page_title: Skegness
section_title: Arrival of the railways and building of the modern resort
hierarchical_section_title: Skegness / History / Arrival of the railways and building of the modern resort
caption_attribution_description: Print no. &#34;10826&#34;.; More information about the Photochrom Print Collection is available at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.pgz; Title from the Detroit Publishing Co., Catalogue J-foreign section, Detroit, Mich.&#160;: Detroit Publishing Company, 1905.; Forms part of: Views of the British Isles, in the Photochrom print collection.
context_page_description: Skegness is a seaside town and civil parish in Lincolnshire, England. On the Lincolnshire coast of the North Sea, the town is 43 miles east of Lincoln and 22 miles north-east of Boston. With a population of 19,579, it is the largest settlement in the East Lindsey district; 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 line.
  The original Skegness, which was lost to the sea, was situated further 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.
context_section_description: 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 96 acres 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. 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 undeveloped lands north of Scarbrough Avenue were fenced in and planted with trees in a space called The Park.
caption: The Grand Parade before the clock tower was built, looking north towards the pier. The Marine Gardens are on the right.
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