Friday afternoon, the day before the big day, and the crowds are out on the beach at Bournemouth, making the most of the sun and sand. Kids are doing the hokey cokey in the bandstand, Harry Ramsden’s is enjoying a thriving trade in fish and chips, and the screams of thrill-seekers ring out as they plummet down the zip wire between the pier and the beach.

“I’m sitting here looking out of my window and I can see the seafront,” says Mark Cribb, owner of Urban Guild, which runs restaurants and a hotel. “There are California-style lifeguard huts, swimming schools, surfers. It’s got a vibe and an energy that most people don’t know about.”

Cribb is one of Bournemouth’s entrepreneurs making the most of the town’s imminent entry into the big time. AFC Bournemouth’s Premiership debut on Saturday made them the latest minnows to live the dream – even if they did lose 1-0 to Aston Villa. But it’s not really about the football. For many who live, work and study in Bournemouth, it is about the next stage in the seaside town’s development, about seizing the attention to highlight a small town on the south coast with lofty ambitions.

“Bournemouth is moving up from a place where people came to die – or to build sandcastles – to a place that will be at the cutting edge of creativity in the 21st century,” says Deryck Newland, artistic director of Pavilion Dance South West, which has its base just opposite the town’s main pier. “There is a real sense that the town is on the move, which is quite a nice phrase for us, because dance is all about movement.”

Newland praises the vision of the council, which offered the company a home. “The council put in £3.2m five years ago,” he says. “They recognise that these are the sort of cultural markers that carve out a new identity. It presents a real opportunity if the council is brave enough and rides the wave that the football club is going to bring.”

Wave riding has something of a mixed history in Bournemouth. Six years ago, the council invested in an artificial reef off Boscombe pier, a mile east of the town centre. The intention was to revive a downtrodden area. It didn’t go to plan. “It was a bit of a disaster,” says Cribb. “It’s probably floating off France somewhere. It hasn’t worked, but it did its job as a catalyst for development.”

Bournemouth seems to hum to the tune of regeneration; even the population is unusually young, with the average age of 34 set to stay the same for the next 20 years. If there is a prosperity index, Bournemouth is at or near the top, and it boasts an array of blue-chip companies calling it home: the JPMorgan financial services group, and insurers Arthur J Gallagher, LV and Ageas among others. The borough council’s head of economic development, Chris Shephard, is enthused by the potential.

“It’s Bournemouth’s time now,” he says, sitting in the sunshine outside the council’s offices. “I think there’s something about telling a story through business about what this place has to offer.”

Beyond the cafes and bars, cranes and hard hats that are the traditional indicators of regeneration, a greater force is at work in Bournemouth. Matt Desmier runs the annual Silicon Beach gathering, the focal point for the town’s ambitions to be not just one of the leading digital hubs in the country, but in the world, boosted by a Tech Nation report this year naming Bournemouth as the UK’s fastest-growing city in the digital economy. “The council has a vision to be one of the top 20 global digital hubs by 2020,” he says. “That’s wildly ambitious but, you know what? Shoot for the moon.”

Desmier found that there was another Silicon Beach gathering, in Santa Monica, California, and took himself and 20 of his cohorts out to meet them. “We could see the synergy between that southern Californian vibe and what we’ve got here,” he says. “People in Santa Monica were really interested in what we were doing, but they’d say, ‘Bournemouth? Where’s that?’ I said, we’re like you, we’re a digital hub in the shadow of something bigger, in their case Silicon Valley and in ours London. I told them that Bournemouth is like a suburb of London – we’re the London beach suburb.”

Bournemouth’s main pier. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt

He lists some of the 400 digital agencies that are based in the Bournemouth area – “that’s one for every 1,000 people,” he says – Amuzo, creators of Lego computer games, 3 Sided Cube, Redweb, Thinking Juice.

Desmier has a vision. “I want to create a global community of Silicon Beaches, these places that live in the shadow of somewhere else, a global community of also-rans. We’ve got an opportunity here. We need to make the most of it and I’m personally going to make the most of it.”

Andy Martin, acting editor of the Bournemouth Echo, has lived in the town for 25 years. “It was the next step for Bournemouth,” he says of its football team’s success. “There are two big hotels being built, there’s lots of construction, the university has a massive reputation, and Flybe has just moved in to the airport. The town is changing out of recognition.”

Jim Cregan embodies the laid-back surfer dude, get-up-and-go entrepreneurial spirit of Bournemouth. With his sister, Suzie, he launched Jimmy’s Iced Coffee, a simple concept – small cartons of iced coffee – that has made it big and, if not already, will shortly be in a store near you. Cregan stars in his own publicity video, a freewheeling homage to early 90s hip-hop videos, complete with endearingly goofy rap about the product (“Keep your chin up!”), a speedboat, the protagonist and his homies getting pulled over by a traffic cop, and aerial shots of the glistening shoreline.

“Bournemouth does have that California beach promenade thing to it,” says Cregan over iced coffee in the town’s South Coast Roast cafe. “When it’s good, it’s unrivalled. It’s just really awesome.”

He doesn’t, however, buy into the football regeneration thesis.

“We really love business here, and that has got absolutely nothing to do with football,” he says. “Personally, I don’t think the football has any major effect. The only thing it means is that it will bring tens of thousands more people into the town. You’re either beach side, and you suit and like the outdoor lifestyle, or you’re on the football side.”

Claims to fame

Oldest beach hut

Bournemouth is home to Britain’s oldest beach hut, which dates from 1909 and still has its original structural foundations. The wooden chalet, known by number 2359, was also the first council-owned hut in the UK.

Seven miles of beaches

Bournemouth has seven miles of curved, sandy beaches, which attract as many as 100,000 visitors on a typical busy August day.

The Great Train Robbers

Roger Cordrey, the first gang member to be arrested, was caught in Bournemouth in 1963 after he rented a lock-up from a policeman’s widow.

Mary Shelley

The English novelist Mary Shelley, who died in 1851, is buried at St Peter’s church in Bournemouth along with her parents, the writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and political philosopher William Godwin.