Beach huts, a Victorian pier, saucy postcodes, a stick of rock… there’s something deeply comforting about a classic British seaside town. Popular wisdom has it that the advent of low-cost flying in the Seventies signalled the end of their glory days – and, for some, the decline has seemed to be terminal. But most are desperately trying to reinvent themselves: conserving, renovating, gentrifying. Over the coming months, we will be taking the pulse of our most famous traditional coastal towns, to gauge how they are faring in 2024, the challenges that remain – and whether they are still worth visiting. This week, Ed Grenby explores Skegness.
I have narrowly avoided winning a plastic lizard. Which is good because I think I might have been mugged for it by a seething crowd of septuagenarians otherwise.
At 49, I am the youngest person in the bingo hall by a decade or two, and the other patrons eye me with barely-veiled suspicion. Skegness, it seems, is not just the Midlands seaside town that time forgot; it’s the one time buried alive and then forgot.
This means that much of what made it famous is still right here and smelling only faintly of damp. Dodgems and donkey rides, candy floss and caravan parks, Butlins and indeed bingo – it’s all just where Freddie Laker left it when his cheap-overseas-package-holiday boom tore two-thirds of the town’s tourists away in the 1970s. Except now there are vodka slushies on sale alongside the ice creams. (Literally alongside, as it happens, which marks an interesting pathway to early alcoholism, and perhaps explains the bands of underage drinkers who make some of the streets faintly threatening after dark.)
Skegness isn’t exactly faded then; if anything it’s become brighter and more lurid (the vodka slushies are neon blue, in case you wondered). Welcome to what locals call “Skegvegas”…