Sheringham

The working shore and its pubs

The fishing boats come up the beach on a tractor. There is no harbour at Sheringham, and never has been, so the crab boats are hauled straight up the sand and parked on the front like cars, which is more or less what they are to the eight men who still work them single-handed. There were maybe two hundred boats at the peak. There are about eight now. You can stand on the prom and watch them come in, and the sea they come in from holds one of the world's longest chalk reefs, more than twenty miles of it off Cromer and Sheringham, which is the thing the crabs and lobsters live on and the reason anyone has ever bothered to launch a boat here at all.

Start at The Lobster, at 13 High Street, because it is where the town's signature catch and the town's drinking habits meet. The walls are hung with lobster pots, nets, fishing implements and ships' lamps, there are nautical charts pinned to the ceiling, and there are open fires. It has been open since at least 1832, began life as a coaching inn, and was refitted by the brewers Steward & Patteson in the early 1930s, which is why it still has a 1930s lounge good enough to appear on CAMRA's national inventory of historic pub interiors. The kitchen does Cromer crab and lobster, and the converted Stables restaurant round the back serves all day in summer, with vegan and vegetarian options and room for children and dogs. There are two changing ales — over the years it has poured Timothy Taylor Landlord, Woodforde's Wherry, Nelson's Revenge and Adnams Ghost Ship.

Down on the seafront at 2 High Street, directly on the beach, The Two Lifeboats has the sea views and knows it. It is one of the oldest pub sites in town — the deeds reportedly go back to 1720, when it was a farmhouse called the New Inn, and it spent a stretch in the 1870s as a Coffee House before returning to sense. It does fresh fish and chips, Cromer crab and lobster when they have it, well-reviewed Sunday roasts, and a separate menu for dogs. It is table service only and a little pricier than most, and the sea-facing terrace is the reason nobody minds. Four cask beers in season, fewer in winter — Woodforde's Wherry, Wolf Brewery's Lifeboat Ale, the Wolf In Sheep's Clothing, Greene King Old Speckled Hen, Adnams.

Shellfish, tea and trains

For the other sea-view pub, walk round to Lifeboat Plain and The Crown Inn, licensed before 1781, rebuilt around 1935, and rated by locals alongside the Two Lifeboats for the view and for an excellent pint of Adnams Ghost Ship. If you want to get away from the water, the Windham Arms on Wyndham Street is a back-street local, licensed since at least 1808 and named for the Windham family. One of its former licensees, Robert Sunman, built Sheringham's first lifeboat in 1838, which tells you what kind of town keeps records like this. The Dunstable Arms on Cromer Road, licensed by 1861 and rebuilt in 1931, has a beer garden and a Tudor-style interior described as regionally important, and pours Tipples' Lady Evelyn and Sea Lantern alongside Sharp's Doom Bar. The Robin Hood on Station Road has been drinking under three different names — it opened as the First & Last in 1846, became the Railway Tavern in 1881, and settled on Robin Hood in 1904.

For the crab itself, the place is Joyful West's Shellfish Bar on the High Street: dressed Cromer crab, lobster, cockles, whelks, and sandwiches so full of white meat that they are widely reckoned the best in town. The West family were one of Sheringham's core fishing families, and Henry Joyful West BEM spent years chronicling the town's fishery, so the name is not decoration. If you want something built around a plate rather than a paper bag, Marmalade's Bistro on Church Street does seasonal Norfolk cooking — slow-cooked rump of Felthorpe lamb, and a vanilla cheesecake pudding they call the Sheringham sink hole. No. 10 on Augusta Street runs to Morston mussels and Aberdeen Angus beef with a serious wine list. The Bank Restaurant on Church Street serves Nepalese and Asian food inside a converted Lloyds, with the original safe still set into the wall. Dave's Fish Bar on Co-operative Street does the light-and-crispy fish and chips, gluten-free included, and Fat Ted's Streat Food in Barcham's Yard has won awards for skin-on dirty fries.

Tea is taken at Whelk Coppers on The Driftway, going since 1992, homemade cakes and scones and what reviewers reckon the best outside seating in town — reached through wrought-iron gates that locals will tell you were reputedly designed by Walt Disney. Nobody seems to know why. Saturday markets run all year, and Wednesday ones from April to November.

Parkland, cliffs and the beach

The town runs on trains, and always has. It grew from two farming-and-fishing villages — Upper Sheringham inland, Lower Sheringham on the coast — into a Victorian seaside resort when the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway arrived in the late 1800s, and most of the shops and buildings you walk past date from then and the years just after. Sheringham station is still the northern end of the Bittern Line, ten stations and thirty miles down to Norwich, run by Greater Anglia. From the town's original station the North Norfolk Railway — the Poppy Line — runs steam trains five and a quarter miles to Holt by way of Weybourne and Kelling Heath, and in 2010 the two lines were reconnected by a level crossing over the main road. The A149 coast road and the A148 handle the cars; Coasthopper and Sanders buses link you along the coast to Cromer, Holt, Wells and the villages.

West of town is Sheringham Park, a thousand acres of woodland, parkland and clifftop that Humphry Repton laid out and afterwards called "my favourite and darling child in Norfolk." The circular walk takes in a treetop gazebo viewing tower — built on the site of a Napoleonic watchtower, with steps to the top and the whole North Norfolk coast laid out below — and if you time it right you'll see a steam train crossing the parkland underneath you. The Wild Garden holds over eighty species of rhododendron and azalea, at their loudest from mid-May into early June. East of town the Norfolk Coast Path runs along the cliffs to Beeston Regis and Beeston Bump, a hill of glacial debris around ten to fifteen thousand years old that is both a Site of Special Scientific Interest and, during the Second World War, a secret listening station. From there the path carries on to Cromer, four miles off; the other way it heads to Weybourne.

Lifeboats, murals and town history

The beach is Blue Flag, sand at low tide, with beach huts to hire, rock pools, and the working fishing slopes to watch. Behind it the Reef Leisure Centre opened in late 2021 with a twenty-five-metre pool, and around the town there's a boating lake, pitch-and-putt, a bowling club, and a golf club up on the clifftop that Tom Dunn designed in 1891. The SUP Shack hires out paddleboards on the prom, and the Little Theatre down on the seafront runs a café called The Hub and a youth drama programme. The Town Carnival takes over in early August, and each May Sheringham co-hosts the Crab & Lobster Festival with Cromer, an event that includes a World Pier Crabbing Championship, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The Mo, the seafront museum, is the only place in the world holding four of its own original lifeboats, and it doubles as the visitor centre for the Sheringham Shoal wind farm turning offshore. Along the sea wall, the sea defences carry painted murals telling the town's fishing story — David Barber's roughly hundred-metre Neolithic panorama, opened in 2016, nods to the mammoth skeleton dug up at West Runton two miles down the coast. Sheringham people are Shannocks, and they are particular about it: by the strict definition you have to be born in the town to parents and grandparents who were born here too. The football club are the Shannocks as well.

Old stories and Sheringham identity

The history is heavy for a town this size. The Domesday surveyors found twenty-eight households here in 1086 and valued the whole place at four pounds, the same as it had been worth in 1066. On 19 January 1915 Sheringham became the first place in Britain attacked from the air, by a Zeppelin; the first bomb reportedly failed to go off, and a resident is said to have picked it up and put it in a bucket. St Joseph's Catholic church was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott — the man who drew the red telephone box and Battersea Power Station — and paid for by Catherine Deterding, wife of the founder of Royal Dutch Shell. And in 1931, when the fisherman Jack Craske's boat capsized offshore, a Cromer lifeboatman named Jack Davies jumped overboard to save him. The Sheringham men watched it happen from this beach, and it is credited with ending decades of feuding between the two towns' crews, who had spent years accusing each other of baiting their pots with under-sized crabs.

The town's motto, granted in 1953, is Mare Ditat Pinusque Decorat — the sea enriches and the pine adorns. Once there were fourteen men called Henry Grice living on Beeston Road at the same time, all from the same fishing family, sharing the name until it stopped meaning much of anything. Nobody has topped that since.