Summer 2009
Ice-Cream Sunday
Happily, we have the Vauxhall Zafira VXR at our disposal today – so it’s a double whammy for my budding-car-nut kids; a day at the beach with an ice-cream bias and stylish, seven-seat speedy transportation. Who could ask for anything more?
We won’t need more than four seats today, which means the middle-row seat base can be slid all the way astern to maximise legroom, the centre seat back folded flat to form a convenient table with cupholders between the boys, and the copious loadspace laden with the baffling quantity of… well, stuff that always seems to accompany any family to the beach. Given that map reading invariably elicits a massive row at some stage of any journey involving my family, what we will need is the dulcet tones of the satellite navigation system guiding us directly to our destination.
We’ve never been to Broadstairs before, so it’s something of a relief for boys armed with diggers to see that, unlike so many south-eastern seaside towns blighted by knobbly, bare-feet-unfriendly shingle, Viking Bay washes onto a beach of perfect sand.Once the fishing village of Bradstow, Broadstairs’ stock in trade for centuries was shipbuilding. By the early 19th Century the last keel had been laid, but within 40 years the arrival of the railway established the town as an ideal holiday destination, even luring Charles Dickens away from London to pen Bleak House here.
Today, that status remains undiminished by the intervening years; tiers of brightly-coloured beach huts still line the sand at the bottom of the town’s chalk cliffs and, at the eastern end of the bay, a small pier offers a small shoal of pleasure boats brief sanctuary from the worst of English Channel weather.
Atop the cliffs, behind a swathe of traditional Victorian seaside gardens complete with bandstand, Victoria Parade plays host to Morelli’s, a classic (and retro-style) ice-cream parlour.
The Morelli family has been making ice cream for five generations. The trademark family recipe was introduced to the UK over a century ago in 1907, when Italian immigrant Guiseppe Morelli started selling it, as far afield as Scotland, from his bicycle. The original Morelli’s ice-cream parlour was opened here by his son, Mario, in 1932. It was redecorated in 1957 and, trapped in a delicious pink and wicker time-warp, still exists in its original ’50’s grandeur today, lording over the parade like a flamingo amongst herring gulls.
Behind the neon-lit façade lurk chewing-gum pink leatherette banquettes, dainty white Lloyd Loom chairs, a juke box, an original soda fountain out of which my younger cannot keep his fingers (sorry), highly lickable ice-cream-cone light fittings and an extraordinary pink cut-out suspended from the ceiling like the giant plastic web of Barbie’s pet spider. A seriously cool room for a seriously hot day.
