The Oyster Smack Inn

Not so much a pub these days as a restaurant with rooms, The Oyster Smack Inn isn't a bad place to head for if you want to get out of London for the weekend, situated in the unspoilt seaside-cum-riverside town of Burnham-on-Crouch in a part of Essex that feels quite cut off from the rest of the Southeast. You don't need to bring the car as it's only an hour by train from London Liverpool Street,making it a good, eco-friendly break too.

The Oyster Smack has 10 rooms in all – 5 above the restaurant and 5 in the chalets outside. and they are all nicely furnished and provided with tea, coffee and biscuits, Freeview TVs and decent bathrooms with powerful showers, toiletries and fluffy towels. A couple of rooms have a bath/shower combined and one of the more spacious ‘Superior’ rooms in the main building has a separate bath and shower. Dogs are welcome in the rooms but not in the restaurant, where they serves god, unpretentious food focused on local fish and seafood as well as crowd-pleasers like steak, burgers and pork belly, as well as fish and veggie sharing platters.

Almost literally at the end of the line, Burnham on Crouch feels a bit frozen in time, but that is part of its appeal – workaday waterfront town with a short high street of mostly independent shops and white clapboard houses that leads to the oozy mud and seagulls of the river. It’s popular with boating folk but is not a tourist place, for sure, but you can wander along the many footpaths, both coastal and inland; take seal and wildlife trips that poke about among the nearby coastal creaks and islands; and best of all get out to the little-known Dengie peninsula, a historic yet forgotten corner of England with an amazing 7th century chapel built on the site of a Roman fort.