Top 10 British Seaside Summer Movies

Straying off the mainland, Joanna Hogg transports the audience to Tresco in the Isles of Scilly for this follow-up to Unrelated (2007), her acclaimed debut study of Brits in Tuscany. Proving once again how uncharming and indiscreet the bourgeoisie can be, this unsettlingly intimate chamber drama follows Kate Fahy and children Tom Hiddleston and Lydia Leonard to a cosy cottage to enjoy some time together before Hiddleston leaves to do voluntary service in Africa. Despite the painting lessons, picnics and bicycle rides through the glorious coastal scenery, however, tensions start to rise as Leonard allows the pent-up frustrations of what she perceives to have been a second-fiddle childhood to spill over. With Ed Rutherford's static camera kept at arm's length and plenty going on off screen and between the lines of the semi-improvised dialogue, this is not for the squeamish.

A seaside towerblock becomes tantamount to a gulag in Pavel Pawlikowski's damning indictment of British attitudes to asylum seekers. Detained at the airport after her fiancé jilts her, Muscovite illustrator Dina Korzun and her 10-year-old son, Artiom Strelnikov, are dispatched to the rundown resort of Stonehaven and informed that it will take 12-16 months for the Home Office to process their application. Short on options and strapped for cash, Korzun is forced to rely on bingo caller Paddy Considine and wheeler-dealer Steve Perry, who runs a cybersex site. With cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski picking out the drab greys and chilly blues to deglamorise the Margate settings, this unflinching insight into life beyond the margins is not without its moments of bleak humour and audacious authenticity, as Perry is a real-life entrepreneur who operates under the name Ben Dover.

The multi-story format employed in Holiday Camp is condensed into a day trip scenario in the landmark treatise on culture, racism, commitment, honour, duty, chauvinism, sacrifice and acclimatisation that enabled Gurinder Chadha to become the first British Asian woman to direct a UK feature. Meera Syal's screenplay even includes a plotline about an unplanned pregnancy and replaces the bathing beauties with some male strippers, as a busload of Brummie women travel to Blackpool without the menfolk who limit their horizons. But, while the social landscape might have changed beyond all recognition over the 56 years separating the two films, human nature has remained the same. Thus, there's a universality about the topics and taboos, as the women work towards solutions to the domestic abuse, sexual curiosity, spiritual malaise and feelings of unfulfillment that have variously been blighting their lives.

Any notions that the 1952 remake of Hindle Wakes was outdated are confounded by David Leland's snapshot of parochial postwar provincial life, which is set on the Sussex coast in the year before Arthur Crabtree's film was released. Drawing on the youth of Cynthia Payne - the madam whose infamous exploits inspired Terry Jones's Leland-scripted Personal Services (1987) - Leland exposes the hypocrisy of a society that insists that men and women should be judged by different moral standards. He also pokes fun at British attitudes to sex and deference, as 16-year-old Lynda Mansell (remarkable first-timer Emily Lloyd) sets out to sample everything life has to offer in order to escape the tedium of her conservative seaside existence. The Esplanade in Bognor looks splendid as Lynda cycles along, as does Marine Parade in Worthing, where she works as a waitress.

Intriguing comparisons can be made between the 25th entry in Pinewood's long-running comedy series and Val Guest's social drama, The Beauty Jungle (1964), especially as Sidney James appears in both. He cameos as a judge at Butlin's in Minehead in Guest's seedy saga about typist Janette Scott venturing into the beauty contest business after reporter Ian Hendry spots her competing in a cheesy pageant while holidaying in Weston-Super-Mare. But in Gerald Thomas's bawdy romp, Sid's the brains behind the jamboree intended to bring more visitors to the backwater resort of Fircombe. The spirit of saucy postcard maestro Donald McGill proves alive and well as the innuendo-strewn scenario unfolds, while the clash between the scantily-clad contestants and the women's libbers led by rival councillor June Whitfield culminates in a go-kart chase that was filmed on the West Pier in Brighton.

Bognor Regis stood in for the resort of Piltdown in Tony Hancock's second and last starring attempt to translate his radio and television popularity into film fame. Writing with Philip Oakes, Hancock drew on his memories of growing up in Bournemouth's Durlston Court Hotel and his unhappy marriage to model Cicely Romanis for the story of a beach entertainer whose gift shop-owning wife (Sylvia Syms) arranges for him to perform for the socialite (Barbara Murray) who has been invited by the council to switch on the illuminations at the town's 60-year gala. Preferring the company of fellow outsiders like sand sculptor John Le Mesurier and photographer Mario Fabrizi, Hancock's reluctance to grow up and face up to his responsibilities is drolly captured in his contest with a small boy (Nicholas Webb) to consume ice-cream sundaes known as Piltdown Glories.

Having introduced John Osborne's state-of-the-nation play at the Royal Court in April 1957, director Tony Richardson decided to film it in Morecambe, the Lancashire seaside town where his parents lived. The fading grandeur of the Alhambra and Winter Gardens theatres provided the perfect setting for Laurence Olivier to embody the postwar decline that Osborne dubbed 'the ashes of old glory'. Betraying his old trouper father (Roger Livesey), his alcoholic wife (Brenda De Banzie) and his dutiful daughter (Joan Plowright), the morally and financially bankrupted star of a seedy girlie show entitled Stars and Strips is prepared to do anything to finance his next project. But, while Olivier's admirers were taken aback by the lairiness of his performance, he frankly admitted, 'I have an affinity with Archie Rice. It's what I really am. I'm not like Hamlet.'

There are two holiday destinations for the price of one in Arthur Crabtree's 40th anniversary adaptation of Stanley Houghton's 1912 play. Hindle mill hand Jenny Hawthorn (Lisa Daniely) might set off for Blackpool with her best friend, Mary (Sandra Dorne), but she is quickly lured to Llandudno by boss's son Alan Jeffcote (Brian Worth). However, while she's sampling the delights of the Great Orme, Mary perishes in a boating accident and Jenny's parents (Leslie Dwyer and Joan Hickson) catch her in a lie that causes a scandal in their class-conscious town. Although Lisa Daniely's cut-glass accent means this is never as authentic as Victor Saville's 1931 version, social convention remained sufficiently rigid for a story about a working girl illicitly sleeping above her station to ruffle feathers. Moreover, Geoffrey Faithfull's seaside views are still splendidly atmospheric and irresistibly nostalgic.

Inspired by the activities of the Sabini racetrack gang, Graham Greene's 1937 novel chillingly captures the seamy side of the seaside and his screenplay for this classic Boulting brothers noir retains that sense of the sinister in the everyday. Reprising the role of teenage mobster Pinkie Brown that he had played on stage to Greene's disapproval, Richard Attenborough seethes with malevolent arrogance, as he dispatches an old foe on the ghost train and cynically dates the waitress (Carol Marsh) who could blow his alibi. However, Pinkie fails to recognise the threat posed by Ida Arnold (Hermione Baddeley), a Pierrot performer-turned-amateur sleuth, who literally pursues him to the end of the pier. The ensemble playing is as exceptional as Harry Waxman's brooding photography, while the blade-wielding violence and emotional cruelty that shocked postwar audiences remain deeply unsettling seven decades on.

Echoing Carol Reed's Bank Holiday (1939) in its use of multiple storylines, Ken Annakin's feature debut Holiday Camp reveals his documentary background, as it explores some of the problems facing the postwar population. In many ways, this juxtaposition of individual issues and collectivist spirit could be seen as a 'woman's picture', as key characters include a spinster still mourning her lost beau from the Great War (Flora Robson), the war-widowed single mother (Hazel Court), the mithered matriarch (Kathleen Harrison), a pair of husband seekers (Yvonne Owen and Esma Cannon) and a pregnant outcast (Jeannette Tregarthen). Yet, despite the presence of card sharps and a serial killer, the guests at Farleigh camp (actually Butlin's at Filey) are encouraged to have fun, with the various sing-songs, beauty contests and parades laid on to ensure they have a 'holiday with play'.