Modern Hunstanton was largely the creation of a single person. In 1846, Henry L'Estrange Styleman Le Strange — local landowner, amateur architect, amateur painter — decided to develop the area south of the old village as a bathing resort. He brought investors into a railway project. He commissioned Victorian architect William Butterfield to design the first main building, the Royal Hotel. He drew his own maps and perspectives showing shops, a church, a railway station. He moved the ancient village cross to a new location.

The railway from King's Lynn was complete by 1862. Le Strange died that same year, at 47, before he could see the town take proper shape. His son Hamon inherited the project. The Lynn and Hunstanton Railway became one of the most consistently profitable lines in the country — the resort drew sufficient visitors to make the numbers work year after year. The Victorian architecture Le Strange and Butterfield envisioned still defines the town's character: stone buildings, some with glazed canopies, the 'Old English' style they both favored, rooted in medieval precedents and earnest Gothic Revival.

What makes Hunstanton's cliffs unusual — distinctive enough to have a geological formation named after them — is the layering. The Hunstanton Formation is the type section for a band of reddish limestone laid down in the Lower Cretaceous. Above it sits red chalk limestone from a different period. Above that, white chalk from the Upper Cretaceous. Three distinct geological eras visible in horizontal stripes, the colors stacked like a flag: rust, then rose, then white.

The cliffs hold the remains of St Edmund's Memorial Chapel — a ruined structure where sailors once burned lights to guide ships into The Wash before any lighthouse existed at the headland. The layered chalk and carrstone provide the backdrop to the rock pools where L. P. Hartley's fictional children Eustace and Hilda played in 'The Shrimp and the Anemone' (1944), the Hunstanton neighbourhood transformed into a setting for a novel about class and aspiration.

On the night of 31 January to 1 February 1953, a storm surge flooded the North Sea coast from Scotland to the Thames. At Hunstanton the wall of water killed 31 people — 16 of them United States military personnel and their families stationed in the area. Further south, 35 more died in neighbouring Snettisham and Heacham.

Among the responses to the disaster, a young American airman named Reis Leming entered the floodwaters repeatedly at South Beach and rescued 27 people. The British government awarded him the George Medal. The 1953 floods reshaped both the physical and administrative landscape of this stretch of coast, leading to new flood defences and changes in land use that are still evident today.

Between the wars, P. G. Wodehouse regularly visited his friend Charles Le Strange at Hunstanton Hall. The town and its surroundings left a mark on the Jeeves stories: Aunt Agatha's country seat Woollam Chersey drew on local manor house atmosphere, and the octagon in the garden at Hunstanton Hall appeared directly in 'Jeeves and the Impending Doom.' Norfolk names seeded Wodehouse's character lists — Brancaster, Snettisham, Sheringham Adair.

Patrick Hamilton opened 'Hangover Square' with his protagonist walking the cliffs here. The Princess Theatre — renamed in 1981 for Lady Diana Spencer, who married the Prince of Wales that July — continues to offer year-round performances in a building notable for containing the largest gable wall of Norfolk carrstone in existence. The pier, which Alec Guinness once filmed on for the 1957 comedy 'Barnacle Bill,' is long gone, destroyed by fire and storm across decades and replaced finally by an arcade in 2002. What remains is the town: Victorian squares, a sloping green, and the westward view across The Wash that no other east-coast seaside resort in England can offer.