Why huts are hot property

Brits have rediscovered the unadulterated joys of an old-fashioned bucketand-spade holiday, and everything that comes with it: the sand which gets in the sandwiches, the dive-bombing seagulls, the glistening sea – enticing regardless of its temperature.

Dotted along the shoreline are the newly appreciated jewels in the coast’s crown: beach huts. These unassuming little structures are enjoying something of a renaissance after two years of travel restrictions. “There was a 50% increase in website traffic in 2020 compared with 2019,” says Charlie Ramsay, founder and executive chairman of SpeedyBooker, the technology platform behind BeachHuts.com.

Having been all the rage in the interwar years and after World War II, the beach hut languished in the holiday doldrums, a casualty of the air travel boom towards the end of the 20th century. As foreign holidays became more affordable, the humble hut conjured visions of being buffeted by the elements while gazing out to sea forlornly through drizzle, cradling a flask of tea and sharing a damp sandwich and gristly sausage roll, before going inside to wrestle