The Coastal Shift street photography at seaside towns

I grew up in London in the 1980s, when the coast still felt like the nearest kind of escape. A place for quick getaways, for B&B breakfasts, for arcades and sea air and the feeling of being briefly elsewhere. That memory sits quietly in the background each time I return to the Kent shoreline today. The places are different now, but the pull is still the same.

Whitstable, Herne Bay and the Isle of Sheppey share the same sweep of coast, yet each holds its own character. The past is visible in all three, not as a theme or narrative, but simply as part of the landscape. What keeps drawing me back are the traces of industry, the shapes of old infrastructure and the way certain traditions still manage to hold on. Street photography fits naturally into this way of looking, giving space to the unplanned details, the passing faces, the lived-in textures that define a place more quietly than its landmarks do.

Whitstable shows this mix of past and present through the living presence of its oyster trade. For all the contemporary cafés, creative studios and weekend crowds, the harbour still works. The tools, the baskets, the wooden frames and the slow early movements of people who know the tides better than the trends underline a continuity beneath everything new. It is a place where work and leisure sit close enough together that you can often catch both in the same glance.

Herne Bay, though, reveals its character in a far more inviting and distinctive way. It has a softness to it, a friendliness that appears in small details. The tea rooms, for one, are proper ones, not stylised reinventions, with tablecloths, warm chatter and the feeling that nothing in the world needs to happen quickly. Between the seafront and the town centre you find little shops selling locally made gifts, prints, ceramics and pieces of art that feel genuinely tied to the town.

And then there is the antique fair, which gives Herne Bay a kind of unexpected brilliance. Housed in a vast building filled with sixty years of British nostalgia, it feels part market, part museum, part time capsule. Brighton has echoes of this atmosphere, but Herne Bay’s version feels more grounded, less curated. It is the kind of place where a street photographer could spend hours, simply watching the layers of memory drift through the aisles.

Sheppey carries its history differently. The island remains rooted in its working identity, shaped more by practicality than by reinvention. Industrial remnants, old maritime structures, weathered yards and long-standing businesses create an atmosphere that asks to be observed slowly. Street photography here becomes less about moments and more about mood, about the way the island seems to operate on its own terms, separate from the reinvention happening elsewhere along the coast.

Working with film across these towns is simply a way of spending time, slowing down and noticing. The photographs do not follow these observations, and the writing does not attempt to describe what the camera captures. They sit alongside each other as parallel impressions of the same journeys, each formed through its own way of looking.

What becomes clear over time is how present the past still is along this coastline. Whitstable’s oysters continue to shape the life of the harbour. Herne Bay’s charm comes through in its tea rooms, its creative shops and that extraordinary antique fair that feels like a condensed archive of British seaside memory. Sheppey endures with the unfiltered honesty of a place built around work rather than performance.

None of these towns are static. They shift in their own ways, shaped by different pressures and different kinds of resilience. This project keeps returning, not to tell a story, but to see how they feel each time. The coast changes, the towns change and the impressions change with them. The shoreline remains the constant, pulling everything together in its own quiet, persistent way.

An ongoing dbase studio study of Whitstable, Herne Bay and the Isle of Sheppey

Words and film photographs by Chris Dbase