On the beach. The beach: location of holiday joy, of seaside pleasures, of time off in the sun at the coast – opened up for democratic leisure and pleasure by the Victorians, who invented the popular coastal holiday resort. It's where people liked to be. ‘Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside,’ sang the music hall star Mark Sheridan on his recording of 1909, making a popular hit of John A. Glover-Kind's 1907 expression of seaside desire:

Glee on the beach. But being on the beach was also a metaphor for the miserably penniless, the forcefully unemployed, the jobless. This version of the beach was as a site of nautical misery, locale of forcefully retired, out-of-work, redundant sailors: the beached ones. OED beached, adj., sense 3: ‘Fig. Laid aside, discarded; unemployed (cf BEACH n. 3b)’: beach, n., sense 3b: ‘Naut. The shore, any part of the coastline off which a ship is at anchor; hence on the beach, ashore; retired… . By extension on the beach is used to mean “beachcombing, unemployed”; also (occas.) penniless, “broke”.’ The first OED illustration of which is from Jack London's novel about the poor, The People of the Abyss (1903): ‘England is always crowded with sailormen on the beach.’ Nevil Shute's apocalyptic 1957 novel about civilisation, the human even, at an abject ruined end, is aptly titled On the Beach.