‘OH! I DO like to be beside the seaside, I do like to be beside the sea…’

Written in 1907, the popular British music hall song was made famous by music hall singer Mark Sheridan who sings of his love for the seaside, and his wish to return there for his summer holidays every year.

It was composed at a time when visits to the seaside were booming. Families, in particular those living in towns and cities looked forward to days out when they would take buckets, spades and picnics to resorts like Scarborough, Morecambe, Skegness and Margate.

More than a century later, ask anyone if they love to be beside the sea and, unless you’re allergic to sand and salt water, almost all will answer, without hesitation, “Yes!”

The seaside has for decades been a magnet for families from all social backgrounds. For children, if there is a day at the beach on offer, anything else pales in comparison.

Growing up, my daughters loved the seaside. So much so that for ten years in a row, we took them every year for our summer holiday to Sandsend near Whitby, where they spent the week rooting around in rock pools, looking for fossils under the cliffs, burying each other in sand, swimming in the sea and eating ice cream.

For me too, the seaside was very much part of my childhood. Throughout the year we made regular trips to the coast.

But while most of us have memories of wriggling out of wet swimsuits without the towel slipping, of standing on the last ramparts of a sandcastle as the incoming tide reclaims it, and of ice creams melting down our hands as we carried them across a hot beach, almost a fifth of today’s children have not set foot on a UK beach.

A survey by Keep Britain Tidy also found that a quarter of youngsters have never been swimming in seas around Britain.

The abandonment of buckets and spades is blamed by parents on bad weather, unclean water, litter and concerns about dog dirt. Two in five parents worry the water is not clean enough and 38 per cent are put off by litter.

When we were young we did not give a hoot as to whether the water was clean. Back then there were no stewardship schemes like Blue Flag or Seaside Awards, we just took pot luck and, thankfully, didn’t suffer any ill effects. We were perhaps naïve, but we were more worried about jellyfish than pollution.

British beaches and are a lot cleaner today than in my youth. Under tough EU bathing water rules - which I hope remain after Brexit - we have been forced to clean up our act. In the early 1990s just 28 per cent of coastal and inland bathing waters met the top standards, now it is 93.2 per cent.

All it takes to check on the cleanliness of a beach is a click of a mouse, and, from this month, quite rightly, dogs are banned in summer from many popular beaches across the UK.

I am not deriding the survey results, but don’t think parents are being entirely honest as to the reasons why they are not taking their children for days out to the coast.

I’m inclined to think it’s less about concerns for cleanliess than a reflection of our times, when both parents and youngsters are spending more and more hours in front of computer screens.

Sadly, in many households, the only surfing they are likely to do is on the web. They are missing out. Today, a Bank Holiday, if the weather suits, and if humanly possible, families should head out until they spot that blue (or grey) horizon, and feel the sand between their toes.