The Secret Life of Beaches

This time the all-new series of Coast is exploring the glorious diversity and endless delights offered by our beaches. The British Isles' stunning range of sand, shingle and rock formations creates some unique havens for wildlife and the sea-girt margins of our isles are Britain's treasure chest, where forgotten stories of heroism and ingenuity lay waiting to be discovered.

Nick Crane digs deep to discover what it is like to live on Britain's most unusual beach, the eerily beautiful, vast shingle spit at Dungeness in Kent. Nick also meets an artist who has taken up residence in a first-class railway carriage, abandoned on the beach. Together Nick and the painter explore what makes this vast ocean of pebbles such an oddly inspiring location.

In Scotland, zoologist and ex-soldier Andy Torbet braves one of the most dangerous beaches in Britain. Andy investigates how an RAF bombing range on the sands manages to double as a secret retreat for a colony of seals, who seem to thrive while basking within earshot of the bomb blasts.

In Jersey, Hermione Cockburn joins the world's best beach artists as they create massive art installations along some of the UK's most spectacular shoreline. How can anyone begin to take in these stunning artistic creations, stretched not on canvas but across entire beaches?

Tessa Dunlop learns the extraordinary engineering secrets behind building one of Europe's biggest steelworks on a vast beach at Port Talbot in South Wales and on the sands of Aberlady Bay in Scotland new Coast presenter, military historian Nick Hewitt, unearths the steel skeletons of two top-secret midget submarines.