The quiet character of the village remains distinct from its busy sibling and complements it with clifftop walks past a redundant lighthouse and the ruins of St Edmund's Chapel, built in 1272.

In 1846, Henry L'Estrange Styleman Le Strange (1815–1862),[3] decided to develop the area south of Old Hunstanton as a bathing resort.

In 1848 the first main building, the Royal Hotel (now the Golden Lion), was built by Victorian architect, William Butterfield, a friend of Le Strange.

Their shared passion was for an "Old English" style of architecture for domestic buildings, owing much to medieval precedents and the earnest Victorian Gothic Revival.

In 1915, during the First World War, Hunstanton was the headquarters of the West Norfolk training programme of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, as they prepared for active service on the Western Front.

[12] Hunstanton's summer crowds are smaller than in the 1980s, although its relative popularity with day-trippers and holidaymakers has endured, despite the decline in British seaside holidaying.

Hunstanton has a fairground, aquarium and seal sanctuary, leisure pool, theatre, large caravan parks with amenities, some amusement arcades, and a long promenade.

In good weather, excursion boats take visitors out to view grey and common seals that have colonised sand bars in the Wash and to the north of Norfolk.

The countryside around Hunstanton is hillier than most of Norfolk and sparsely populated, the only large settlement nearby is King's Lynn, 12 miles (19 km) to the south.

The pier featured in the 1957 Ealing Studios comedy film Barnacle Bill (released in the US as All at Sea) starring Alec Guinness.

[17] The Smithsons deliberately left many of the service elements of the school exposed, making a feature of the water tank by turning it into a tower.

The disposition, steel frames and panels of brick and glass echo the work of Mies van der Rohe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Opened as the Capitol Cinema in 1932, it is noted for its Norfolk carr stone construction, of which it contains the largest gable wall in existence.

The Deaf Havana album Fools and Worthless Liars featured a track called "Hunstanton Pier", a nostalgic recollection of the town where James Veck-Gilodi, its lead singer, grew up.

It influenced a number of locations in his comic novels, as Aunt Agatha's country seat Woollam Chersey and the inspiration for the setting for Money for Nothing (1928).

L. P. Hartley knew the Hunstanton neighbourhood from childhood holidays and used it as a setting for The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944), the first novel in his Eustace and Hilda trilogy.

Patrick Hamilton's novel Hangover Square opens with George Harvey Bone walking on the cliffs in Hunstanton.

Hamilton lived for many years at Martincross in Sheringham and spent time in the 1930s in a cottage in Burnham Overy Staithe, with his first wife, Lois.