The great escape: How writing a travel feature convinced me to leave the city for the seaside

It’s a fickle job, being a travel writer. You’re compelled to fall in love with a different destination every day, flitting your attention from continent to continent like a bee hopping from flower to flower. You’re selling the idea of a place – whether you’re the one who’s visiting and reporting back on its charms, or commissioning another writer instead and polishing up their own enticing vision.

I’m used to the sensation of getting my head turned by every country, city or town I cover editorially: the Technicolor picture that good writing can conjure means I feel the tingling spray of the sea on my skin, smell the stomach-rumbling scents of spice-laden street food and hear the shrieks of wildlife though heavily humid junglescape – even if I’ve never visited the place in question. Every time, I long to be there; to trade in my well-trodden London life for something fresh and new.

This love is no less real for being fleeting, soon to be displaced by whichever destination is next in line for a moment in the spotlight. After all, how can you expect a reader to buy into the vision if you don’t believe it yourself?

It’s why my most frequent activity when arriving somewhere new is checking the property listings. Within a couple of hours of any given break, I start to believe I could happily live there and begin researching accordingly. This is, of course, a nonsensical pipe dream. Much as I might want to, I physically cannot simultaneously reside in the Isles of Scilly, Rotterdam, the Julian Alps, Marseille, Valencia, Turin, Tangier and Rijeka. My research never translates to reality. Until the one time that it did.

It was 2019 when I first went to Folkestone on a one-day press trip. By the end of that visit – barely six hours in total – I had predictably fallen in love all over again. But this time was different; this time, for some reason, it stuck.

It was the year before the coastal Kent town’s most recent Triennial was scheduled to run – a once-every-three-years event when leading artists from around the world are invited to install public artworks, either temporary or permanent – and we were given a tour that took in striking outdoor works by Richard Woods, Tracey Emin, Yoko Ono, Tim Etchells and Antony Gormley. The vast array of pieces around the town add up to form the UK’s biggest urban exhibition of contemporary art.