Fashionable paddling - or why the Browns chose Southwold

Almost certainly by accident - intent has been a bad friend recently - Gordon Brown has done a fashionable thing. He is going to Southwold for his holidays.

Reports in the newspapers have quoted local people making angry remarks about fuel and food prices and hoping he will "jump off the end of the pier", but in Southwold this week I met nobody so unkind. They worried about his privacy.

On a good day, Southwold's beach is well-populated. Would his children be left alone to dig in the sand? Would he and Mrs Brown be left in peace to paddle with them? Would detectives fend off the over-curious onlooker and Hello magazine? People said: "Poor man! I feel sorry for him", conflating their sense of the prime minister as a political tragedy with a more local concern about where on their coastline he might be left alone to behave like an ordinary British father in August.

Covehithe was one suggestion. It lies a few miles north of the town, where Suffolk is crumbling into the sea and the beach is protected by eroding, but private, farmland. In the bar of Southwold's Sole Bay Inn I overheard a different speculation. "I think he'll go to Walberswick," a man in a linen jacket was telling his friends. "All those people there are well in with Brown." I never found out what he meant by that, and when I met novelist Esther Freud, who has a house in Walberswick, she was also nonplussed. Perhaps they'd confused her husband, actor David Morrissey, who played Brown to Michael Sheen's Blair in the television play The Deal, with the man himself.

"Fashionable" is an irritating word and Southwold people rather bristle at it. Jonathan Adnams, the chairman of Southwold's brewery, insisted that Southwold as a holiday resort had never not been fashionable: in the 19th century it was the place that "more senior management" came when their workers were packing the boarding houses of Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth.

Steamers from London called at the pier then, and a branch line connected the town to expresses at the inland junction of Halesworth. Several grand hotels lined the promenade. Neither the steamships nor the railway survived the 1920s; the grand hotels were demolished or turned into flats; the summer crowds dwindled after the war.