The seaside is where British documentary photography keeps returning: Tony Ray-Jones in the 1960s, Martin Parr's saturated beach work in the 1980s, and countless projects since. The ingredients have not changed — leisure taken seriously, sunburn and windbreaks, chips against grey skies, the gap between the postcard and the reality.

The Essex coast gives you all of it under an hour from Fenchurch Street. This is not landscape photography with a sea view: the subject is people, and the coast concentrates them into photographable ribbons — the promenade, the pier, the arcade doorways, the seafood stalls.

Marine Parade — the Golden Mile — is roughly half a mile of amusement arcades, food outlets and illuminated signage, and it is the densest street photography on the Essex coast. Shoot the arcade interiors (machine-light on faces), the doorways where the neon spills onto the pavement, and the seafront wall where day-trippers eat chips in all weathers.

Southend Pier is the longest pleasure pier in the world, extending over 1.3 miles into the Thames Estuary — first built in 1830, rebuilt in iron in 1889. Walking it puts you in the middle of the estuary with fishermen, the pier railway and enormous skies; from the end, the town compresses into a single photographable strip.

Adventure Island, beside the pier, began life in 1918 as the Sunken Gardens and grew into the amusement park it is today from the mid-1970s. It is private property, so treat it as a backdrop from the public seafront rather than a location to work inside.

Two stops down the line, Leigh-on-Sea is the counterweight to Southend's noise. Old Leigh — the historic wharf below the town — still has working cockle sheds, fishing boats on the mud at low tide, and a narrow cobbled high street of former fishermen's cottages. It is quieter, slower and better in soft light: early morning before the pubs open, or late afternoon when the low sun crosses the estuary.

The walk between Chalkwell station and Old Leigh along the seafront is a picture in itself at low tide, when boats sit stranded on a mile of mud and the light bounces off wet flats. Winter is arguably the season here: the crowds are gone, the melancholy is honest, and the arcade lights come on at four in the afternoon.

Work the gap between intention and reality: the fun being had grimly, the formal wear on the beach, the seagull negotiation. Colour is the tradition's language — saturated signage, ice-cream pastels, high-vis against grey sea — so this is a location to shoot in colour even if you normally work in black and white.

Exposure is the technical challenge: seafront light is brutal, bouncing off water and pale concrete. Sunny 16 works perfectly here, and slight underexposure keeps the colour dense instead of washed out. Wind is the other constant — keep your shutter speed up.