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Beautiful UK beach with crystal-clear water unleashes brutal £100 warning

Beautiful UK beach with crystal-clear water unleashes brutal £100 warning

Daily Mirror28-07-2025
A popular stretch of coast renowned for its sugar-like sand and cobalt waters is cracking down on two common tourist activities - which now risk fines of up to £100 or £1,000 if you're taken to court
A 'glorious' slice of the UK coast has unveiled a major tourist clampdown ahead of the busy summer holidays. Situated in the idyllic Dorset National Landscape, and boasting four miles of pristine beach framed by rugged dunes and lush cliffs, lies the acclaimed Studland Bay.

Often touted as a 'tropical paradise' due to its sugar-like sand and crystal-clear waters, the hotspot wouldn't look out of place if it moved over to the picturesque Caribbean. The bay comprises of four beaches: Shell Bay, Knoll Beach, South Beach, and Middle Beach, all of which have been managed by the National Trust since 1982.


But, earlier this year - the Mirror reported on how Dorset Council was mulling over two new Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs) to tackle issues such as wildfires and anti-social behaviour.
Now, Dorset Council has confirmed the extension of its current PSPOs, which will be in place for another three years. These orders clamp down on drinking alcohol in public places, feeding gulls, overnight camping on beaches, lighting of fires and BBQs on open land, as well as 'aggressive begging'.
The council has also extended the overnight camping ban to include Studland Beach, in a move to 'protect the sensitive coastal environment'. Tourists found breaking this rule could be fined up to £100.

It has also expanded restrictions on lighting fires and BBQs to cover additional areas of heathland and forest across Dorset. Again, flouting this PSPO can result in a hefty penalty.
If you pay the fixed penalty notice, the offence is discharged and no further action is taken. However, if the fixed penalty notice is not paid, you may be liable on summary conviction in a Magistrates Court to a fine not exceeding £1,000.

"Renewing our existing PSPOs means continuing the important safeguards that have been in place for several years—protections our residents have told us they value," said Councillor Gill Taylor. "In addition to these renewals, we're introducing two new Orders: one to help preserve the natural beauty and tranquillity of Studland Beach, and another to protect our rare heathland habitats, which are home to some of the UK's most endangered wildlife.
"Dorset should be an enjoyable place for our residents and visitors alike. By working with our partners, these Orders help us to deal with a small minority of people who can spoil it for others."
Shaun Milton of Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service, also welcomed the move - reminding Brits of the 'devastating' Wareham Forest fire in 2020 which destroyed more than 220 hectares of forest and heathland. This is the equivalent of more than 230 football pitches. "Preventing fires before they start is the most effective way to protect lives, property, and the environment," he added.
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Berlin's dark past and me
Berlin's dark past and me

New Statesman​

time2 hours ago

  • New Statesman​

Berlin's dark past and me

The platform was empty. It was a serene scene: the rain had stopped and the air smelled green, the trees showering droplets each time the wind blew. My mother and I carefully stepped around the puddles as we read the plaques on the very edge of the platform. 18.10.1941 / 1251 Juden / Berlin – Lodz. 29.11.1942 / 1000 Juden / Berlin – Auschwitz. 2.2.1945 / 88 Juden / Berlin – Theresienstadt. The Gleis 17 (Platform 17) memorial at Grunewald station on the western outskirts of Berlin commemorates the 50,000 Jews who were deported from the city to concentration camps by the Nazis. There are 186 steel plaques in total, in chronological order, each detailing the number of deportees and where they went. Vegetation has been left to grow around the platform and over the train tracks, 'a symbol that no train will ever leave the station at this track again', according to the official Berlin tourist website. Were we tourists? I wasn't sure. I paused at one plaque in particular: 5.9.1942 / 790 Juden / Berlin – Riga. My great-grandmother, Ryfka, was one of the 790 Jews deported to Riga on 5 September 1942. She was murdered three days later. Her husband, Max, had been arrested and taken as a labourer to the Siedlce ghetto the previous year. In 1942 he was shot and thrown into a mass grave. When I told people we were taking a family trip to Berlin, many brought up Jesse Eisenberg's 2024 film A Real Pain (released January 2025 in the UK), in which Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play mismatched cousins on a tour of Poland, confronting the inherited trauma of their grandmother's Holocaust survival story. But when we first started planning our trip six years ago, that wasn't the idea at all. It wasn't supposed to be about Max and Ryfka. It was about their daughter, my grandmother, Mirjam, and my grandfather, Ali, whom we called Opa. Opa's ancestry enabled us to claim German citizenship. My mother, sister and I started this process in 2017 without really thinking about it. The UK had voted to leave the EU, and Brits with relatives from all over were looking for ways to retain an EU passport. The Global Citizenship Observatory estimates that 90,000 Brits have acquired a second passport from an EU country since 2016, not counting those eligible for Irish citizenship. Article 116(2) of the German Constitution states: 'Persons who surrendered, lost or were denied German citizenship between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds are entitled to naturalisation.' The same applies to their descendants. Mirjam died in 1990, before I was born, and Opa in 2003 – both British and only British citizens. But we had his voided German passport, his birth certificate, the notice of statelessness he'd received when he came to England in 1936. It took two years, but on 3 June 2019, the three of us attended the embassy in Belgravia and were solemnly dubbed citizens of Germany. We received our passports a few weeks later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe My mother wanted to celebrate with a trip to Berlin – the city where her parents grew up, and which my sister and I had never visited. Five years later than planned, thanks to Covid travel bans, we made it, honouring Opa by sweeping through immigration on the passports he had posthumously gifted us. I was prepared for the attempts at schoolgirl German, the arguments over bus timetables, itineraries and whether or not it was acceptable to fare-dodge on the U-Bahn. What I wasn't prepared for was being struck down by tears on a suburban street, faced with the reality of how exactly I had come to be there and what my presence meant. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Photo by Jon Arnold Images Ltd My grandfather's family made it out of Nazi Germany. So did my grandmother and her siblings. Her parents did not. Max and Ryfka were typical middle-class Berliners, owners of a profitable cigarette factory. They had three children: Fanny, Mirjam and Harry. The family lived in a five-storey apartment block with a dramatic art nouveau facade – an open-mouthed deity staring down as residents came and went – on Thomasiusstrasse, on the edge of the Tiergarten city park. Around the corner, in the same affluent neighbourhood, lived the boy who would become my grandfather, Ali. They used to play together as children. Two decades, multiple emigrations and an internment in Canada later, Ali married Mirjam. My mother was born two years later. I know all this thanks to her, her sister and their cousins. A few years before the Brexit vote, they had set out to consolidate everything we know about the family – sifting through documents, photos and letters, sharing recollections of their parents, writing down everything so the story would not be forgotten. I know, for example, that the basement of the house in Thomasiusstrasse was used for meetings of their Zionist youth movement long before emigration became an urgent issue. I know when and how the siblings fled Berlin to what was then British-occupied Palestine: Fanny going first to Denmark in July 1937, then to Palestine in February 1939, where she worked at the first haute couture fashion house in Israel. Mirjam left in April 1936 via a boat from Italy. She studied horticulture before eventually marrying Ali in 1951 and moving to England. Harry arrived in Palestine on 1 September 1937, his 16th birthday. And I know, from the letters we have, how often and how seriously all three urged their parents to sell the cigarette factory and leave Berlin, before it was too late. On the pavement outside the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, set into the cobblestones, gleamed the Stolpersteine. Any visitor to Berlin will find the streets scattered with these 'stumbling stones', small brass plates, each one a memorial to a victim of the Nazis who lived at that address: their name, year of birth, where and when they were killed. The commemorative art project, begun in 1992 by artist Gunter Demnig, has spread across Europe: there now are more than 116,000 stones, in 31 countries. The Stolpersteine for Max and Ryfka were laid in August 2014. My mother and her family attended; a clarinettist played klezmer music. There are eight stones for that single apartment block. The day before we visited, my mother had booked us on a tour of the Jewish quarter. Our guide told us that the aim of the Stolpersteine initiative was to compel confrontation and reflection, causing passers-by to stumble, both figuratively and physically, over this dark period of European history. Berlin is forthright about confronting its past – using art and architecture in innovative ways to do so. At the Holocaust memorial by the Brandenburg Gate, visitors get lost in an unnerving maze of concrete slabs. At the entrance to the Jewish Museum, the floors slope and the walls are set at odd angles, making the space difficult to navigate with confidence. The 'Garden of Exile' just outside the museum, designed by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind to capture the disorientation of the refugee experience, is similarly slanted and boxed in by columns. The day we visited, it was raining again, the uneven cobbles slick and treacherous. The garden was empty. I slipped – and through my perhaps disproportionate tears realised there was a lot more to my new German passport than I had imagined. Everyone knows about the Holocaust. Six million Jews, more than a quarter of a million Gypsies, millions more Poles, Soviets, homosexuals and people with disabilities, systematically exterminated at death camps. I had always known that my family was in some way linked to it all, that the Holocaust was why we were in Britain in the first place, that I wouldn't be here were it not for my maternal grandparents being 'denied German citizenship… due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds'. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the Nazis. Every Jewish family I know has a story: of how their ancestors escaped, and what happened to the ones who didn't. I knew long before I visited Berlin that there is nothing special about my family's history. But I had always seen it as just that: history. The Jewish Museum's core exhibition charts the history of Jews in Germany from medieval times to the present day. The final section looks at descendants of Holocaust victims and refugees who chose to restore their German citizenship – and why they made that decision. Why had I done it? To get an EU passport after Brexit. To make it easier to work abroad one day. To give my future children the option to live anywhere in Europe. To skip the queues at immigration. All valid reasons. And all, suddenly, entirely inconsequential Staring at the memorial plaques on Platform 17, sitting on the steps of the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, losing my footing in the Garden of Exile, I felt myself slot into the narrative, the next chapter of a story that is both unfathomable and at the same time utterly unexceptional. Opa died when I was 12. He was so proud of being British. I never asked him how he would feel about us using the trauma of his past to become German for the sake of convenience. I'd always thought he'd like the idea of us reclaiming his rightful heritage, but in Berlin it seemed less clear. But I do think he would have liked the fact that we were all there in Berlin, on the streets where he and his wife grew up, laughing and crying together, realising our mother-and-daughters getaway had ended up a lot like Eisenberg's A Real Pain after all. The three of us lost in reverie outside the apartment block, picturing my grandmother coming and going. A sign by the door was engraved in looping gothic script. It looked like a memorial plaque. We struggled to decipher first the letters, then the German. Eventually we resorted to Google Translate, and discovered in lieu of the profound message we had expected, a polite request for guests to please wipe their feet. [See also: Rachel Reeves' 'impossible trilemma'] Related

The historic English country estate which is now a hotel with private spa and grand bedrooms
The historic English country estate which is now a hotel with private spa and grand bedrooms

Scottish Sun

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The historic English country estate which is now a hotel with private spa and grand bedrooms

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The historic English country estate which is now a hotel with private spa and grand bedrooms
The historic English country estate which is now a hotel with private spa and grand bedrooms

The Sun

time3 hours ago

  • The Sun

The historic English country estate which is now a hotel with private spa and grand bedrooms

MIDDLETHORPE Hall is arguably one of the hidden gems in the Yorkshire countryside, but still with a taste of the city not too far away. Here's everything you need to know - from room rates to dining options at the hotel's restaurant. 2 Where is the hotel? Just two miles from York city centre, Middlethorpe Hall is a William III country house set in 20 acres of rolling parkland. It is found just an 11 minute drive from York Train Station, so easily accessible. What is the hotel like? If your mates were landed gentry, this would be their country pile. The 29-bedroom National Trust hotel on York's outskirts has the wow factor plus a warm, homely vibe. Think grand wooden staircase, squashy sofas and delightful staff who waved us off with water and biscuits for our trip home. What are the rooms like? No sterile identikit decor here. Expect four posters, quirky antiques and old paintings, but still with the mod cons. If you opt to stay in the main house, you'll be met with a glorious view of the gardens. The range of rooms available includes Courtyard Suites, Courtyard Bedrooms, Cottage and Garden Suites, Main House Bedrooms and Main House Suites. Rooms for two available at £289 per night on a bed and breakfast basis with use of the spa. What is there to eat or drink there? Dine in. The afternoon is fit for royalty- inventive open sandwiches, delicate cakes and an apple and black pudding sausage roll. Dinner was three fine courses, including dick with plum and a fig parfait, in the wood-panelled dining room with roaring fire. My companion, who has both gluten and dairy allergies, was also offered plenty of indulgent choices. No wonder it has two AA Rosettes. What else is there to do at the hotel? The hotel boasts a miniature spa complex on site, with a pool, sauna, steam room and other spa treatments available, as well as the walled garden to relax in whilst you take in the countryside. You are also well-placed for York's sights and shops, with the racecourse also just a few minutes away. It is a picturesque place to take a walk on a sunny day. The hotel also offers connections to multiple tours in and around York, including The bespoke private walking tours in York and the Downton Abbey film locations in Yorkshire tour. For more information, click here. Is the hotel family friendly? Yes, the hotel welcomes families with children aged 6 and over for a stay at the hotel, and aged 8 and over in the spa during specified swimming times. Dogs are also welcome in select rooms. Is the hotel accessible? Yes, Middlethorpe aims to be as inclusive as possible, and where not possible due to extenuating circumstances, they will endeavour to offer a suitable alternative. Looking for a place to stay? For more hotel inspiration click here. 2

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