Tag Archives: Seaside

Essex-on-Sea: The Essex coast in historical picture postcards

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Just in time for the summer holidays, we have installed a new display in our Searchroom of a selection of the wonderful picture postcards we have of Essex coastal resorts.

Our new Searchroom display highlights historical postcards from Southend-on-Sea, Clacton-on-Sea, Frinton-on-Sea, and Walton-on-the-Naze

Open the drawers of our display case to see original postcards sent by people holidaying in Essex in the early years of the 20th century

In their heyday, the coastal resorts of Essex attracted thousands of holidaymakers every summer. Postcards can bring us something of the atmosphere of these holiday destinations – not only through the photographs on the front of the cards, but through the messages on the back as well.

Postcards have existed in various forms since the 1840s, but picture postcards only became widespread in the UK from the 1890s. The boom in postcards coincided with a huge increase in tourism among ordinary people, driven by the invention of paid time off and the ability to travel further from home thanks largely to the building of railways. A belief in the health benefits of sea air and salt water bathing also drove the development of coastal resorts.

The ERO’s postcard collection is one of the very few things we have which is not listed on our online catalogue. If you would like to see postcards from our collection for a particular place, please ask staff who will be able to advise you on how to order them.

See the Flickr albums below for a flavour of the collection, and do stop for a look at the display next time you are visiting.

 

Southend-on-Sea

Southend’s origins are as the ‘south end’ of the ancient parish of Prittlewell, occupied by isolated farms. In the late eighteenth century a fashion took off for visiting the seaside for the supposed health benefits of bathing in and drinking sea water. Southend, being relatively easy to reach from the capital, became a popular place for London’s fashionable gentry to visit. Southend’s reputation as a resort for fashionable, wealthy visitors would all change with the arrival of the railway, which reached the town in 1856. This drastically reduced journey times and costs, and meant that a trip to the town was, for the first time, within the reach of ordinary people. New entertainments and accommodation were built to cater for the masses of tourists who now flooded Southend every summer. In 1889 a new iron pier replaced the original wooden one. It included an electric railway, the first of its kind on a pleasure pier. Visitors might still come for their health or to enjoy a quiet retreat, but people after noisier entertainments could avail themselves of donkey rides or boat trips, or take in a performance by a brass band or pierrot troop, perhaps while enjoying an ice cream.

Southend-on-Sea historical postcards

Clacton-on-Sea

The resort of Clacton-on-Sea was founded in 1871 with the opening of a pier, built by civil engineer and businessman Peter Bruff, who had also played an important part in the development of Walton. The Royal Hotel opened in 1872, also built by Bruff, initially standing alone at the base of the pier. By the 1890s the pier had been extended, and housed hot and cold sea baths, and the Pavilion theatre at the pier head. The railway reached Clacton in 1882, opening it up to even more visitors. In 1938 Billy Butlin opened his second holiday camp at Clacton, which was visited by thousands during its lifetime until its closure in 1983.

Clacton-on-Sea in old postcards

Walton-on-the-Naze

The development of Walton-on-the-Naze began with the opening of the Marine Hotel in 1829 and the town’s first pier in 1830, both built by Mr Penrice of Colchester. The pier was the main way in which visitors would arrive and depart, travelling on steamships coming from London and Ipswich, at least until the railway arrived in 1867. By the 1890s Walton had a second, much longer pier, with an electric tramway running its 790 metre length. Other attractions for the Victorian and Edwardian visitor included pleasure craft, bathing machines, theatrical entertainments, and later cinemas.

Walton-on-the-Naze in old postcards

Frinton-on-Sea

The development of Frinton-on-Sea began a little later. In 1886 the Marine and General Land Company published plans for creating ‘a high class watering place’ at Frinton, including hotels, a marine parade, a cricket ground, and tennis lawns. One undated postcard sent from Frinton reads: ‘Yesterday we went to Frinton and enjoyed it very much, it is so pretty. You would like Frinton there are such lovely large private residences each standing in own grounds along the front – a very select place. Only 4 large hotels and no boarding houses.’

Frinton-on-Sea in old postcards

Essex Sounds Like…

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For the past six months, we have been surveying people across Essex to ask them what they know about the Essex Sound and Video Archive (ESVA). The main aim of the exercise was to collect baseline data, so we will have some statistics to compare with similar surveys we plan to run after the You Are Hear: sound and a sense of place project. We hope this will demonstrate the impact of the project to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and that more people will be aware of us and have engaged with our treasure store of recordings.

We surveyed our long-suffering readers in the Searchroom, so frequently asked for feedback; visitors to events that we attended; and innocent passers-by who happened to be walking through High Chelmer Shopping Centre, Chelmsford on Saturday 1 March. We even roped in the aid of libraries and village agents to distribute our surveys. The end result was 185 surveys completed by people from near and far (even some from outside Essex snuck in).

Our main aim was to establish how many people had heard of the Essex Sound and Video Archive. Forty percent of the people who answered this question knew about the ESVA but had never used it, but another 54% had not even heard of us. We obviously have some work to do!

We collected demographic information about our participants, but we also took the opportunity to ask some more interesting questions about people’s perceptions of where they live.  Eighty-six percent of participants felt they belonged to some kind of community: mostly their town or village, but social or religious groups, neighbourhoods, and on-line communities also featured. Despite a few references to the stereotypes associated with Essex (thanks largely to a certain ITV television programme), most people had positive associations with the county. Several referred to it as home or felt rooted to it by family ties. Some mentioned its attractive features, such as the seaside, the countryside, the good travel links – and the fact that it’s not London. We hope to build on this  undercurrent of pride in the county by sharing what former residents have felt about their homeland, what they experienced, and what they felt moved to create in it.

The most interesting question to me was, ‘Which sounds represent where you live?’ Although it initially puzzled a few people, we eventually got some wonderful descriptions of the aural landscape of the county. The overwhelming majority of the responses were precisely what I would have identified in my own town: Essex sounds like traffic and birds.

We created a word cloud from all of the responses received: the bigger the word, the more times it was mentioned. How does the picture compare with your location?

sounds wordcloud aug 2014

Wordcloud of sounds associated with Essex, created with www.wordle.net

In the spirit of You Are Hear, we have a sound clip alternative:

At the moment the clip is just the words spoken aloud: the recording of the actual sounds will come once the project starts, with your help.

Thank you to everyone who completed a survey or helped to distribute them. Get in touch if you want to read more about the results.

A summer holiday on Essex’s ‘Sunshine Coast’

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Where are you planning your summer holiday this year? Essex is possibly not the first place you would think of, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Essex’s ‘Sunshine Coast’ was one of the destinations of choice for the discerning British holiday maker.

The historians of the Victoria County History of Essex have been hard at work over the last few years researching the pasts of Clacton, Walton and Frinton, and their research has now been published as volume 11 in the Victoria County History of Essex series.

I/Mb 387/1/4 Print of Walton-on-the-Naze as a seaside village, 1829, just as it was starting to be developed a seaside resort

From the 1820s, Walton and later Clacton and Frinton were promoted as high-class residential and holiday resorts. After a slow start, hampered by poor communications and low demand, growth was stimulated by steam ship companies which landed visitors on newly built piers in Walton and Clacton and by the railways that reached Walton in 1867, Clacton in 1882 and Frinton in 1888.

I/Mb 387/1/13 Photograph showing new resort bulidings at Walton-on-the-Naze constructed c.1860, juxtaposed with the surrounding rural landscape with cows grazing on the cliff tops. Photograph by T. E. Freshwater

 

I/Mp 86/1/3 Clacton Pier – a key element in the growth of Clactonas a seaside resort, since it enabled steamship to bring visitors to the town

However, the working-class excursionists newly attracted to Clacton, and to a lesser extent Walton, then irrevocably changed the social tone of both resorts. By the 1920s and 1930s Clacton had become a highly commercialized holiday destination and its pier’s funfair-style facilities rivalled those of any other British resort.

   I/Mb 86/1/29 Postcard of the bandstand, Clacton-on-Sea, c.1910

Nearby Jaywick was established as a cheap and cheerful plotland development and Butlins opened its popular Clacton holiday camp in 1938. While Walton remained popular with families, Frinton continued as a ‘select’ resort, with building development and commerce strictly controlled to protect its exclusive character. 

After 1945 camping and caravanning increased in popularity, but from the later 1960s the growth of overseas holidays led to a steep decline in the domestic tourism economy. The coast remained popular for retirement and subsequent diversification has led to large dormitory-style housing developments, light industry and shopping centres.

The volume which tells this story is part of a grand tradition: the distinctive big red volumes of the Victoria County Histories have graced the shelves of archives and libraries across England since 1900. Founded in 1899 and dedicated to QueenVictoria, the Histories aim to produce ‘an encyclopaedic record of England’s places and people from earliest times to the present day’. The Histories are still being written by historians working in counties right acrossEngland, and the Essex Record Office is home to the Essex VCH Trust.

Volumes of the Victoria County of History in the ERO Searchroom

Volume 11 of the Victoria County History of Essex, Clacton, Walton and Frinton: North-East Essex Seaside Resorts, will be available in the ERO Searchroom shortly, and can be ordered from Boydell & Brewer Ltd here.