What images are conjured up by the name of ‘Skegness’?
A
queue of traffic stretching towards Lincolnshire’s most popular seaside
resort?… More fish and chip shops than you can count on 6 hands?… the numerous
caravan parks?… or Butlin’s holiday camp?
The
railways made Skegness, just as they did so many other British seaside resorts.
The familiar picture of a fisherman bounding along with the slogan ‘Skegness is so
bracing!’ was originally a railway poster by John Hassall (1908) and has become
an enduring emblem of the town.
Billy
Butlin was the next individual that should take credit for Skegness’s tourism
industry. After making his
fortune by opening a chain of seaside amusement parks in resorts such as
Mablethorpe, Hayling Island and Bognor, Butlin opened his first holiday camp at
Skegness in Easter 1936, with admissions rising from 500 per week to 1,000 per
week by June of that year (Butlin, 1982: 107). This
holiday camp still survives whereas other Butlin camps at Filey and Clacton
have folded.
The
other most popular way to holiday in Skegness is in a caravan. As Walton
argues, Skegness saw a decrease in ‘serviced bedspaces’ between 1950 and 1998,
but ‘gained more than 15,000 caravans over the same period’, and saw a boom due
to second holidays, and self-catering at the turn of the 80s and 90s. (Walton,
2000: 69).
Like
Blackpool, Skegness appears to be a resort that acknowledges the working-class
tastes of its consumers. The visitors guide usually has the resort’s nickname ‘Skeggy’
unpretentiously emblazoned across its front cover. Comic T-shirts refer to the town as 'Skeg Vegas'.
In
summer 2016 I returned to Skegness after an interval of many years. I found
that very little had changed since childhood. The sands were still reassuringly
crowded with families, there were still plenty of places to buy fish and chips,
and the delicious egg custards that aunty enjoyed were still bigger in the
Skeggy bakeries than anywhere else on earth.
A
Hillbilly shooting gallery that I’d last played in the 1990s was
still here, firing water back at those sure-shots who managed to hit a target. One thing which did stand out as being new were the stalls openly selling
alcoholic slush! This is a beverage which will cool you off and send you tipsy after
sunbathing on the sands all day.
Slush, fish and chips, donuts and the midday sun will force you to retire to your
caravan for a much needed late afternoon nap...
Further
reading:
Butlin,
Billy, 1982, The Billy Butlin Story, A Showman to the End, London:
Robson Books.
Kerry,
Matthew, 2012, The Holiday and British
Film, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan
Walton,
John K., 2000, The British Seaside, Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth
Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
