On a spring weekend of intermittent sunshine and temperatures peaking at a mere 14C, the beach in my old hometown teems with life. Student life.

Some of them are swimming in the North Sea in trunks and bikinis - or playing volleyball in the shallows. Many more recline on the sand in groups, fluted glasses in hand. Are those champagne bottles in their picnic cooler bags?

On days like this when I was growing up here, the West Sands in St Andrews were the preserve of dog walkers and kite fliers. Back then, people used to think the dogs were crazy for bounding into the icy waters.

This was the beach which, in 1980, was deemed suitably anonymous to be used as a 'stunt double' for the seafront at Broadstairs, Kent, when the opening sequence of the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire was being shot.

Remember those barefooted runners in white, splashing along the foreshore and onto the grass beyond it, which just happened to be the fairway of the first hole of the Old Course? The Royal and Ancient Golf Club was in shot, along with the former Grand Hotel which, by the 1980s, was a draughty university hall of residence.

How we guffawed in the New Picture House in North Street when the film came out and we saw our town's unmistakeable links doubling for some seaside conurbation 500 miles away.

Yet the episode speaks to the astonishing contrasts between the town I left 40 years ago and the aggrandised one I visit regularly today and survey with grim fascination.

Producer David Puttnam may just have got away with it in 1980 but no filmmaker these days would dream of dressing up the St Andrews Links as somewhere else.

It is simply way too famous, too obviously the bucket list destination for too many millions of golfers across too much of the globe.

There was an unassuming quality to the town where I spent my teenage years. Today many here wonder if it assumes it is now a theme park for the mega-wealthy; or an overgrown campus for moneyed international students. There is mounting evidence it sees itself as both.

'We are being squeezed out of our own town,' says Colin McAllister, 84, who has lived in St Andrews since 1955.

The former economics lecturer identifies the two behemoths doing the squeezing: the golf and the university. Both have grown exponentially since I lived here. Together they rule St Andrews, leaving many of the indigenous population feeling like an endangered species.

Sure, their town is Scotland's soaraway economic success story.

Golf in St Andrews brings £317million of benefit to the nation every year and, when the Open Championship last visited its spiritual home in 2022, it brought in almost that much in a single week thanks to a tournament record attendance of 290,000 fans. Similar figures are expected when the Open returns next year.

Large volumes of the English and international students have money in their pockets. It is commonplace for parents to buy town centre properties for their sons or daughters, fill up the extra bedrooms with two or three of their student pals and sell on at a profit when they have completed their degrees.

In one recent example, a Texan grandmother shelled out £1.2million on a smart, three-storey St Andrews townhouse for her granddaughter's university years. Few doubt it will sell for even more in a few years time.

After all, this is Scotland's most expensive coastal location, according to a Bank of Scotland survey, with average property prices nearing £460,000.

That draughty old hall of residence behind the 18th green of the Old Course? Today it is Hamilton Grand, the most expensive apartment complex in the land. A penthouse there sold for £7million. A two-bedroom flat below it fetched £3.6million.

Two hundred yards away, Knight Frank is marketing a three-bedroom townhouse which is not even built yet: fixed price £7.25million. It is one of four springing up on a plot overlooking the Swilcan Bridge on the 18th fairway and, crucially, due for completion in good time for next year's Open.

But where does all this leave the locals - those not here for degrees at the Prince and Princess of Wales's alma mater, those not relocating here to retire after making their fortunes, and not making a killing from property empires, packing in students and golfing tourists on inflated rents?

Many now argue it leaves them priced out of the market.

'There has been a hollowing out,' says marine archaeologist Neil Dobson, who has lived in the town since 1972. He tells me none of his three grown-up children can afford to buy or rent a property in their hometown, even though they all work.

'If you go around the businesses and the shops and the bars, very few of those working there live in St Andrews.' He adds: 'There are very few trades companies in the town. You try and find an electrician in St Andrews, or a builder. They're all gone.' Some describe the effect here as Dubai-ification - the transformation of a historic community into a highly affluent micro-economy, an exclusive enclave which, over the decades, expels natives of moderate means and thereby loses its soul.

'Yes, it is Dubai-ification,' says Mr Dobson. 'As an archaeologist and historian, I think that's a brilliant word to use.'

I tell him of the St Andrews I knew in the early 1980s, reel off the names of the independent traders - Murray Mitchell's the butcher, Birrell's the greengrocer, Wilson's the ironmonger - and he remembers them all fondly.

Different times. The Glasgow-born hospitality magnate Stefan King now runs the site of the former butcher as a restaurant through his company The Scotsman Group. He has several others in the town too.

Indeed, when Birrell's closed 11 years ago, the owners claimed a key reason was the loss of supply contracts with hospitality chains such as that run by Mr King. As big money moved in, the old deals were off. St Andrews was becoming corporate.

I discover that Mr King also owns my old school, the Kilrymont campus of Madras College which I attended from 1979 to 1981. The classrooms have been turned into luxury student accommodation - some with private balconies - with rentals starting at £285 per person per week. They rise to £650 per week for a one-bedroom penthouse apartment.

Around 80 per cent of these rooms will be made available to tourists in the summer months.

And what of the school's town centre campus with its magnificent Neo-Jacobean quadrangle and cloisters?

It was bought by the ever-expanding university a few years ago to serve its business and international relations departments.

You can see why it wants the space. When I left St Andrews in 1985 the student roll was approximately 4,000, roughly a quarter of the town's population.

Today there are almost 11,000 students from 80 countries (only 25 per cent of them are Scottish) and they account for more than 60 per cent of townsfolk. Little wonder locals feel squeezed out.

'St Andrews has lost its sense of community,' says Mr Dobson. 'They have ripped the heart out of the town. When are they going to say enough is enough?' Mr McAllister echoes the sentiment: 'The university has got too big for the town, that's what I'm saying. It's been hollowed out.

'Very few people live in the town as opposed to students.' Among the resentments bubbling to the surface is the fact that students pay no council tax.

That, argues Mr McAllister, encourages landlords to charge higher rents and ultimately it means they can afford to pay higher prices to buy property.

'That's how the mechanism works and it prices people out of their own town,' he says. 'It's outrageous.'

It is all a far cry from the housing climate of the early 1980s when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave council tenants the right to buy their homes. Almost no one paid more than £10,000.

Today the same properties are worth anything from £300,000 to £600,000 - way out of first-time buyers' league - and many are houses in multiple occupancy (HMOs) packed with students.

Then there is the vexed issue of access to the golf courses which are run on behalf of the people of the town by the St Andrews Links Trust. While permanent residents can enjoy unlimited access to seven courses - including the Old Course - with a yearly season ticket costing £398, students pay £330 for similar access for the nine months of term time.

Is this a reasonable arrangement, wonders Mr McAllister, when students are by far the largest demographic in the town and pay zero in council tax?

He says: 'We can't uninvent the university and we can't uninvent tour operators, but we've got to get the balance right where locals are not the bottom of the heap in everything.'

Like many, he bridles at the changing face of the town centre - a place increasingly geared to the golf and student markets.

Who would have imagined in years gone by that its only cinema, the family-owned New Picture House, would pass into the hands of megastars from the worlds of golf and music - Tiger Woods and Justin Timberlake - and be turned into an Americanstyle sports bar with golf simulators and electronic darts? A petition was launched to protest against it but the decision to retain two of the three cinema screens averted a bigger outcry.

Who foresaw the steady disappearance of affordable eateries in the town - and the rise and rise of fine dining tailored for the deepest pockets from abroad?

When did my old town lose its presbyterian diffidence and become so knowing?

Around the golf courses, rooftop restaurants with panoramic views over the hallowed fairways now abound. A recent addition to their number is 18, which sits atop the newly expanded Rusacks Hotel.

A review of this place by the food critic Jay Rayner has now passed into local folklore. He said the place smelled of 'newly pumped testosterone' and that the diners - mostly male Americans on the night he visited - feasted almost exclusively on enormous steaks.

Executive chef Billy Boyter, who had previously run the Michelin-starred Cellar restaurant in Anstruther, was clearly stung by the review and publicly responded before quitting soon afterwards.

But might the food critic's words speak to wider issues for St Andrews? The town may be the home of golf; its championship course may represent the holy grail for a certain demographic of golfers, particularly wealthy American ones.

Its cultural identity, however, extends much further than its famous links. For centuries prior to the Reformation this place was Scotland's ecclesiastical capital.

Relics of Saint Andrew, the nation's patron saint, were housed here. Its cathedral, in ruins since the late 1500s, was the largest church ever built in Scotland.

Does a place of such national historical significance really need imported Americana?

'This is not Las Vegas,' says Mr McAllister. 'It's not necessary and it's not wanted.'

Another well-known local figure, golf historian and artist David Joy, tells me that, as a born and bred St Andrean, he is 'among the last of a dying breed'. Yet he believes the layers of his town's history can and do co-exist alongside the gaudier American imports.

'The old and the new marry up quite well,' he says.

Not for nothing, he says, does St Andrews regularly feature on lists of the UK's most desirable places to live. The university, meanwhile, is among the most highly regarded on these isles.

For decades Mr Joy, 77, did stage and screen portrayals of Old Tom Morris, the St Andrews-born winner of multiple Open Championships who had a hand in shaping the Old Course. He took his acting turn to the US and was astonished by the fascination there for the Grand Old Man of Golf who died in 1908.

'I often wonder what Old Tom would think of the place today,' he says. 'I'm sure he'd be absolutely stunned.' Dazzled too, perhaps.

A few years ago another golfing great, Jack Nicklaus, described St Andrews as the old, grey town which 'lights up' for him whenever he is there. Is the problem today that the lights are too bright, the vibe too decadent, the whole place too full-on?

I miss the old days - before St Andrews woke up to the spectacular extent of its allure.