Bringing you the news year after year
The Skegness Standard was first published on Wednesday, July 5, 1922, from a premises in Lumley Road.
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A brief history of tourism
The Skegness area has been occupied since Roman times.
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Find out about the Fisherman
The Jolly Fisherman, with his sou'wester, gum boots and broad smile, has become synonymous with Skegness.
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Paddle boats and a pier to be proud of
Skegness’ most famous feature is undoubtedly its pier, which is one of only 50 remaining in the UK.
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Billy Butlin - funfairs and fame
William Heygate Colbourne Butlin was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 29th September 1899 to William, the son of a clergyman, and Bertha, the daughter of a small town baker who had become a travelling showman.
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Carry on camping
Billy Butlin, a travelling fairground worker from Canada, set up his first holiday camp at Skegness in 1936 having identified a need for all-weather recreation for holiday-makers.
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80 years of Skegness yesterdays
After the foreshore became the property of Skegness Urban District Council in 1922, the local authority quickly went ahead with developing it.
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Flying bombs and wartime rations
By 1939 the nation seemed to have almost recovered from the Wall Street disaster of 10 years earlier, and then Hitler marched into Poland and Europe was aflame again.
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The ups and downs of life in a grand old English seaside town
As at the end of the Great War 1914-18, the aftermath of the Second World War found Britain with a huge housing shortage and local authorities’ first priority was solving that crisis.
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Tower Esplanade, Skegness, during the 60s. The building was the Foreshore Centre, which before its demolition was used for tourist information.

After the foreshore became the property of Skegness Urban District Council in 1922, the local authority quickly went ahead with developing it.

In little more than a dozen years, the sands and dunes had been transformed with a large boating lake, an open air swimming pool - claimed to be the biggest on the east coast - the Embassy Centre, the Sun Castle Solarium, bowling greens and tennis courts, a winding waterway with pleasure boats, and wonderful floral gardens.

Throughout the summer season there were swimming galas with international swimmers and divers and water polo matches, boating lake regattas in which local schools competed in rowing races, air displays on the Royal Oak airfield and motor races on the Seacroft sands.

In addition, a mammoth street carnival procession was organised for several years by Billy Butlin, with brass band contests attracting competitors from all over the country.

By the early 1930s there were three cinemas on the go and two theatres and also two amusement parks.

Large pleasure boats plied from the sea’s edge with a multitude of small motorboats running short trips to the sealbanks in the Wash.

At summer weekends the trip trains queued up in the sidings after disgorging their packed cargoes of humanity from the East Midlands towns and cities and farther afield.

The winding road from Boston - much more so than it is today - and the road that comes over the Wolds from Lincoln, brought ever increasing numbers of cars and motorcycles and buses.

A car park had to be laid out on Grand Parade in 1926 and another plot across the road was reserved for the excursion buses.

On the outskirts of the town, farmers threw open their field gates to entice motorists to leave their Fords, Morris Cowleys and Austin Sevens in their keeping for a bob a time.

Other farmers used their grass field to accommodate the campers; real ones with tents and near ones with caravans; with fresh milk and free-range eggs on site.

Residential development was not standing still and, despite worldwide financial depression, new houses and streets were springing up all over the place.

The parish of Winthorpe had been incorporated in 1926, almost doubling the area, although not adding much to the total population.

On the roads, many hairpin bends and awkward deviations were straightened out as traffic accidents increased every summer. Present day lay-bys will indicate some bits of former routes of main roads, when surfaces were not like today’s and vehicle steering and controls were far more primitive.

Lincolnshire Road Car Company absorbed several small pioneer bus businesses in the 1930s and they opened Skegness’s first service bus station in Drummond Road in 1937, moving it to Richmond Drive in 1978.

Mains electricity, brought to the Skegness area in 1932, opened up new standards of domestic lighting after flickering gas mantles or paraffin lamps. Electric street lighting was still another 20 years in the future as the old squat gas lamps remained in use, although standing unlit during the war years.

The water supply had been helped by the erection of a water tower at the Burgh Road waterworks in 1927, but new boreholes had to be sunk at Orby not long afterwards to augment the Welton reservoirs.

Extensions had also taken place at the gasworks, while in 1930 a new sewage works was put into operation on Burgh Marsh.

The new works, like its predecessor at Cowbank, was designed for land treatment as Skegness Council had always shied away from shooting sewage in to the sea, a cheap method that had contaminated many beaches around the coast.

The Burgh Road water tower was demolished after it became superfluous in 1982, but when television hit the country in the early 1950s, reception at Skegness was very poor and the BBC placed a booster on top of the tower to improve the picture.

Construction of the tall television mast at Belmont in the Wolds eventually rendered this unnecessary and with a large bore main to bring water from Welton, the water tower to store supplies for peak periods was no longer required.