The town's motto — Mare Ditat Pinusque Decorat, 'The sea enriches and the pine adorns' — was granted in 1953 and reads like a description of the view from the beach. To the north, open North Sea. Behind the town and on the surrounding hillsides, the woodland planted in the 19th century by the Upcher family. Both are still there.

Sheringham's economy began as a fishing station for the village of Upper Sheringham, which sat a little inland. Lower Sheringham, which became the current town, grew around the beach and the catch. In the late 1800s there were perhaps 200 boats working from here, supplying crabs, lobsters, herring, and cod to markets as far as London. The railways made that possible; when the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway arrived in the late 19th century, a fishing town became also a resort. Today eight boats work the beach single-handed. The crab and lobster trade continues.

Most of what visitors see in Sheringham today was built between the arrival of the railway and the end of the Edwardian era. The buildings use flint — common enough in Norfolk — but in a variety of techniques not typical of the county. Knapped flint, split to show a dark glassy face. Pebble flint, rounded and set whole into mortar. Flint mixed with red brick, with gault brick, with render. The town hall, completed in 1912, anchors the centre. Independent shops line the high street. On Saturdays, a market runs in the car park beside the station.

The Church of St Joseph on Cromer Road, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was funded partly by a donation of over £3,000 from Catherine Deterding, wife of the founder of Shell Oil Company, and consecrated in its completed form on 25 March 1935. Its Stations of the Cross were ordered from a Tyrolean craftsman and spent the First World War in the hold of an impounded German freighter in Genoa before eventually arriving.

Sheringham has attracted a notable range of people who left their mark elsewhere. Ralph Vaughan Williams lived here in 1919 and worked at a house called Martincross, where he composed A Sea Symphony. Ernest Shackleton lived at the same house — then called Mainsail Haul — from July 1910 to April 1911, in the months between his Nimrod expedition and the planning of the Endurance voyage. Stephen Spender, the poet, lived in a house on the cliffs called The Bluff and recalled the town warmly in his autobiography World Within World.

Olive Edis ran two photographic studios in Sheringham and became Britain's first female war photographer in the First World War. Patrick Hamilton, the playwright and novelist who wrote Gas Light, lived and died in Sheringham. The Singing Postman, folk singer Allan Smethurst, grew up here. The hill behind the town, Beeston Bump — a kame of glacial deposit, formed between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago — hosted one of the Second World War's secret Y-stations, used for signals intelligence.

Two things set Sheringham apart from comparable seaside towns. One is the North Norfolk Railway — the Poppy Line — which runs steam and diesel trains from Sheringham's original Victorian station through Weybourne to Holt, operating as a heritage railway and connecting in 2010 to the national rail network for the first time in decades. The sight of a steam locomotive passing between sea and heath on the north Norfolk coast is one of those distinctly English pleasures that requires no further explanation.

The other distinction belongs to the lifeboats. Sheringham is reputed to be the only place in the world with four of its original working lifeboats still preserved: the J.C. Madge, the Foresters Centenary, the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, and a fourth in the old lifeboat shed. Because the town has no harbour, boats have always been launched by tractor from the open beach — a practice that continues today. The museum known as The Mo holds the collection alongside fishing equipment, a viewing tower, and the visitor centre for the Sheringham Shoal Offshore Wind Farm, whose 317 megawatts of generating capacity sit 11 to 14 miles out to sea. The sea, as the motto says, enriches.