What are Nude Beaches in the UK Really Like?

Honestly, we had no idea what to expect. For years, people from all around the UK had been sending us messages asking when we would finally cross the channel. We always found a reason not to. The high cost of living, the unpredictable weather, and the pandemic kept pushing us to places like Spain and France. Countries that we know and where we’re certain that we can make good content.

The purchase of Scarlet, our camper van, changed everything. By being able to stealth camp and cook most of our own food, the financial aspect wasn’t much of an issue anymore. If the weather would turn against us, at least we would be sleeping in a tin can instead of a canvas tent. Especially the latter proved to be a huge advantage because during the first 4 days of our UK adventure we were greeted by a slight but consistent drizzle.

As much of this had been last-minute decisions, we weren’t very well prepared. Only a few days before we would board the ferry, we had a look on the internet to see whether we could find a nude beach or two in the UK. Much to our surprise, the website of British Naturism showed more than 50 of them. Most could be found in southern England, the area we were planning to visit. Earlier, we had wondered whether we would find enough places to get naked to write and make videos about, now we had to worry about how we would visit all these beaches during the limited time we had planned.

In addition to these 80 beaches, technically any other beach can be considered a nude beach as well because what few people know is that the British laws are pretty nude-friendly. Actually, they are very similar to those in Denmark or Spain. As long as you get naked in appropriate places (read: On beaches or other natural areas but not on Oxford Street) and you have no intention to shock people, it’s totally legal. But legal doesn’t always mean socially accepted.

After spending a lot of time in Spain, we know exactly how these nude-friendly laws work. Although it is legal to be naked on any beach, you better stay away from the very popular ones. Many Spanish may not be aware that it’s allowed to be nude, and then there are the millions of tourists who are totally oblivious about what’s allowed and what not. To avoid trouble, we just avoid the crowds and we never had any issues on the less-packed beaches.

But just because it’s like this in Spain, doesn’t mean that we could apply our strategy in the UK as well. The British are often pictured as rather conservative and we had no idea how people would react if they walked the dog to the far end of the beach and suddenly ran into a naked couple.

On a sunny afternoon, we headed towards Carlyon Bay Beach, the first official nude beach in Cornwall. The main beach was packed with bathing suits but according to our information, there should be a nude section at the far end. This side of the beach was definitely less crowded, but none of the people there were naked. In the centre of what was supposed to be the nude section was a family with a handful of kids.

We could imagine the headline already: “Belgian exhibitionists shock British family”. So we started climbing rocks and wading through the sea until we found an empty cove. We got naked, but the thought of shocking unknowing passersby never slipped our minds. Only when we returned to the main beach, we realised that the local naturists had not yet arrived earlier that day. The family was still there, but around them we counted at least 10 naked people.

At the next beaches we visited, we found something very similar. There would be naked people and clothed people and nobody cared about the other. It almost seemed like a perfect world and very similar to what we knew from Spain. The British were definitely not as prude as we had imagined. But then we went to Portsmouth.

Our map showed a nude beach in the Eastney neighbourhood, in the very south of the city. As soon as we arrived in the late afternoon, we could see that this was a very urban beach, packed with people who wanted to soak up a bit of sun after work. When we started walking towards where the nude section was supposed to be, we passed by a part of the beach that appeared to be popular among people with diverse cultural backgrounds. Many looking Middle Eastern or Central Asian.

We really want to avoid sounding racist here, because we are everything but. Yet, when we watched them wading into the sea wearing long trousers and t-shirts, we couldn’t help but wonder how this could match with a nude beach that was supposed to be just a few meters further. But there it was, a reasonably large section of the beach with several tens of naked people.

From time to time we hear people blaming immigrants for the disappearance of nude beaches. Now we know what to reply to them: “Go to Portsmouth and you’ll see that they can, almost literally, live hand in hand”.

By now, we had visited about ten nude beaches in the UK and on all of them, we had found some naked people. Never the great masses and often quite spread, but England definitely proved to be more nude than we had ever expected. And that was before we went to Studland Nude Beach.

Friends had told us that we better arrive early. On a sunny summer day, best between 8 and 9 am. We found that hard to imagine and showed up by 9:30. Thanks to someone who just drove away, we were lucky to get one of the last parking spots. Unlike at the other nude beaches we had been to, where we often had to trust the internet to know where to find the nude section, at Studland it couldn’t be more obvious. All along the trail to the beach, every several meters we would see a sign telling us that we were likely to encounter naked people. What the sign didn’t warn us about though was how many there would be.

This was a beautiful summer day in August, the main holiday month for the British, but it was a Monday morning at 9:30 am and we kid you not, there were at least 1000 naked people. It felt as if all of England had come down to prove to us how nude the UK can really be. If that was the case, it totally worked.

We like to believe that because we’ve been to so many places in the world, we have a broader view of things than people who don’t travel. In the UK, we learned that even long-time travellers can have completely wrong prejudices about the places they haven’t been to yet. The UK was more nude than we had ever imagined and we wondered what had kept us so long from coming here.