Skegness

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

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 47 mi east of Lincoln and 25 mi north-east of Boston. With a population of 21,128 as of 2021, it is the largest settlement in East Lindsey. It 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. Tourism increased following the recession of 2007–2009 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. 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 has 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 22 mi north-east of Boston and 43 mi 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 4 - above peaking at 6 m on North Parade; the A52 road is elevated at 4 m; there is a short narrow bank parallel to the shoreline between the North Shore Golf Club and Seathorne which is 10 m 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; 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. 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 of boulder clay. Rising sea levels and more intense sea storms from the 13th century onward likely eroded these islands, increasingly exposing the 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 15 mi 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 UK. In Skegness, the average daily high temperature peaks in August at 20.4 C and a peak average daily mean of 16.7 C occurs in July and August. The lowest daily mean temperature is 4.4 C in January; the average daily high for that month is 7.0 C and the daily low is 1.9 C.

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 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; 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. 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; 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. Local people attempted to make artificial banks, but they were costly. Rising sea levels further threatened the coast 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

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 400 acre 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 agriculture. The Lords Castleton enclosed a large portion of the land around Skegness by 1740, over 800 acre. 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 1219 acre 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 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 holidayed at Skegness as a young man; some scholars have drawn parallels between his poetry and the landscape he encountered on these visits.

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 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 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 acre 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.

Source and attribution

Adapted from “Skegness” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.