Outside the Swanage Information Centre, opposite the beach, there's a Beach Toy Library — a box of spades and buckets left out for anyone to borrow and bring back. This is a south-facing bay with a long sandy beach that shelves gently into a designated swimming zone, lifeguarded by the RNLI in summer, with deckchairs, ice cream and fish and chips along the front.
The town has nearly a dozen traditional pubs, most of them pouring locally brewed ales and ciders. The Black Swan on the High Street is Grade II listed and does seafood, sharing platters and Sunday roasts, and well-behaved dogs are welcome in the garden. The Ship Inn, central, has a "gourmet dog" on the menu alongside burgers and loaded fries, and its own dog walks running out from the door. The Red Lion is family-run with a spacious beer garden, and the Anchor Inn, near the beach, does Sunday roasts by a fire.
The High Street keeps a run of independent shops. Martins the newsagents occupies what was once the bookshop where Enid Blyton held signings for locals. She holidayed in Purbeck three times a year for over twenty years, and was elected President of the Swanage Carnival in 1957.
Walk south and the coast path climbs to Durlston Country Park, past the closed Tilly Whim Caves to Anvil Point Lighthouse, built of local stone in 1881. Durlston is also home to the Great Globe: a forty-tonne sphere of Portland stone, three metres across, carved with the continents and joined with granite dowels. George Burt had it made in London and shipped down by sea in 1887.
Burt is why Swanage was once called Little London by Sea. He and his uncle John Mowlem built fortunes shipping Purbeck stone to the capital, and the returning barges needed ballast, so Burt brought back salvaged London architecture and re-erected it here. The Wellington Clock Tower on the seafront originally stood at the Southwark end of London Bridge, where by the 1860s it had become "an unwarrantable obstruction" to traffic. Burt removed it to Swanage at no charge. Its spire came off in 1904 and was replaced with a copper cupola. The Town Hall carries the old Mercers' Hall façade, also brought down from London.
St Mary's, mostly rebuilt in Gothic Revival in 1859, kept its medieval tower — three stages from the 14th century, the top one from 1620 — and a ring of eight bells, two of them cast in 1594 and 1612.
North of the bay, the chalk ridge of Ballard Down runs out to Old Harry Rocks, the white stacks that mark the eastern end of the Jurassic Coast. The walk from Studland over the down is about six miles, with Poole Harbour and the Needles on the far side.
The mainline station is at Wareham, ten miles off; the A351 comes in through Corfe Castle, and the number 40 Purbeck Breezer runs hourly from Poole. The way to arrive, though, is the Swanage Railway, steam-hauled from Norden — lifted entirely under the Beeching cuts in 1972, then rebuilt from scratch by volunteers over the following two decades.
Enid Blyton and her husband, locals recalled, used to swim round both piers before supper. There is one pier fewer now.
