At last, after several months of great weather the BBC South East News team came to Camber last Friday, August 7, as I had sent an email to the news team to argue the case that while our local TV often mentions towns and cities with popular beaches (like Brighton or Margate) that have a problem with a total overload of tourists, a small village that happens to have an iconic and wonderful beach (and gets the same overload) is never mentioned.
And at 9am last Friday, it was almost too late for the interviewer and cameraman to even get into the car park and, such is the popularity of Camber Sands, that by 9:30am or 9:45am Camber's central and its overflow car park were full.
I began the interview with a mention of the Camber Action Group, started because (and I quote) “it looked as though the situation was likely to continue in perpetuity unless someone did something about it”.
That, I am sad to say, has been Camber’s position for decades and that is why Camber Action Group was started with myself, John Parsons and Jimmy Hyatt. Camber Parish Council already do a very good job of looking after our village with John Bradford as chair and the other councillors but we, as a group, simply want to ensure the actual implementation of plans to stop the total invasion of vehicles and end the parking madness that happens.
Those plans would include the addition of double yellow lines to more streets and roads and the most important thing of all - traffic wardens - to issue a high penalty fee and very possibly sanction the removal of vehicles deemed to be parking exceptionally badly, for example in front of emergency access points.
John Parsons and I talked for about 10 minutes on the turmoil that happens and about how the elderly and vulnerable were affected by this tsunami of people into our village with just under 600 residents.
This was, unfortunately, cut down to a much shorter airing time on the evening of August 7 at 6:30 pm (because of the lack of social distancing, concerns about drownings and an impending "beach party", which actually moved to nearby Greatstone) but I think we both got our case across that Camber suffers as much as, if not more than, Brighton or Eastbourne.
