It was somewhere about the beginning of the nineteenth century, contemporaneously with the general rise of seaside resorts, that the invigorating air of Cromer first began to attract attention, and so early as 1806 an anonymous visitor, seeking health here, published Cromer: a Descriptive Poem, a wearisome production of several hundred lines, in blank—very blank—verse. The reader shall be spared his rhapsodies on the sea, but his circuitous description of a taxed cart, typical of his literary method, is not without its unconscious humour:—

If brevity be, indeed, the soul of wit, how witless this laboured effort!

If our poet could but return and his poem were to do again, he would have to wrestle with very changed conditions, and would probably give us something like this:—

And so forth. There is room for lengthy eloquence on the subject.

Cromer has in these later years become the Motor Cad’s Paradise. Here are the gorgeous “hotels” beloved of his little soul, and here the good roads he can render dangerous to others with little risk to himself.

A wide gulf separates the Cromer of that poet’s time and ours, but the change that has taken place is quite recent, and astonishingly sudden. At the close of Georgian days a certain vogue had been established, and a Bath House was built under the cliff. This was washed away during the storm and high tide in 1836, but the “Bath Hotel” of that period, stuccoed, white-painted, midway between cliff-top and sea, remains, together with a few of the early Victorian bay-windowed seaside lodging-houses, small but comfortable, that line the narrow streets near the cliffs’ edge. It was following this great storm of 1836 that the first of Cromer’s defensive sea-walls was built; but the greater storm of 1845 wrecked it and washed away the timber jetty, built in 1822, at a cost of £1,400. What Cromer was like at this period may be judged from the illustration, which clearly shows how, from the picturesque point of view, it has been spoiled.

In those days before railways, sea-borne goods came cheapest to Cromer, on whose sands the cargo-boats of small burden were beached and unloaded between tides. The few houses for the accommodation of summer visitors had not overshadowed the fisher-village, and the narrow streets remained paved, as from time immemorial they had been, with cobble-stones. The great people, locally, of that period were the allied families of Gurneys, Buxtons, and Hoares, of whom the few petty shopkeepers stood so greatly in awe that no visitors could count upon being able to purchase anything until those tradesfolk had made quite certain those grand seigneurs were not likely to require the articles in demand. The railway, which altered all this, was long kept away by the exclusives, but it came at last, and, backed by the sentimental gush of Mr. Clement Scott’s writings on what he was pleased to call “Poppyland,” spoiled Cromer. The public read the articles on “Poppyland,” and fell all over the place. There are those—and among them the present writer—who are sick of the name of “Poppyland,” and for whom Overstrand is spoiled by that much-quoted poem, the “Garden of Sleep,” on which the Great Eastern Railway guide-book writers, and the manufacturers of pictorial post-cards have traded, in and out of season.

The evolution of Cromer from fisher-village to fashionable resort was well on the way in 1892, when Sir Evelyn Baring, who in 1841 was born at the early nineteenth century mansion called Cromer Hall, took the title of Cromer on his being created a Viscount; and the process was completed in the summer of 1901, when the pleasure Pier, constructed at a cost of £43,000, was opened. It replaced the wooden Jetty built at a cost of £6,000, after the storm of 1845, and battered to pieces in 1897. The new Pier, ornamental, and rather alien in appearance, is evidence of Cromer’s determination to be select and to stand aloof from popular vulgarities. Here those who seek the automatic machine shall not find, and no stalls, and no advertisements are permitted. At Cromer, in fact, the higher vulgarity is cultivated, just as at Yarmouth you plumb the depths of the lower variety. The tripper, holiday-making at Yarmouth, who comes over to see what Cromer is like, and finds no whelk and oyster stalls, and no popular entertainments on the sands, thinks it dull; and the average man, wandering along the Lighthouse cliffs in danger of having an eye knocked out by the wealthy and selfish vulgarians who practise golf there, is prone to consider Cromer a fine place, except for the people who frequent it, and for whose benefit the giant hotels facing the sea have been built, and still are building.

Looking upwards from the Pier, you see a long line of these great caravanserai, skirting the cliff-top. The HÔtel de Paris, the HÔtel MÉtropole, and others with titles equally English, astonish the beholder, not only with their appearance on what was until recently the rural Norfolk coast, but also with the rashness that reared such heavy loads of bricks on a seaboard so notoriously storm-swept and on the crest of crumbling cliffs. It does not need a prophet of very great prescience to declare that either disaster must overtake them or the cliffs must, from time to time, be strengthened at enormous cost, to bear the weight. Cromer has been fortunate not to have suffered so much as thought inevitable three hundred years ago, but the cliffs on either side have been eaten away, and have lately suffered, to such an extent, that the land it stands upon will soon be a promontory, in advance of the general coast-line, and must accordingly be more exposed.

Meanwhile, the many-towered steep, whose sky-line is so picturesquely serrated with cupolas and spires, is wonderfully effective when viewed from the beach on some kindly day of hazy effects, when the raw edges of those fire-new hotels are softened down, and imagination is given a chance. Then the sea-front of Cromer is even more charming than it was in Creswick’s time, and has something of the Arabian Nights order of lordliness.

Such is Cromer, whose population is mounting up to 4,000 souls. The beauty of its situation is unquestionable, the purity and bracing qualities of its air proverbial, and the hardiness of its fishermen well known. But (to the great joy of the Great Eastern Railway) it is no longer unspotted from the world, and has become modish and sophisticated. It is a very pretty mode and a coquettish sophistication, and if indeed you do very speedily exhaust Cromer itself—why, then the magnificent hinterland of wild tumbled hills and dark fir-woods is well-nigh inexhaustible. But the solitude and the natural life of the seaboard villages are extinct, even as are those features of Cromer. Summer existence there is like that of the midges and butterflies; gay, without care.

In winter, however, when the holiday folk are gone, its modern status lies heavy, like a shadow, on one: for then the whole place, given over, body and soul, to providing for visitors, is in doleful dumps. This is the dark reverse of that bright summer picture, and the fact that Cromer’s season is only of eight or ten weeks’ duration means many little domestic miseries. To stand in the empty October streets and meet the last bathing machine being drawn up from the deserted beach to winter quarters; to see the restaurants and tea-shops without customers, and cards offering rooms to let in most of the houses, is to realise that a fisher-village on an open coast, without river or harbour, and consequently no trade, cannot suddenly become a resort without a tragical side to its comedy. I stand on the cliff-top as night shuts down over the North Sea, and I have the place wholly to myself. The hotels have switched on their electric lights, but those rooms, so gay and crowded in August, are now for the most part empty. I am sorry for the Cromer that was, and much more sorry for the Cromer that is.