Skegness

Skegness ( ) is a seaside town and civil parish in the East Lindsey District of Lincolnshire, England. On the Lincolnshire coast of the North Sea, the town is east of Lincoln and north-east of Boston. With a population of 19,579 as of 2011, it is the largest settlement in East Lindsey. It also incorporates Winthorpe and Seacroft, and forms a larger built-up area with the resorts of Ingoldmells and Chapel St Leonards to the north. The town is on the A52 and A158 roads, connecting it with Boston and the East Midlands, and Lincoln respectively. Skegness railway station is on the Nottingham to Skegness (via Grantham) line.

The original Skegness was situated farther east at the mouth of The Wash. Its Norse name refers to a headland which sat near the settlement. By the 14th century, it was a locally important port for coastal trade. The natural sea defences which protected the harbour eroded in the later Middle Ages, and it was lost to the sea after a storm in the 1520s. Rebuilt along the new shoreline, early modern Skegness was a small fishing and farming village, but from the late 18th century members of the local gentry visited for holidays. The arrival of the railways in 1873 transformed it into a popular seaside resort. This was the intention of The 9th Earl of Scarbrough, who owned most of the land in the vicinity; he built the infrastructure of the town and laid out plots, which he leased to speculative developers. This new Skegness quickly became a popular destination for holiday-makers and day trippers from the East Midlands factory towns. By the interwar years the town was established as one of the most popular seaside resorts in Britain. The layout of the modern seafront dates to this time and holiday camps were built around the town, including the first Butlin's holiday resort which opened in Ingoldmells in 1936.

The package holiday abroad became an increasingly popular and affordable option for many British holiday-makers during the 1970s; this trend combined with declining industrial employment in the East Midlands to harm Skegness's visitor economy in the late 20th century. Nevertheless, the resort retains a loyal visitor base and has increasingly attracted people visiting for a short holiday alongside their trip abroad. Tourism increased following the recession of 2007–09 owing to the resort's affordability. In 2011, the town was England's fourth most popular holiday destination for UK residents, and in 2015 it received over 1.4 million visitors. It has a reputation as a traditional English seaside resort owing to its long, sandy beach and seafront attractions which include amusement arcades, eateries, Botton's fairground, the pier, nightclubs and bars. Other visitor attractions include Natureland Seal Sanctuary, a museum, an aquarium, a heritage railway, an annual carnival, a yearly arts festival, and Gibraltar Point nature reserve to the south of the town.

Despite the arrival of several manufacturing firms since the 1950s and Skegness's prominence as a local commercial centre, the tourism industry remains very important for the economy and employment. But the tourism service economy's low wages and seasonal nature, along with the town's aging population, have contributed towards high levels of relative deprivation among the resident population. Poor transport and communication links are barriers to economic diversification. Residents are served by five state primary schools and a preparatory school, two state secondary schools (one of which is selective), several colleges, a community hospital, several churches and two local newspapers. The town is home to a police station, a magistrates court and a lifeboat station.

Geography

Topography and geology

The civil parish of Skegness includes most of the linear settlement of Seacroft to the south and the village of Winthorpe and the suburban area of Seathorne to the north, all of which have been absorbed into the town's urban area. The neighbouring parishes are: Ingoldmells to the north, Addlethorpe to the north-west, Burgh le Marsh to the west and Croft to the south. The town is approximately north-east of Boston and east of Lincoln.

Skegness fronts the North Sea. It is located on a low-lying flat region called Lincoln Marsh, which runs along the coast between Skegness and the Humber and separates the coast from the upland Wolds.. Much of the parish's elevation is close to sea level, although a narrow band along the seafront is above peaking at on North Parade; the A52 road is elevated at ; and there is also a short narrow bank parallel to the shoreline between the North Shore Golf Club and Seathorne which is above sea level.

The bedrock under the town is part of the Ferriby Chalk Formation, a sedimentary layer formed around 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period; it runs north-west from Skegness in a narrow band to Fotherby and Utterby north of Louth in the Wolds. The surface layers are tidal-flat deposits of clay and silt, deposited since the end of the last ice age and during the Holocene epoch (the last 11,800 years). The shoreline consists of blown sand and beach deposits in the form of clay, silt and sand.

Coastal erosion

There has been coastal erosion in the area for thousands of years, though it was relatively sheltered until the Middle Ages by a series of offshore barrier islands or shoals made up of boulder clay. Rising sea levels and more intense sea storms from the 13th century onward very likely eroded these islands, increasingly exposing the Skegness coast to the tides. Records from the Middle Ages show that local people maintained sand banks as a form of sea defence; fines were levied for grazing animals on the dunes, which could weaken the defences. Skegness was flooded in 1525 or 1526, requiring the village to be rebuilt inland, and loss of land continued during the century. A clay embankment, Roman Bank, was built in the late 16th century and was followed in ''c''. 1670 by another closer to the sea (Green Bank), running from what is now North Shore Road to Cow Bank, following a line from St Andrew's Drive to Drummond Road. By the late 19th century, sands were accreting at Skegness; the retaining sea wall erected in 1878 was designed to support the resort town's seafront development rather than to protect it from the sea. Nevertheless, this wall largely saved the town during the 1953 flood, when only gardens, the amusements and part of the pier were damaged.

In the early 21st century, Longshore drift carries particles of sediment southwards along the Lincolnshire coast.. At Skegness, the sand settles out in banks which run at a slight south-west angle to the coast. Sand continues to accrete at the southern end of the town's shore, but coastal erosion continues immediately north of the settlement. Modern sea defences have been built along a stretch of coast between Mablethorpe (to the north) and Skegness to prevent erosion, but currents remove sediment and the defences hinder dune development; a nourishment scheme began operation in 1994 to replace lost sand..

Climate

The British Isles experience a temperate, maritime climate with warm summers and cool winters. Lincolnshire's position on the east of the British Isles allows for a sunnier and warmer climate relative to the national average, and it is one of the driest counties in the United Kingdom. In Skegness, the average daily high temperature peaks in August at and a peak average daily mean of occurs in July and August. The lowest daily mean temperature is in January; the average daily high for that month is and the daily low is .

History

Prehistoric and medieval

There is evidence of late Iron-Age and early Roman saltmaking activity in the Skegness area. Place names and a report of a castle in the medieval settlement have been interpreted as evidence that a Roman fort existed in the town before being lost to the sea in the late Middle Ages.. The archaeologist Charles Phillips suggested that Skegness was the terminus of a Roman road running from Lincoln through Burgh le Marsh and was also the location of a Roman ferry which crossed The Wash to Norfolk. If the Roman fortifications indeed existed, it is likely that the Anglo-Saxons used them as a coastal shore fort. Later, the Vikings settled in Lincolnshire and their influence is detected in many local place names.. Skegness's name combines the Old Norse words ''Skeggi'' and ''ness'', and means either "Skeggi's headland" or "beard-shaped headland"; Skeggi (meaning "bearded one") may be the name of a Viking settler or it could derive from the Old Norse word '' skegg'' "beard" and have been used to describe the shape of the landform. gives both possibilities. Skegness was not named in the ''Domesday Book'' of 1086. It is usually identified with the ''Domesday'' settlement called Tric.. The historian Arthur Owen and the linguist Richard Coates have argued that Tric derived its name from ''Traiectus'', Latin for "crossing", referring to the Roman ferry that Phillips argues launched from Skegness. The name Skegness appears in the 12th century, and further references are known from the 13th.

Natural sea defences (including a promontory or cape, as the place name suggests, and barrier shoals and dunes) protected a harbour at Skegness in the Middle Ages. It was relatively small and its trade in the 14th century was predominantly coastal; its economic fortunes were probably closely related to those of nearby coastal ports, such as Wainfleet, which in turn depended on the larger port at Boston which was heavily involved in the wool trade. It was also an important fishing port. During the medieval period the offshore barrier islands which sheltered the coast were destroyed, very likely in the 13th century during a period of exceptionally stormy weather. This left the coast exposed to the sea and in a constant state of change; later in the Middle Ages, frequent storms and floods eroded sea defences.. Between the 14th and 16th centuries, Skegness was one of several coastal settlements to incur major loss of land to the sea. Local people attempted to make artificial banks, but they were costly. Rising sea levels further threatened the coast § 2.2.1.4. and in 1525 or 1526 Skegness was largely washed away in a storm, along with the hamlets of East and West Meales..

Later fishing and farming village

After the flooding, Skegness was rebuilt along the new coastline. By 1543, when the antiquarian John Leland visited the town, he noted that "For old Skegnes is now buildid a pore new thing"; the settlement was principally a small farming and fishing village throughout the early modern period, with the marshland providing good summer pasture for sheep.. Over the course of the 16th century, the sea continued to encroach into the land at Skegness, while depositing sand banks further south, leading to the creation of Gibraltar Point. Roman Bank, a clay sea defence upon which the A52 road now runs through Skegness, was built in the latter part of the century. Much of the land in and around Skegness came into the hands of Nicholas Saunderson, 1st Viscount Castleton,. who enclosed of saltmarsh in 1627 and later in the 17th century reclaimed more marshland which had emerged from the sea, sheltered behind the growing Gibraltar Point.. His descendant was responsible for erecting Green Bank between Roman Bank and the shore in ''c''. 1670, allowing more lands to be converted to agricultural use. The Lords Castleton had enclosed a large portion of the land around Skegness by 1740,. over .. The Castleton estate passed through the male line which became extinct in 1723 on the death of the 5th Viscount, who bequeathed his estate to his cousin Thomas Lumley; in 1739 Lumley became 3rd Earl of Scarbrough. By 1845, the Scarbrough estate comprised at Skegness. Although the population rose above 300 by 1851,. the settlement "was still very much an undeveloped village of fishermen, farmers and farm hands" in the early 1870s..

Early resort

Local gentry began visiting the village for leisure reasons from the late 18th century. The sea air was thought to have health-giving qualities.. To capitalise on this trend, the Skegness Hotel opened in 1770; visitors could reach it by omnibus from Boston, which was the terminus of several stagecoaches.. The first reference to bathing machines on Skegness's shores dates to 1784 though they are thought to have been present earlier. Private houses also opened their doors to lodgers, and other hotels opened... Born and raised at Somersby, the poet Alfred Tennyson (later Lord Tennyson) holidayed at Skegness as a young man, often taking walks along the shore from his lodgings at Mary Walls' Moat House on the sea bank; some scholars have drawn parallels between his poetry and the landscape he encountered on these visits.

The railways and the modern resort

The East Lincolnshire Railway, running along the coast between Boston and Grimsby, opened in 1848. In 1871, a branch line was built to Wainfleet All Saints with rolling stock operated by the Great Northern Railway; an extension to Skegness was approved by GNR shareholders that year and the railways arrived at Skegness in 1873. The line was designed to bring day trippers to the seaside.. Rising wages and better holiday provision meant that some working-class people from the East Midlands factory towns like Nottingham, Derby and Leicester could afford to have a holiday for the first time. With agriculture in depression, the major landowner Richard Lumley, 9th Earl of Scarbrough had seen his local rental income decline; his agent, H. V. Tippet, decided that the earl's fortunes might be revived if he turned Skegness into a seaside resort.. A road plan was developed and the earl took out a mortgage of £120,000 to fund developments. In 1878, the full plan laid out plots for 787 houses in a grid-aligned settlement on of land between the shoreline and Roman Bank north of the High Street. Scarbrough Avenue would run inland from the centre of the Parade and was bisected by Lumley Avenue, with a new church in the roundabout. At the end of Scarbrough Avenue would be a pier.

The earl spent thousands of pounds on laying roads and the sewerage system, and building the sea wall (the latter of which was finished in 1878).. He provided or invested in other amenities, including the gas and water supply, Skegness Pier (opened in 1881), the pleasure gardens (finished in 1881), the steamboats (launched by 1883) and bathing pools (1883). He donated land and money towards the building of St Matthew's Church, two Methodist chapels, a school and the cricket ground.. Housebuilding was left to speculative builders; the earliest development was concentrated along Lumley Road, which offered a direct route from the train station to the seafront. Newspapers across the Midlands advertised properties, and shops began opening. By 1881 almost a thousand people had moved into the town.. According to the local historian Winston Kime, Skegness had become known as a "trippers' paradise" by 1880. The August bank holiday in 1882 saw 20,000 descend on the town; they came to enjoy the beach and the sea, the many games and amusements that had popped up in the town, the pleasure boat trips that had just started launching from the pier, and the donkey rides. Building contracted after the 1883 season, although in 1888 the accreted sands in front of the sea wall south of the pier were converted into the Marine Gardens,. a lawn with trees and hedges. The undeveloped lands north of Scarbrough Avenue were fenced in and planted with trees in a space called The Park.. This stagnation coincided with a declining number of day-trippers, which fell from a peak of 230,277 in 1882 to 118,473 in 1885. The local historian Richard Gurnham could not find a clear explanation for this decline in contemporary reports, though one newspaper article from 1884 blamed "the depression of trade" in Nottingham for a fall in visitor numbers compared with the previous year.

1890s to 1945: boom years

Fortunes changed during the 1890s;. in the words of the historian Susan Barton, "Skegness and other 'lower' status resorts provided cheap amusements, beach entertainers, street traders and, by the end of the nineteenth century, spectacular entertainment for a mass market". Convalescent homes began opening in the town, the earliest being the Nottinghamshire Convalescent Home for Men (1891). Holiday homes or camps for the poor opened in 1891 and 1907. The town became an urban district in 1895. In 1908 the famous " Jolly Fisherman" poster was used by GNR to advertise day trips from King's Cross in London.. By 1913 more than 750,000 people made excursions to the town. Aside from bathing and enjoying the sands, visitors to Skegness found entertainment in the pier, which had a concert hall, saloon and theatre. Other theatres and picture houses opened in the early 20th century.. Britain's first switchback railway had opened in the town in 1885 or 1887. A fairground operated on the central beach before the First World War and the Figure 8 roller coaster replaced the switchback in 1908.. By 1911, the population had reached 3,775..

Seventy-one local servicemen who died in the First World War are commemorated on the town's war memorial. Aside from a seaplane base briefly established by the town in 1914, the conflict brought little change to the fabric of Skegness. Its popularity as a tourist destination grew in the interwar years and boomed during the 1930s.. The urban district council purchased the seafront in 1922 and its surveyor R. H. Jenkins oversaw the construction of Tower Esplanade (1923), the boating lake (1924, extended in 1932), the Fairy Dell paddling pool, and the Embassy Ballroom and an outdoor pool in 1928, and remodelled the foreshore north of the pier in 1931. Billy Butlin (who had been a stall holder on the beach since 1925) built permanent amusements south of the pier in 1929. In 1932 the first illuminations were turned on and the following year Butlin launched a carnival. Cinemas and casinos joined the theatres of the Edwardian period as popular attractions, while some of the apartments and houses by the seafront were converted into shops, cafés and arcades. In 1936, Butlin built his own all-in holiday camp in Ingoldmells, providing constant entertainment and facilities for guests. It was joined in 1939 by The Derbyshire Miners' Holiday Camp. This coincided with growth in the residential area, mostly speculative developments and some council housing; North Parade was built up with hotels in the 1930s and the Seathorne Estate was also laid out in 1925. By 1931, the town's population had reached 9,122.

During the Second World War, the Royal Air Force billeted thousands of trainees in the town for its No. 11 Recruit Centre. The Butlin's camp was occupied by the Royal Navy, who called it HMS ''Royal Arthur'' and used it for training seamen. Aerial bombing of the town began in 1940; there were fatalities on several occasions, the greatest being on 24 October 1941 when twelve residents were killed during a bombing raid. Fifty-seven local servicemen died in the conflict and are named on the town's war memorial.

Since the Second World War

Since the Second World War, self-catered holidays have become popular, prompting the growth of caravan parks and chalet accommodation. By 1981, 20 caravan sites were in operation and five years later there were over 100,000 holiday caravans and chalets in Skegness and Ingoldmells... Increasingly the lodging accommodation in the town centre closed as a result, or was converted into flats or shops. The 1970s also witnessed the advent of the cheap package airline holiday abroad, which took visitors away from British seaside towns.. The decline in coal mining in the East Midlands in the 1980s caused what the BBC
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