Queensmead: IELTS General Training Reading practice test

Mondays 18.30 to 20.30, twelve weeks, £130. No previous knowledge is assumed and the class is taught almost entirely in Italian from the third week onwards. The course book costs £16 and is purchased at the first session; it is not covered by the fee. Numbers are limited to fourteen so that everybody speaks in every class.

Tuesdays 18.00 to 21.00, ten weeks, £220. The fee includes entry to the external examination held in January, which would otherwise cost £45. You will need a laptop for each session; a small number are available to borrow for the evening, but this must be requested when you enrol rather than on the night.

Wednesdays 13.00 to 16.00, eight weeks, £185. Bring a small chair or stool of your own to work on. The tutor holds a free open evening on 3 September at which she will look at your piece and say whether it is suitable for a first course. Fabric, webbing and tacks are charged separately at what they cost us.

Thursdays 18.30 to 20.30, twenty weeks across two terms, £260, which may be paid in two instalments in September and January. Students must attend at least eighty per cent of sessions in order to be entered for the assessment at the end. Deaf tutors teach all levels of this course.

Saturdays 10.00 to 13.00, six weeks, £95. The course is open to everyone and no writing needs to be submitted in advance. It has been oversubscribed in each of the last three years, and where there are more applicants than places the group is chosen by drawing lots. Everybody who applies is told the outcome by 10 September.

Fridays 18.00 to 20.00, six weeks, £80. Please note that this course is taught at the Queensmead Motor Centre on Fairfield Road and not at the main building. Overalls and gloves are provided, but steel toe-capped boots must be your own and you will not be admitted to the workshop without them. Eight places only.

This is a defined contribution scheme, which means that what you eventually receive depends on what has been paid in and how the investments have performed, rather than on a formula based on your salary. You contribute five per cent of your qualifying earnings and the company contributes eight per cent, rising to ten per cent once you have completed five years of service. You may pay in more than five per cent at any time, although the company contribution does not increase if you do.

You are enrolled automatically from your first pay date; nothing needs to be signed. If you decide the scheme is not for you, you may opt out within one month of enrolment and everything deducted will be refunded with your next salary. Opting out after that point stops future contributions but leaves what has already been paid invested until you reach retirement.

Contributions go into the default fund unless you choose otherwise. The default has been selected for members who do not wish to make investment decisions, and it moves gradually into lower-risk assets over the ten years before the retirement date you have given us. Eleven other funds are available, and you may switch between them twice a year without charge.

An annual management charge of 0.35 per cent of the value of your pot is taken, deducted in monthly instalments rather than as a single sum. There is no charge for making contributions, none for transferring another pension into the scheme, and none for the first two switches between funds in any year.

Contributions attract tax relief at your marginal rate, which is applied automatically through payroll. There is an annual limit on the total that may be paid into all of your pensions with tax relief, and a tax charge applies above it. Monitoring this is your responsibility rather than ours, and it matters particularly if you hold a pension from a previous employer.

The pot belongs to you and is unaffected by leaving the company. You may leave it where it is, move it into a new employer's scheme, or transfer it to a personal pension. It cannot be taken as cash before the minimum pension age set by law, with one exception: where a member is in serious ill health, early access may be permitted on production of medical evidence.

The seaside holiday began as a medical treatment. In the middle of the eighteenth century a physician in Sussex published a book recommending seawater, taken both externally and internally, for a long list of complaints, and the fashionable sick began arriving at a fishing village called Brighthelmstone to be immersed. The bathing machine, a hut on wheels that was rolled into the shallows so that the occupant could enter the water unseen, was equipment for a prescription rather than for a pleasure. Resorts were built around this business, with assembly rooms and lodging houses, and for about eighty years the seaside was a place one went to be cured.

The second invention was the excursion train. From the 1840s railway companies discovered that a cheap return ticket on a Sunday could fill carriages that would otherwise be idle, and within twenty years working populations of the industrial towns were reaching the coast in numbers that alarmed the residents. Blackpool served Lancashire, Southend served the East End of London, Margate and Ramsgate served the rest, and a day at the sea became the first holiday that a factory worker could afford. What had been a health resort for a few hundred people became a mass destination for hundreds of thousands, and almost everything now regarded as traditional about the English seaside was built to serve that market.

Paid holiday completed the transformation. Legislation passed in 1938 established the principle that a week away should be paid for, and though the war delayed its effect, the decade that followed was the high point of the British resort. Whole towns in the north closed for a week at a time as the mills shut, and the same families returned to the same boarding houses in the same week each year, a pattern regular enough that a landlady could plan a decade ahead.

What that produced was an extraordinary quantity of building: something approaching a hundred piers, of which about half survive; winter gardens, ballrooms and theatres of a size a town of twenty thousand people would never otherwise support; miles of promenade; and street upon street of boarding houses designed for a season. All of it was sized for a summer population many times larger than the winter one, and all of it was sized for a market that had no obvious reason to disappear.

It disappeared within fifteen years. From the early 1960s a package of flight, transfer and full board in Spain could be bought for less than a comparable fortnight at home, and it came with a guarantee the English coast has never been able to offer, which is sunshine. Cheap flights extended the effect in the 1990s. The resorts did not lose their visitors all at once, but they lost the fortnight, which was the part of the trade that paid for the buildings. What remained was the day trip and the weekend, which spends less, requires no accommodation and lasts three months of the year.

The boarding houses then did what empty buildings do. Large properties, divided for occupancy and impossible to sell as family homes, became bedsits, and cheap bedsits in a town with no work attracted people with very little money, including many placed there from elsewhere by authorities with housing shortages of their own. This is the point at which the story stops being about holidays. A seaside town has three structural problems that have nothing to do with nostalgia: its employment is seasonal and low-paid; it sits at the end of a transport line with half of its natural catchment under water; and it has a large stock of cheap, subdivided housing. Any inland town with those three features would be in the same position.

Some things have worked, and the evidence about them is worth reading carefully. Several resorts have invested in galleries and cultural venues, and in the best-documented cases visitor numbers, business start-ups and property values have all risen. Whether the gains reached the existing population is contested, and in at least one much-cited case the answer appears to be that they reached some of it. The growth of the short domestic break has helped, as has the arrival of people who can work remotely and who find a large house near a fast train line considerably cheaper by the sea than inland. None of these is a restoration of the old trade. They are different trades occupying the same buildings.

The honest conclusion is that a seaside resort is a town built at scale for a market that ended, which is an unusual predicament but not a mysterious one. Pit villages and mill towns faced the same thing and are not generally discussed in terms of faded glamour. What the seaside has, which those places largely do not, is an inheritance of buildings that people still want to look at and a location that people still want to be in, and a plan that begins from those two facts has a reasonable chance. A plan that begins from the summer of 1955 does not.