, he finds himself in a 'drinking town with a fishing problem'.
This is a book about what it is like to live on the margins, to slide into middle age unfulfilled and poor, scared, the same person but different. It is deeply and unashamedly romantic and it is also angry - at Brexit, at what Britain has become, and about seagulls too. It is a book about love, family and the unbreakable bond between father and son. Endlessly moving, Strangers on the Shore is a work of transcendent beauty from the acid house Montaigne: literally a man 'who lived to wonder at the world'.
Release date:
May 28, 2026
Publisher:
Orion
Print pages:
320
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Sat in the Silchester Road laundrette, staring at the tie-dye slowly floating round and round, the leathery old hippy bloke leaning on his walking stick smoking a rolly outside, oblivious to the weapon dog barking over the road … the sign on the wall said SMILE, YOU’RE ON CCTV, and I was smiling, soaking up the shabby magic of the seaside town, while the sunset cast silhouettes on the luminous walls and marinated the room in golden honey …
Strolling home with my big blue IKEA bag full of laundry, catching the last of the sun, wending my way through the wedding-cake square, classical columns and bone-white walls with rusty streaks running down from the derelict satellite dishes that cluster like mushrooms in the damp corners, old dreams of imperial grandeur fallen away into this strange, shady half-life … alkies on benches, pitbulls tearing round the grass, moody blokes on crutches in Reebok Classics hanging round the telephone box … and stood on her pedestal, Victoria still stares out to sea, ruling the waves with a traffic cone on her bonce, her huddled minions shuffling round the alcoholic gardens, cadging enough money for a tenner bag or a few cans of Tennent’s, and glazed eyes stare out from 2,000 leagues under the sea …
And among this unkempt undergrowth, orchids left alone to bloom in the shady patches … the theremin player whose theremin was on the blink, the ex-opera singer with the big white Father Christmas beard, the lady from Hot Gossip who used to dance on the Kenny Everett Show … there was always the feeling this place was a law unto itself, a forgotten little corner you hoped would stay forgotten a bit longer, close enough and far enough to follow its own eccentric orbit round the capital, the culture, the laws of economics, somewhere out there beyond the convenient commute of the pointy-shoed fuckers with the hedge-fund hair, right down here to the ends of England, where shitty old London Road and its gnarly chicken shops finally runs out of tarmac and hits the sea, and a glamorous old copper-green clock from the Jazz Age still keeps the hours against the vast blue that stretches out the same forever …
And now I walk home by the crumbling elegance of the Regency façades, pot-holed pavements and rising damp … and when the sun’s caught flat against the pastel stucco, the dogshit capital of the South Coast can still look impossibly pretty, long shadows against the clotted cream streets of golden hour, a dreaming seaside town for dreamers … and every evening at sundown, I get home to the church bells ringing their rich, deep melody, like it was all a message just for me, St Leonard telling me I’d been given a second chance, that I’d entered into some kind of pact with the place, and it’d be kind to me, and grant me what I needed.
What was I doing in this strange seaside town? I remember when we first arrived, I’d walk around with the pram like a private eye casing a mystery, a mystery which unfortunately nobody was paying me to solve … the place was a puzzle, a confusion of streets, the sublime cheek by jowl with the sordid and ridiculous … a rakish elegance gone rough & dodgy, like a classy old suit gone all moth-eaten and threadbare … a town full of worn-away dreams, sweetened by the poetry of the hazy blue horizon …
It felt like I’d stumbled upon a secret little world complete in itself: the gentle brilliant light, the freshness of the sea air, noisy seagulls circling terrace roofs, lively, tatty little streets, peeling pinks and pastel blues, and shops full of beautiful junk.
With its crazy paving and potholed tarmac covered in dogshit and white paint spills, grubby net curtains behind grand mansion windows, marble steps to once-proud doorways with a dozen rusty bedsit buzzers, St Leonards felt beyond the pale, out on a limb, which after the sardine-tin crush of London brought an overwhelming sense of freedom and release – it still had some legroom for the artistic life, that marginal, precarious, romantic kind of life that always seems to be on the verge of getting gentrified out of existence … out here it was all crumbling stucco streets opening out onto big vistas – all sea, all sky, and the space and the luxury to be left alone to get on with it, like children playing on the bombsites after World War Two.
St Leonard, patron saint of prisoners and the mentally ill. I’d lived under his sign through my best years, in the knot of streets behind St Leonard’s parish church in Shoreditch, in England’s first council estate, a Grade II listed Edwardian council estate full of Bangladeshi children playing below washing lines in the sky and the constant smell of curry, when the Versace shop on Redchurch Street was still Old Tom the rag’n’bone man’s Steptoe-style yard …
And now I found myself in St Leonards-on-Sea, which in many ways felt similar to his parish on the raggy edges of the City Fringe 20 years earlier – the people who washed up here on the edges of the country reminded me of the lost souls who washed up in that old ditch on the margins of the Square Mile: the troubled and the troublesome, swept down here by social cleansing, pawns in a dirty deal between the inner boroughs and the cash-strapped coastal resorts full of empty B’n’Bs, London’s hush money, pushing its undesirables out of sight and out of mind, right down here to the end of the train line … in the days when they were building this elegant escape, it would have been a one-way boat to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread …
The nasty, brutish and short, and the arty types with their precarious financial arrangements, at right angles to the rest of the world, floaters who had lived in the same marginal no-man’s-lands round the frayed City Fringe, pushed out by an economy whose only visible growth had been in property, and the redevelopment of vast dilapidated inner-city swathes of it for at least the last decade … the London poor got shipped out, the London creatives got priced out, and now they’ve all washed up here, cheek by jowl in this elegant seaside shit hole originally designed as a getaway for London’s rich …
It was a shock when we first moved down here. The place was on the bones of its arse. I’d push the pram along the dilapidated Deco sweep of the prom, towards the ruined pier like a row of burned matches sticking out into the English Channel, rotten stumps at the centre of the seafront’s smile, like the smile of one of the junkies on the square … and looking out beyond this Corbusian concrete hangover at a ruffled windy sea stretching out to a stormy horizon, my son pointing over to it, saying ‘Baf’, his second word, I’d just hang my head and think to myself, Oh God, what have we done?
Like Cold War relics, the seafront was littered with strange abandoned structures whose function had become obscured: a dilapidated concrete bunker leading to a locked-up underground swimming pool; a scrubby grassed-over wasteground in the rectangular footprint of a once glamorous lido; a rain-stained concrete colonnade open to the beach on one side that ran underneath the 1920s promenade between Hastings & St Leonards, conceived as an arcade for the well-heeled holiday makers to stroll down when it drizzled, a covered walkway with viewing bays for string quartets and Cinzano bars, the longest, most glamorous modernist concrete structure of its day in England, degenerated into a pissy crumbling underpass full of fag butts and broken glass, a wind-break for drug dealers & their staffies running wild …
A town littered with the hulks of abandoned industry, a colossal ruin like Middlesbrough or Detroit, only this town’s industry was mass leisure. The thing about the English seaside is it was leisure on an industrial scale, the leisure of the industrial revolution; when that mass leisure industry moved away, outsourced to Spain, it devastated these places as surely as steelworks relocating to India or China devastated big northern towns.
And littered along the front were all these traces, chalk outlines of a tragic death at a crime scene, ghosts like Marine Court, the centrepiece of St Leonards’ seafront, a crumbling Art Deco apartment block that looks like an ocean liner, a Titanic of the English seaside that hit its iceberg sometime in the mid-’70s, the slow sinking of the South Coast into its strange fifty-year winter that only now seems to be thawing …
You’d have to be a fucking idiot to open a place selling cloudy, cidery natural wines and dank juicy craft beer at £4 a half along this stretch. Nevertheless, this was our big idea. We couldn’t make ends meet in the Smoke anymore, and certainly couldn’t afford to have a baby there. It was a painful way to fall out with a place. After giving London our best years, it felt like we’d just realised we’d been shafted by an old and trusted business partner we’d just twigged had had one hand in the till all along.
A booze emporium. This was the best escape plan we’d managed to come up with as economic refugees from the city where the streets are paved with gold, and the rents reflect it. The baby was born at the end of May, we moved here in July, and opened the bar on the August bank holiday. I have hardly any memories of that summer. It was like some massive delirious bong hit of madness. It made my beard go grey. I only remember it in little fragments: the opening night of the bar, meeting all these new faces, pouring wine and beer one-handed while bouncing a three-month-old baby in my arms, and then when we finally got everyone out, thinking, Well, that went well, and then realising I had baby sick all down my T-shirt, and probably had done all night.
I met so many people that night. I’d suspected there were semi-employed creative types hidden away, peppered among the shoddy terraces, but had no idea they lived here in such numbers. It turned out they’d been trickling down for decades, quietly beavering away in their bright and breezy ramshackle houses with the beautiful sea views.
They seemed to like drinking in our gaff, and a group of regulars quickly yoked around the bar … my favourites were all in one evening: a bloke who made big paintings of scary fishermen whose eyes followed you round the room, a thesp who’d just finished playing a pædophile on a mobility scooter hanging round a playground on BBC1 daytime drama Doctors, a novelist writing an experimental psychogeographic piece about the haunted underground streams of the town, the theremin player whose theremin was broken, all chatting and rubbing shoulders amiably, and I remember, as I was making some drinks and enjoying the patter, it suddenly struck me: I was running the bar I’d always wanted to drink in, the bar I’d always dreamed of …
Underneath the bar was a damp, dingy basement with a collapsing ceiling held up by two breeze-block columns and a concrete floor that flooded every summer as the water on the way from the Sussex Weald percolated down to the sea, and underground streams running off the forests came back to life …
We built a makeshift bar and stuck some tables with candles glowing in the shady Victorian brick arches at the back. We got some gorgeous old wooden KEF speakers that made the place sound like a dubby womb and kept the lights down low. The arts lab Berlin bunker vibes were accidental, more by necessity than design – we eked out a living in this place and couldn’t afford to do anything with it, but this all seemed to work to its advantage.
I remember at one of the first gigs down there, a bald long-haired bloke playing howling free jazz saxophone and smashing plates off his head at the same time … when he finished his set he came to the bar and very politely asked me for a dust pan and brush to clean up after himself, and I noticed he had a big triangular shard of china sticking out of his bald head, and blood trickling down behind his ear and into his long greasy hair …
It was always so much fun in the bunker. Some men buy a red convertible sports car at my age, but I have no money and can’t drive, so I got some vintage hi-fidelity wooden speakers that ‘Voodoo Ray’ and ‘Mysteries of Love’ sounded really nice on, and a dingy cellar bar to play them in while I made Manhattans & Whiskey Sours. I worried I was drinking myself into an early grave, but I was always sweaty and happy by the end of another long night. I pulled the wires out of the CCTV so my wife couldn’t spy on us on her phone and shout at me when I was enjoying myself. I was often too drunk to lock the shutters properly.
The self-loathing came in the mornings, when my little boy needed someone to play with and I was too hung over to do anything but put Scooby-Doo on repeat, and I felt so ashamed. The thing that was earning us a living was short-changing my child. That place was my freedom and it was also my gilded cage.
I remember the day – no, the moment – I met her, the mother of my child: she floated across the busy bar as if she were stepping weightlessly out of a Botticelli painting, gliding in on a zephyr from a giant scallop shell on the surf, all golden cloudburst curls and diaphanous peachy silken swirls … it all went silent, time stood still, the proverbial pool ball stopped rolling into the pocket in the corner of the table, and I was lost for words.
It happened on one of the first Fridays of spring. The gentle sunlight and the sweet breeze seemed to whisper about the coming promise of life opening up again after I’d been holed up in my sad little rented room all winter … I had a tantalising sense of something delicious being on the cards, still just out of sight, somewhere just around the corner …
And as I made my way into the guts of the capital, people finishing work and crowding outside the restaurants and pubs, those early evening streets seemed to open out for me, heaving with pleasure and promise … I made my way across the silvery river to the Southbank and my date with destiny. I was doing a reading at an event there, and it was pretty nerve-wracking performing in one of the big concert halls, so I spent most of the evening in the green room downing beers in nervous anticipation of going on stage, and then spent the rest of the evening drinking in relief, as my turn seemed to go down well …
By the time I’d got to the party afterwards I was pie-eyed, chatting at the bar with my mate who organised it all, to coincide with his big birthday bash; suddenly I stopped listening, forgot about everything else, at the sight of a mysterious golden-haired girl gliding through the crowd towards us: Wow, what’s her story? I thought; there was something enigmatic about her, a delicious mystery; she floated over like some radiant creature who didn’t really belong in a world as humdrum as this one … and somehow, it looked like she was coming over to say something to us; I had no idea what was about to come out of her mouth, but I was intrigued …
‘Alright Jeff, can I get you a birthday drink?’ she said to my mate, and then she looked into my eyes … ‘’Ere, ’Artlepool, do you want a drink as well?’ she said in a Teesside accent as broad as mine. She’d obviously clocked we were from the same town when I’d done the reading. I was bamboozled. It was the last thing I could have possibly expected. I didn’t think they made them that nice up there. It soon transpired it was a hat trick – her job was to do all the English shmoozing for one of the grand old champagne houses, and I was at a stage in my life when drinking fine wine had become my second favourite activity. An improbable angel had just fallen into my world.
She fell back out of it fifteen minutes later, making a sharp exit after I’d told her she was my dream woman, while her friend kept miming, ‘No, no,’ shaking her head and making a cut-throat motion beside her. The next morning I remember waking up, happy but hungover, thinking, Well, at least it’s nice to know there are still girls like her out there. Maybe the universe had just wanted to remind me that life is capable of throwing a bit of magic your way once in a while, even if it was not to be with this one …
She called me out of the blue about a month later, and that was that. From the first weekend we spent together I knew she’d be the mother of my child. ‘If I have a boy I’d like to call him Raf,’ she said, the first time we walked through the park together on the Sunday. ‘We’ll have a boy called Raf then,’ I said, and as soon as I said it I had the most peculiar experience. It was the one and only time I ever experienced a feeling like it in my life, and I still can’t explain it – my body suddenly felt like a tuning fork, resonating with some kind of higher energy, a higher vibration all up my spine, a will bigger and wiser than mine, suddenly fulfilling itself through me. I felt like I was in the old National Lottery advert, when the big hand towered over the rooftops, and the finger pointed straight at me, a beneficent voice from the sky thundering ‘IT’S YOU’ … it was like being touched by the hand of fate or something, and from that moment on I knew in my gut that me and Jess having a boy called Raf was written in the stars, and our son was a done deal …
St Leonards train station gets lovely, crisp early morning light. It was always exciting, standing on that platform, waiting to get away for the day, especially when it was just the two of us again, no child and no dog, back up to London for a fancy wine tasting, enjoying the payback for the hard and stressful slog of running a business together, all the long, late hours running our own bar, sweeping up sticky broken glass, bleaching the bogs, worrying about the leaky collapsing ceiling, worrying about where all the money’s going to come from. That afternoon it seemed especially that way – a few hours tasting the kind of champagnes we can’t afford to drink, at one of Piccadilly’s oldest and most romantic oyster bars.
In many ways, going back to London now, it’s like I’d never lived there. It hits you as soon as you step off the train at London Bridge: I forget which tube lines go where, how the ticket machines work, how one should gracefully mount an escalator. My new life rarely rose above the first floor, and it must’ve been the first time I’d been on an escalator in months. The minute we got off the tube at Green Park, Jess tugged my sleeve: ‘Eee, there’s Duncan Bannatyne!’ she said, and we gawped like tourists at a cheesy TV judge, not like the Londoners we once were, blasé, nonchalant … we were like hayseeds again, blown into the big city, wide-eyed, amazed by all the silver foxes in royal blue bespoke suits that cost more than our car, by the women whose shoes seemed to be made of diamonds, here on the richest mile of the richest city in the world, gawping down the elegant sweep of Piccadilly, a wide stately avenue rolling like a red carpet from the Ritz all the way to the Statue of Eros, the appropriate deity of Soho, in the distance.
We got to the dimly lit staircase leading discreetly down to the cellar of the oyster bar, nestled under the colossal columns and arches of Air Street vaulting into the clear blue sky like a vision of imperial Rome … I had a look at the wine list. It began with a quote from Galileo, ‘Wine is sunlight, held together by water’ … the wines, Meursault 1er Cru Les Charmes, £140, Chateau de Puligny Montrachet, £170, Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, £386, were surely so, for the gentlemen in royal blue suits and the diamond-shoed ladies who got to taste them.
Not that I’m complaining. There were three trestle tables full of impossibly delicious champagnes in the black room with the gold trim. Biscuitty champagnes, bruised apple champagnes, champagnes with bubbles so delicate and fine they shimmered in a gentle cascade across your palate like sunlight over the sea. A public school scrum formed round the waiter with the silver tray every time he emerged from the kitchen doors again, people going crazy for the oysters this place was famous for. I kept nudging the greasy bespoke-shoed bastards out the way to get my share.
More bottles popped. The champagne never seemed to end. We were plastered by the time we had to leave, floating through the sun-soaked streets of Soho on the way back to the train. In Charing Cross Station I stole a block of parmesan from M&S when the cashier at the till I’d been queueing patiently for said I’d have to join the queue for the self-service machine because he was cash only. I met Jess outside. She’d just stolen some hand cream from Boots. It was only on the train I realised how spangled she was, as she blew raspberries at the Daily Maily old ladies going back to the shires from their big day out at The Mousetrap or the Royal Academy or wherever it is these people go.
It was only four in the afternoon. We left early because we had to pick our son up from nursery. Like coming down from acid as a teenager, the re-entry into the mundane life of the peripheries from more stellar regions like these is always a difficult landing to navigate. I braved the nursery, because Jess was still hammered. As luck would have it, I got outside to find her talking to our son’s best friend’s mum. We’d never met her before. I was mortified. Jess kept saying this or that was ‘shit’ far too much, and then panicked that she’d lost her bags, which I could plainly see on the other side of the pavement where she’d left them. ‘I’m so sorry, we’re not normally like this – we’re normal people, it’s just that we’ve been to a champagne and oyster tasting in Mayfair,’ I explained, realising that didn’t sound very normal at all … we said our goodbyes and walked off; I was cringing inside, but Jess still seemed too drunk to register.
We were all hungry. ‘Let’s go for a burger,’ I offered.
‘Yeah! I like burgers!’ our son confirmed.
We stopped in the children’s play area on the way there for a minute. Raf got too excited in the Thomas Train and suddenly screamed, ‘Daddy I need a wee!’, panicking; I went to pull him out of the wooden train and carry him quickly to the bushes, but too late; all I could do was watch as he whimpered and wee flowed down his leg from his shorts, soaking them and his socks and shoes and the floor of Thomas’s engine room.
I looked over to Jess for help. She’d sat down in his pram and was passed out snoring. I lost my shit at this point. ‘Jess! Get out of the fucking pram!’ I shouted, ‘We have to get him home – forget the burger, he’s pissed himself.’
‘What are you on about? He hasn’t pissed himself,’ she argued, apparently unable to see – and so the black hour began, a crying child with soaking pants in between two drunken assholes boozed up on high-end champagne, while the twilight drew in and the wind got colder by the twinkling lights of the shabby dilapidated seafront.
Oh the wines of London. There was a world’s worth of the best ones money could buy crammed onto those wine shop shelves. In the richer neighbourhood down the canal from me, there was a fine wine dealer who had one of those magic wine machines that uses NASA technology to pour you a glass and then fill the empty space in the bottle with a noble gas like argon instead of air, so it never reacts and spoils, and for this devilishly simple reason they can sell wines as fancy as they like by the glass, without having to worry whether they’ll be able to sell the rest of the bottle before it turns. I’d find myself drifting over there if I had nothing to do that afternoon, sticking £20 on the little card they give you, putting the card in the magic wine machine, and trying egg cups’ worth of all the fine wines therein; five minutes later, you’ve spanked your 20 quid, and it’s very hard not to say ‘fuck it’ and stick another 20 quid on the card. It’s like crack for people in red chinos.
In the days when I used to get paid properly I would often go and stand by the machine and while away half an hour and 40 or 50 quid swirling a glass and waxing lyrical to myself. They normally had very good bottles in that machine, but there was one occasion I went in and my jaw really dropped: there, racked up proudly in a row, were several of the finest wines available to humanity, the ones you only ever read about, the ones the Queen or Charles Saatchi get to drink at fancy banquets, on show here at £50 a thimbleful. It was an eye-watering embarrassment of riches, sat there on proud display in the machine: a Le Chambertin, one of Burgundy’s loftiest peaks, that was as old as me, gone all reddy brick-brown with age; two of only five Bordeaux allowed to call themselves Premier Cru, a Chateau Lafitte and a Mouton Rothschild, the two jewels in the crown of the evil banking dynasty’s wine portfolio. It was racehorse territory, the place where wine reached its lofty apotheosis. My heart swooned at the prospect, but there was no way I could afford to try even a drop.
The gods must have been smiling on me that day. The fucker with the Fulham pullover tied round his shoulders went off on his lunch break and I noticed he’d forgotten his magic staff wine card by the side of the machine. My golden Willy Wonka ticket lay there winking at me. I wasted no time, and dived straight in to a more beautiful world, a world of sunlight held together by water, the world inhabited by Monet or Titian or Giorgione. Working your way round that magic wine machine was like walking round the National Gallery, grapes and oak like oil paint, capturing the airs of late autumn afternoons, their atmospheres and enchantments … fallen leaves on forest floors, russets and ochres in dappled, honeyed sun … the poetry of the land, the soil, grapes becoming raisins, blue-veined cheeses and noble rot, the smell of sweet decay, of time … in all the overwhelming beauty of it there was a bittersweet note of tragedy: by the time I got to the Chateau d’Yquem I was close to tears, nearly weeping at the perfection of it, and at the passing of it, knowing I would probably never drink this ambrosia again …
I rinsed that terracotta-trousered fucker’s card, but like all ecstasies it had to end, and I left before he came back with his jambon sandwich from Paul and I got rumbled, and lumbered with an unpayable bill for several hundred pounds. I stumbled home down the canal like a God, a ruddy-faced retainer of. . .
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