Six AM one Sunday morning last summer something was posted through our letter box. I remember thinking how strange it was that someone should be out and about at that time. After all, there’s no milk or post delivered on a Sunday, the papers don’t arrive til after breakfast and our leafy suburb isn’t the kind of place revellers stagger through on their way home from all-night parties. On rising we discovered that the British Nationalist Party had delivered leaflets canvassing votes for the upcoming local elections. Reading through the leaflet there was nothing particularly unusual about what they had to say, just the usual stuff that politicians go on about, lack of services for the poor and elderly, the state of the health service, all that sort of stuff. You don’t have to take much of an interest in politics to know that this particular party’s solution to all our countries ills is to send home all immigrants and asylum-seekers back to where they came from. Being a descendent of Huguenot refugees myself and married to a Canadian whose family emigrated from Eastern Europe in search of a better life, they don’t get my vote.

I hope you enjoy my picture of a British family enjoying a trip to the Seaside.

In the good old days when life was lived in black and white, women didn’t have careers and there was no such thing as social mobility. People knew their place and were content with their lot, but the times they were a changin’ and people wanted to see the world in glorious technicolour. In the Sixties people turned on, tuned in, and dropped out of conventional society to explore new ways to live.

At the beginning of the Seventies all seemed hunky dory, but before long we were working a three day week and attempts to give HRH’s subjects something to cheer about were rudely disrupted by the explosion of punk. Labour plainly wasn’t working.

The class system was smashed down in the Eighties, often literally. Council houses were sold off, financial strait-jackets were cast aside and money trickled down from the rich to the poor (that’s the theory, at least). What we had we stone-clad. What we aspired to were Filofaxes, Porsches, penthouses on Canary Wharf and Phil Collins on the Walkman. We were no longer a nation of shopkeepers, but a nation of house owners.

But then Blue Monday turned into Black Wednesday. In the Nineties we nervously watched our mortgage interest rates soar whilst our pension funds jumped overboard and drowned. The lucky ones compared notes at dinner parties on how well they were doing on the property ladder; the canny ones seeked alternative sources of retirement income as buy-to-let landlords. For a while we channelled our efforts into improving our living spaces, for an Englishman’s castle is his home. Friends mucked in to landscape gardens and impose their own personalities on neighbours’ living rooms, all in the name of light entertainment.

In the high-definition Noughties luxury apartment blocks rise from the ground whilst loopholes are exploited to avoid providing affordable housing. When I were a lad these were all brownfield sites. The fallout from the break up of the Nuclear Family resulted in high levels of single occupancy dwellings. Plasma no longer courses through our veins but is wall-mounted. We obsess about location, location, paying off our mortgage in two years and chance our luck at property development as a way to make a fast buck.

The people in the picture are heading out of town.