SCARBOROUGH - "Queen of Watering Places". How potently that lovely, though long-discarded, tag lingers. And how grateful Scarborough should be that it does.

What grace it suggests. What elegance. Their everyday lives left far behind, the town's visitors relax in a setting and surroundings designed to dispel their cares.

With a little imagination it's still possible to feel, if not quite live, the dream. The Spa, classical and dignified, is still there, linked to the town by its own iron footbridge. The Grand Hotel, as confident a Victorian gesture as ever was made, still defines South Bay's profile as stirringly as the castle, proud on its headland.

The Crescent, once home to the literary Sitwells, still evokes Bath, while Peasholm Park, marvellously fashioned from piggeries 90 years ago, continues to delight with its Japanese buildings and lanterns slung out over the lake.

And, oh yes, there's the Marine Drive, that curving promenade round the headland. Hands up who has never strolled on Scarborough's Marine Drive, enjoying the views of the beach and the bay. Just as I thought. Very few.

But that particular pleasure is about to diminish if not disappear. For Scarborough District Council is determined to raise a concrete wall on the seaward edge of the Drive. Replacing the attractive Victorian railings as part of beefed-up coastal defences, the wall will be a metre high by a metre thick. Just when we thought that the New Brutalism, which wrecked so many towns in the 1960s, had done its worst and departed, here it will stamp its ugliness on one of the finest surviving creations from the glory days of the English Seaside Resort.

Nothing and no one it seems can swerve the council from this grave folly. Not Scarborough Civic Society which, while accepting rock armour and "acropodes", interlocking concrete blocks, to protect the Marine Drive, considers the surmounting wall "a step too far". Not the town's campaigning Sons of Neptune who, with hyperbole justified to raise the alarm, insists the Drive deserves the respect accorded York Minster.

The council is deaf, too, to residents whose protests have swelled the postbag of the local paper. That the wall will present a mile-long grafitti gallery, could tempt skateboarders and would-be Blondins, at risk of serious injury or death, and will curtail the Drive's value for spotting danger at sea, has left the council as unmoved as the reported tears of a regular wheelchair user. Not even compelling evidence that the rock armour alone provides sufficient protection - to say nothing of the £24m scheme already running £9m over budget - has shifted the council.

Scarborough is busy re-inventing itself, with ambitious "21st Century" leisure schemes in both the North and South Bays. But some seaside experiences are timeless. None more so than the "stroll along the prom prom prom''. And with its Marine Drive, Scarborough has just about the best in Britain. Nothing in the town is more eloquent of Scarborough's role, which it is still happy to proclaim, as "the first seaside resort''. Only a town blind to the secrets of its own appeal would sacrifice such an asset.