Rooms for improvement: new pods pep up an unsung Somerset coastal town

A new arts centre in previously overlooked Watchet offers rooms with a view and wider community benefit. Plus six more UK social enterprises

On a fine weekend evening, locals gather at the harbour in Watchet, west Somerset. Town crier David Milton, dressed in a gilt-trimmed green jacket and tricorn hat, leads the singing: lusty accounts of drunken and lovelorn sailors and maritime glories past. Kids bob on parents’ shoulders and seagulls cast figures-of-eight against the blue-grey horizons of the Bristol Channel, and soft outlines of Wales’s Barry island beyond.

Rather than a nod to the pandemic’s TikTok fad, Watchet’s monthly shanty singalongs are an expression of a proud maritime identity for a town that’s often overlooked by the craft cider suppliers and luxury country cottage-bookers on the West Country holiday circuit.