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I remember stepping onto the cliff-top at Penarth, one blazing July morning, looking out over a dazzling panorama of the Bristol Channel with Thunderclap Newman’s ‘Something in the Air’ ringing through my mind. ‘We’ve got to get together sooner or later,’ went Speedy Keane’s plangent whine, ‘because the revolution’s here… !’ It was 1969 and the song was Number One. The fervour of May ’68 had been transformed into a winsome pop ode. I was a schoolboy on his way to the swimming baths in Penarth - one of the least revolutionary places on earth. But what did that matter? I was twelve, and everything was possible!

Set among limestone cliffs just around the headland from Cardiff’s docks and newly built marina - at once a peculiarly well-preserved Victorian seaside resort and a slightly snooty dormitory town for the Welsh capital - Penarth was an oddly appropriate place to have been in the heady sixties. With its gothic mansions, still avenues and strange neo-Moorish pier, it’s amazing the place has never become the setting for some surreal TV series, like that classic of the period, ‘The Prisoner’.

And for me there’s always been something almost magically exotic about this section of the Bristol Channel with its continually changing coastline - the light on the water reflecting and intensifying the colours of the islands and the surrounding headlands; qualities that have drawn diverse artists here over the past century.

Now, on another magnificently sunny morning, I’m walking through the network of quiet streets around the town centre. Having barely set foot in Penarth for decades, I wanted to see if it was as strange and remarkable as I remembered it.

The big handsome houses, their gardens brimming with blossom, are here austere - rusticated limestone edged with yellow London brick - there a fanciful blend of half-timbering and carved red sandstone. There are ornate wooden balconies, French chateau roofs and florid friezes of disporting griffins and cornucopia. And I’m walking not only through a living source book of Victorian vernacular architecture, but among sites of memory that I sense not so much with my mind’s eye as from beneath the skin.

Among the deep shadows of the yew trees in Victoria Square, is the spot where a girl with ‘Simon’ written on her satchel in florid lettering would pass me each day on the way home from school. I would stare at the backs of her very pink knees, and every day, just there, she would turn back to look at me. And from this corner, I remember seeing another girl who, when I was thirteen, seemed to embody everything that was most perplexingly attractive about the female sex, walking remote and abstracted through the rain.

All very Proustian. And there is something very Proustian about Penarth.

Beside Turner House, a curious red sandstone edifice, built by a 19th century millionaire to house his art collection, a staircase cuts into the thickly wooded glade of the Dingle. On long summer evenings, my step-brother and I would head into here, exploring the network of gardens and cliff-walks that run into each other above the esplanade. Paths, bridges and staircases linked it all together, depositing us suddenly beneath the tall limestone mansions from whose turrets and penthouses I imagined that old sea captains were forever scouring the waves. It followed a pattern I never quite fathomed, and gave the whole place the air of a puzzle.

Light glitters through the foliage, dappling the mossy bridges, the banks thick with ivy and wild garlic. The trees give way to the steeply pitching lawns of Alexandra Park, where a group of girls lie giggling giddily on the vertiginous grass, and high above, topiaried trees stand like surreal chessmen against a sky of deepest azure.

Down on the esplanade, the patterned china and framed views of Portofino in Rabaiotti’s café seem unchanged since this Penarth institution opened in the early sixties. At my school, getting ‘banned from Rab’s’ was considered an achievement (though not by me). But there are no troublesome teenagers today, just ladies conversing with that wonderful Welsh intentness and day trippers of modest means chomping on the house special: breaded plaice and chips with a slice of lemon. Very Penarth.

It’s Bank Holiday weekend, and the esplanade mills pleasantly with strollers. Young girls practise gymnastics in the dilapidated pier ballroom, while outside their elder sisters rest their platform-booted feet and exchange glances with the local swains, as a flotilla of blue-sailed yachts sets out into the hazily sparkling Channel.

I remember making an impulse journey to Weston-Super-Mare, with my family, one golden summer evening, on one of the white-funnelled paddle steamers that then worked the Channel. We made it there and back before dark, with the sea a deep, still purple and the Channel’s two islands - green and domestic Flat Holm and impregnable cliff-bound Steep Holm - standing on the water with a preternatural mirror-like clarity.

On a clear day you can practically count the windows of Weston and Minehead. Then, at the first sign of mist, they disappear, and you might be on the edge of some uncannily still ocean. You can still take a boat to Ilfracombe during the summer months, but there isn’t as much heavy shipping as there was. Yet this still feels like a working sea, and the proximity of industry and Cardiff’s docks lends a gritty quality to the whole area.

Penarth was, of course, created by coal - its docks built in the 1860s to relieve the pressure on the great coal port of Cardiff. But the town that developed on the southern side of the headland soon became a very different sort of place - the favoured abode of ship owners and coal investors. The exclusive Marine Parade once boasted more millionaires than any street in Britain. And every bank holiday, a relay of trains brought thousands of miners and their families down from the Valleys.

Penarth took fifty years to build, but it gives the impression of having been conjured instantaneously into being - a complete community celebrating its affluence and optimism in its wealth of architectural detail and the sheer hedonism of its parks and walks, its respectability in the huge gothic churches that sprout out of every other street corner. The most magnificent is St Augustine’s by the great gothic revivalist William Butterfield, now considered one of the finest Victorian churches in Britain.

For me as a child, the church’s stark outline high on the very summit of Penarth Head, had a forbidding look, and I never had any reason to go up there. But slipping inside after a service I’m astonished at the rich and sombre interior - the diamond and zigzag patterned brickwork, pink marble columns and wooden vaulting all contributing to a sense of enclosure completely at odds with the vastness of the light and space outside.

From the churchyard you have a whole world at your feet, with Cardiff docks immediately below and the Welsh metropolis spread out, with the hills and coal-bearing Valleys beyond. To the right, the Bristol Channel snakes away into the haze of the Severn Estuary.

"This place is very concentrated," says painter Terry Setch as we walk along the beach towards Lavernock. "You’ve got industry and nature, man and the sea, all interacting in quite a small area, and the character of the coastline continually changes."

The sky is overcast, but a milky glow hangs over the sea, enhancing the darkness of the shore - undulating steps of prehistoric lava that give way to red pebbles littered with chunks of sea-washed alabaster. Jagged yellow cliffs fall away into crumbling red shale then suddenly swell into compacted limestone mud, shot through with glittering strata.

When we lived here, Setch was a young man in a leather jacket who used to drag massive canvases miles out onto the sea mud, as though he were trying to get the whole of the sea and the sky onto them, plastering them in detritus washed in from the docks.

He now has a national reputation, and his paintings have got even bigger, with whole cars, beds, dead animals and every kind of inscrutable plastic - all dragged up from the beach - and embedded in surfaces of plastic paint and brilliantly coloured molten wax.

A Londoner, Setch tells me that he never intended to stay in Penarth but this beach has gradually provided him with a whole life’s subject.

Over a hundred years ago, another painter came to this very spot - Alfred Sisley, the English colleague of Monet and Pisarro, who completed eight paintings in and around Penarth. As Sisley daubed away on the cliffs, Guiseppe Marconi was conducting the first radio transmissions over water, from Lavernock to the island of Flat Holm.

Setch has become fascinated by this almost-meeting of two pioneers of the modern world on his stretch of beach, commemorating it in a vast canvas, ‘Sisley and Marconi Were Also Here’. Another, ‘Towards Lavernock’, incorporates six reproductions of a Sisley painting that must have been executed on precisely the walk we’re doing now.

‘Except that he was up there,’ says Setch, pointing to the cliff-top. ‘That was the impressionist way. But now we’re down here. We want to get everything into the picture.’

When I was fifteen, we left Penarth for Surrey suburbia. Life entered a different phase, and it’s only now, coming back, that I realise how much I’ve missed this corner of the world. It’s partly the nostalgia we all feel for the landscapes of childhood, but there’s also something vivid and elemental about this area that you just don’t get in the Home Counties.

Setch pulls at a great skein of bladderack tangled with fluorescent fishing wire and a pair of tattered red knickers. "Pure Jackson Pollock!" he says. Behind us a great blue tanker goes sliding past, surprisingly close to the shore. Setch nods. “This place is as good as anywhere,” he says. And I can’t help but agree.

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