Knight Frank’s Waterfront View 2016 report reveals that we Brits really do like to buy beside the seaside, most of all, we like to buy seaside property in Cornwall, Devon and Dorset.

This may not be a huge surprise but the differential may be – prices for prime waterfront properties in those counties is up to 71 per cent higher than inland comparables.

As well as a price premium, the research points to a number of towns and cities along the coast that surpassed the wider property market over the last two decades in terms of price growth.

Using data from the Land Registry, based on actual sales volumes going back to 1995, Knight Frank calculated the annual price performance of individual coastal markets relative to the average price increase across the three counties.

Croyde in North Devon(pictured) has been the best performing coastal market over this time, with annual outperformance of 4.1per cent on average.

Over 20 years this equates to cumulative price growth of around 122 per cent above the wider Cornwall, Devon and Dorset area. Over the past two decades, Croyde prices have risen by 432 per cent, compared to 310 per cent combined across the three local authorities.

A number of other longestablished prime markets including Rock, Salcombe, Padstow and Falmouth are the hotspots, all experiencing outperformance of at least two per cent annually since 1995.