Life's a beach: Thomas Heatherwick kicks off the English summer with a trip to the seaside.

The English seaside has always been characterised by a through-gritted-teeth kind of jollity. But now that you can fly to Riga for [pounds sterling]9.99, the attractions of pebbly beaches, rotting piers and kiss-me-quick are rapidly fading folk memories for most mass trippers. This summer, however, the seaside strikes back, led by the patron saint of English architectural eccentricity Thomas Heatherwick, energetically abetted by his client Jane Wood.

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On the promenade at Littlehampton, a sleepy West Sussex seaside town, Wood and Heatherwick have created a startling new beachfront cafe serving hearty English grub with sea views. Not for the first time, extreme architecture is in cahoots with gastronomy. Cupped and cradled in a steel monocoque structure, the new building packs a powerful punch. Comparisons with bits of driftwood and the hulls of abandoned boats have been rapidly exhausted since its opening in June, but the muscular ribbed and contoured form (made flesh by structural gurus Adams Kara Taylor) does have something disturbingly organic about it, like a giant seed pod or insect cocoon plopped artfully on the seafront.

Coddled in the haze of golf-loving suburban calm, it is fair to say that Littlehampton has never seen the like, but rather than reacting with predictably small-minded provincial dismay, local planners seem to have been rather seduced by Jane Wood's evangelical enthusiasm for the project. (Having the saintly Heatherwick around doubtless helped.) Wood and her husband, architectural publisher and entrepreneur Peter Murray, have a weekend house in Littlehampton, so are, in a sense, part of the community. Planning permission had been granted for a new restaurant on the seafront on the site of an existing dilapidated kiosk, but at 30m long and 5.5m high, the proposed building was both physically conspicuous and architecturally mediocre, a cocktail unpalatable enough to spur Jane Wood into action and acquire the site. Her search for a suitable architect to join her crusade ended when she happened to bump into Thomas Heatherwick at Goodwood Sculpture Park.

Heatherwick has brought his typically quirky yet forensically inventive vision to bear upon the project. There were constraints--a tight budget, an awkward long thin site, the corrosive effects of sea air--but these have been used as jumping off points for imaginative formal and technical responses. The long bunkered form of the building hunches over to face the sea and is much less intrusive than the original proposal. The steel monocoque shell is both structure and skin, with a steel outer layer cut at a shallow angle into a series of thick vertical slices. This creates the distinctive contoured profile, as if the building had been geologically eroded over millennia.

Mild steel was preferred for the external carapace over the more familiar Cor-ten, because Heatherwick thinks that it will weather better. Once a patina of rust has taken hold, an oil-based coating applied at decreasing intervals will seal and protect the surface, a bit like the effect of shoe cream on leather. In one of those heart-warmingly cosmic coincidences, the metal shell was fabricated by Littlehampton Welding, the firm responsible for building Heatherwick's Rolling Bridge at Paddington (AR December 2005), so the metal workers knew to expect the unexpected. As the existing kiosk was being demolished, the new building was being prefabricated off site.

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Counterpointing the knobbly steel contours of the landward side, the sea edge is simply a long glazed wall, so diners can enjoy surveying beach goings-on and the infinite swell of the English Channel beyond. The glazed wall is also tricksy, articulated by columns made from steel plate which incorporate rainwater pipes, glazing frames and shutter guide rails. To prevent vandalism, which was a scourge of the original kiosk, glazing is protected by a shutter when the cafe is not in use, but in another deft sleight of hand, the bulky shutter boxes are seamlessly integrated within the monocoque structure.

Inside, up to forty five patrons can enjoy delicacies such as potted shrimp, locally caught fish and the East Beach Burger. In fine weather an extra 80 can be accommodated on a generous external deck. Heatherwick sees it as both posh and demotic, a place 'where you can eat a Mr Whippy or drink Dom Perignon'. His perpetually questing antennae are also attuned to the nuances of Littlehampton's relationship with the sea, which is imbued with something curiously potent, despite the aura of Middle England muddling along. 'The seaside at Littlehampton has a raw beauty', he says. 'It isn't fiddly or fuzzy, or about dolphins and anchors, and our building has been designed to fit into this context.' Perhaps it's too early to talk of a West Sussex Guggenheim effect, but I'll raise a Mr Whippy to that.