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. 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"; 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. 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 agriculture. The Lords Castleton 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. 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. 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 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 (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. 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. 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 the
GNR to advertise day trips from
King's Cross in London. By 1913 more than 750,000 people made excursions to the town. 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 town's fabric. 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; 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 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 By 1931, the town's population had reached 9,122.
Second World War 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. Fifty-seven local servicemen died in the conflict and are named on the town's war memorial. Increasingly the lodgings in the town centre closed or were converted into flats or shops. The decline in
coal mining in the East Midlands in the 1980s caused what the
BBC described as a "damaging dip in trade". Nevertheless, holiday-makers continued to visit the town and, in the 1980s and 1990s, people ventured to Skegness for their second holiday alongside trips abroad; Between 2006 and 2008, 870,000 people made overnight trips to Skegness; this figure had risen to 1,030,000 for 2010–2012. The fabric of the town centre has also changed. North and South Bracing were built in 1948–1949. Butlin's left the main amusement park and it was extensively refurbished by Botton Bros in 1966; the switchback on North Parade was demolished in 1970. and various private developments. The seafront was fully developed in the 1970s and the last of The Park built on in 1982. In 1971, the pier entrance was remodelled; The Embassy Ballroom and the swimming baths were replaced in 1999 with the Embassy Theatre Complex, which includes a theatre, indoor swimming pool,
leisure centre and car park. What remained of Frederica Terrace, one of Skegness's oldest buildings, had been converted into entertainment bars and arcades before it was destroyed in a fire in 2007. == Economy ==