| Clacton-on-Sea | |
|---|---|
 Clacton-on-Sea from the air in 2004 | |
  Clacton-on-Sea Location withinEssex | |
| Population | 53,200 (Built-up area, 2021)[1] |
| OS grid reference | TM170150 |
| District | |
| Shire county | |
| Region | |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | CLACTON-ON-SEA |
| Postcode district | CO15, CO16 |
| Dialling code | 01255 |
| Police | Essex |
| Fire | Essex |
| Ambulance | East of England |
| UK Parliament | |
| 51°47′30″N1°08′45″E / 51.7918°N 1.1457°E /51.7918; 1.1457 | |
Clacton-on-Sea, often simply calledClacton, is aseaside town andresort in the county ofEssex, on the east coast of England. It is located on the Tendring Peninsula and is the largest settlement in theTendring District, with a population of 53,200 (2021). The town is situated around 77 miles (124 kilometres) northeast of London, 16 mi (26 km) southeast ofColchester and 16 mi (26 km) south ofHarwich.
The area was historically in the parish of Great Clacton. The development of the seaside resort began in the 1870s and was called Clacton-on-Sea to distinguish it from the older village about 1 mile (1.6 km) inland. Great Clacton and Clacton-on-Sea were always administered together, forming a singleurban district called Clacton between 1895 and 1974. The two settlements gradually merged into a single urban area during the twentieth century.
It lies within the United Kingdom Parliamentconstituency ofClacton.
Clacton-on-Sea is located betweenJaywick andHolland-on-Sea along the coastline and the original village of Great Clacton, now a suburb, to the north. The local authority isTendring District Council.
It is at the south-eastern end of theA133. The resort ofFrinton-on-Sea is nearby to the north-east.
Deposits at Clacton have provided important evidence for theLower Palaeolithic occupation of Britain byHomo heidelbergensis during theHoxnian Interglacial, around 424-375,000 years ago, including stone tools of the titularClactonianindustry.[2][3] At this time Britain had a temperate deciduous forest environment and climate similar to today.[4][5] The "Clacton Spear", a wooden (yew) spear found in these deposits around Clacton in 1911 is the world's oldest known wooden spear.[2][6][7]
TheDomesday Book of 1086 records the village asClachintuna.
Clacton was repeatedly surveyed by the Army in the Napoleonic Wars as a possible invasion beach-head for Napoleon and his Dutch allies. There was a large army and militia camp where Holland-on-Sea now stands. In 1810 fiveMartello Towers were built to guard the beaches between Colne Point to the south and what is now Holland-on-Sea to the north of the town.
In 1865 railway engineer and land developerPeter Bruff, the steamboat owner William Jackson, and a group of businessmen bought an area of undeveloped farmland adjoining low gravelly cliffs and a firm sand-and-shingle beach lying to the south-east of Great Clacton village, with the intention of establishing a new resort. One of the first facilities they built for the new resort wasthe pier, which opened in 1871, allowing visitors to travel by ship; the railway would not reach Clacton until 1882.[8] The town of Clacton-on-Sea was laid out rather haphazardly over the next few years; though it has a central 'grand' avenue (originally Electric Parade, now Pier Avenue) the street plan incorporates many previously rural lanes and tracks, such as Wash Lane. Plots and streets were sold off piecemeal to developers and speculators. In 1882 theGreat Eastern Railway already serving the well-established resort ofWalton-on-the-Naze along the coast, opened a branch line toClacton-on-Sea railway station from a junction on the existing railway at Thorpe-le-Soken.
Clacton grew into the largest seaside resort betweenSouthend-on-Sea andGreat Yarmouth, with some 10,000 residents by 1914 and approx. 20,000 by 1939. Due to its accessibility from the East End of London and the Essex suburbs, Clacton, like Southend, remained preferentially geared to catering for working-class and lower-middle-class holidaymakers.
For well over a century Clacton Pier has been anRNLI lifeboat station.
Just before the Second World War the building ofButlin's Holiday Camp boosted its economy, though the Army took it over between then and 1945 for use as an internment, engineer, pioneer and light anti-aircraft artillery training camp.
Four notable incidents occurred in Clacton-on-Sea during the Second World War. First, very early in the war a German airman bailed out over the town. Procedures for dealing with enemy captives were not yet well-established and he was treated as a celebrity guest for some days, including by the town council, before eventually being handed over to the military. Second, aLuftwaffeHeinkel He 111 bomber crashed into the town on 30 April 1940, demolishing several houses in the Vista Road area as one of the magnetic mines on board exploded on impact, killing the crew and two civilians; another mine was defused by experts from the Navy. Third, the Wagstaff Corner area was bombed in May 1941, demolishing some well-known buildings. Finally, aV-2 rocket hit in front of the Tower Hotel, injuring dozens of troops inside though without bringing down the structure. Clacton lay beneath the route taken by many of theV-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets aimed at London.[citation needed]
A big role in the town during the pre- and post-war period was played by the Kingsman family, which bought and developed the pier and ran a pleasure-steamer service from London. A summer sea excursion toCalais also ran until the early 1960s. Butlin's reopened the holiday camp after the war. This, along with the expansion of the nearby chalet town ofJaywick, originally a speculative private development of inter-war years, and increasingly capacious caravan sites, all swelled by the movement of retired Londoners into the area, altered the character of the town.[citation needed]
Throughout the 1960s Clacton beach remained a popular summer excursion for residents of Essex and east London and in August was often crammed to capacity in the area around the Pier. Thepirate radio ship MVGalaxy (originally known asUSSDensity), which broadcastWonderful Radio London, was anchored offshore from 1964 until its forced closure in 1967.[9][10]
With the advent of cheap flights to Mediterranean resorts in the 1970s, the holiday industry began to decline. Increasingly, hotels' and guest-houses' spare capacity came to be used as 'temporary' accommodation by the local authority to house those on welfare, refugees, migrants and asylum seekers. Pier Ward, in the centre of the town, is one of the poorest in the UK (nearby Jaywick is often cited[by whom?] as the poorest of all).
Since around 1970 several well-known local buildings have been demolished, including the palatialart decoOdeon Cinema (a great loss to both the town and the county); the Warwick Castle Pub; the Waverley Hotel; Barker House, a large home for the learning disabled, andJohn Groom's Crippleage which housed orphaned handicapped girls from London. Cordy's, a well-known large seafront restaurant has recently been demolished. The site of Butlin's Holiday Camp was redeveloped as a housing estate. The once famously crowded bus station in Jackson Road has become a car park. The Ocean Revue Theatre, whereMax Bygraves made one of his first appearances, has closed.[11][12]
The town expanded substantially in the 1980s, 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, with new housing estates on the rural margins of town, and some brownfield developments. Many residents commute to work inColchester,Witham,Chelmsford orLondon. Clacton was in the news when its town centre and seafront areas were struck byan F1/T2 tornado on 23 November 1981, as part of the record-breaking nationwide tornado outbreak on that day.[13]
Gunfleet Sands Offshore Wind Farm, built in the early 2000s some three nautical miles (six kilometres) offshore, is visible from many places in the flat hinterland of the town.
As common with many English seaside towns, unemployment has remained stubbornly high in Clacton.[14] In 2023, Clacton won a £20 million governmentlevelling-up grant to improve the town centre.[15]
The modern day Clacton-on-Sea was founded byPeter Bruff in 1871 as a seaside resort. Originally the main means of access was by sea;Steamships operated by theWoolwich Steam Packet Company docked from 1871 atClacton Pier which opened the same year. The pier now offers an amusement arcade and many other forms of entertainment.
People who wanted to come by road had to go through Great Clacton. In the 1920s, London Road was built to cope with the influx of holidaymakers. Later, in the 1970s, the eastern section of the A120 was opened, obviating the need for Clacton visitors to go through Colchester. Today thePaddle SteamerWaverley operates from Clacton Pier, offering pleasure boat excursions.
Clacton has aBlue Flag beach at Martello Bay (two more are locally atDovercourt Bay andBrightlingsea).[16] Clacton Seafront Gardens which run along the top of the seafront west of Clacton Pier has also been awarded a Green Flag, and includes various sections with formal gardens, memorials and places to sit.
In 1936,Billy Butlin bought and refurbished the West Clacton Estate, an amusement park to the west of the town. He opened a new amusement park on the site in 1937 and then, a year later on 11 June 1938, opened the second of his holiday camps. This location remained open until 1983 when, due to changing holiday tastes, Butlins decided to close the facility. It was then purchased by former managers of the camp who reopened it as a short-lived theme park, called Atlas Park. The land was then sold and redeveloped with housing.[17]
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There are two tiers of local government covering Clacton, atdistrict andcounty level:Tendring District Council, which is based atClacton Town Hall, andEssex County Council, based in Chelmsford.
Theancient parish was called Great Clacton. Until 1891 the parish was administered by itsvestry in the same way as most rural areas. As the area became more populous, largely due to the growth of the seaside resort, more urban forms of government were required. The parish of Great Clacton was made alocal government district in 1891, governed by a local board.[18] Such local boards were reconstituted asurban district councils in 1894.[19] In 1895 the council changed the name of the urban district from Great Clacton to simply Clacton.[20] The legal name of the parish which covered the same area as the urban district remained Great Clacton, but as anurban parish it had no separate parish council. The neighbouring parish of Little Holland coveringHolland-on-Sea was abolished in 1934 and absorbed into Clacton.[21]
Clacton Urban District Council built the Town Hall on Station Road to serve both as its headquarters and as a public hall and theatre for the town, with the theatre now called the Princes Theatre. It is a neo-Georgian building, with a tall portico of composite columns flanked by two-story wings. The architect wasSir Alfred Brumwell Thomas and it was completed in 1931.[22]
Clacton Urban District was abolished in 1974 under theLocal Government Act 1972, with the area becoming part of the new Tendring District. Nosuccessor parish was created for the former urban district and so it become anunparished area, directly administered by Tendring District Council.[23]
The currentMember of Parliament for theClacton constituency isNigel Farage, the leader ofReform UK, who won the seat fromConservativeGiles Watling in the2024 general election.[24]
Clacton and Frinton Gazette is the town's local newspaper.[25]
Clacton Urban District Council had provided the town with electricity since the early twentieth century from Clacton power station. Uponnationalisation of the electricity industry in 1948 ownership passed to theBritish Electricity Authority and later to theCentral Electricity Generating Board. Electricity connections to thenational grid rendered the small 2.15megawatt (MW) internal combustion engine power station redundant. It closed in 1966; in its final year of operation it delivered 796MWh of electricity to the town.[26]
In 2013Tendring District Council undertook significant work to develop a 10-year Economic Strategy for the district which includes Clacton on Sea. Now, half-way through this 10-year strategy, the approach has been refreshed to add a greater focus on the populations of Clacton andJaywick Sands between 2020 and 2024, noting a decline in economic performance of these locations. The strategy focuses specifically on local participation within communities and addressing long term prosperity and also proposes bold action in Clacton town centre, recognising that its future is unlikely to be led by retail.[27] In 2023, Clacton had the highest proportion within the UK of people classed as "economically inactive".[14]
Clacton has comparatively few buildings of architectural interest. In addition to the surviving large seafront hotels, these are:
The parish church of St John, Great Clacton, is the oldest surviving building in the town; it dates from the early decades of the 12th century, though considerably altered. In the late 16th century the vicar was Eleazer Knox (d. 1591) son ofJohn Knox and Marjory Bowes ofNorham.[28] A local legend that smugglers used a tunnel from the coast to the Ship Inn (16th century) opposite the church is discounted by historians; the pub is more than 1.5 km from the sea. The nearby Queens Head inn may be pre-1600.
A large (and actually unfinished) church of 1912-13 between Tower Road and Wash Lane, St James's is a rare southern building byTemple Moore, an architect chiefly associated with the North of England. Somewhat grim on the outside (asPevsner noted inThe Buildings of Essex), the interior is surprisingly light and spare, with different orders of arch on either side of the chancel giving an asymmetrical feel. The building is only a third of its intended size; the original plans had included a large tower at the west end. Ordered for Anglo-Catholic worship, it is large, without pews, and boasts an impressivereredos which finishes in a canopy at the east end.
Themain station building dates from 1929. A typical neo-Georgian 'late Imperial'-style building, it is notable for the decorative use of moulded 'fasces' on either side of the main entrance.[citation needed]
There are threeMartello towers between the Pier and Jaywick Sands to the south; they date from 1809 to 1812. The immensely thick brick walls look circular but are, in fact, rounded triangles, designed to deflect cannon-fire. The tower nearest the pier was, unusually, built within a moat. The name comes from similar fortifications in Mortella, Corsica.
A real oddity: in Albany Gardens West, near the seafront to the north of the Pier, this house of the 1400s was moved from the village ofHawstead, Suffolk and reconstructed here in 1911 – though considerably modernised and altered – for a London builder named J H Gill.
The former hospice is situated in Jackson Road, in the town centre. It has a curved wood and brick corner design of 2001-2 by the Purcell Miller Tritton architectural partnership. The building has been redeveloped and now houses eighteen modern, privately let, dwellings.
A huddle of self-builds and kit-houses were built in the 1920s and '30s in a bleak field dangerously close to the mean sea level. It has been described as resembling "a shanty town", but it also has its admirers who call it "a great place to live."[29]
Jaywick was attractive to workers from theFord plant inDagenham, who bought strips of cheap agricultural land for holiday homes. Following the destruction of manyEast-End homes during theSecond World War, they moved there permanently. The area was badly damaged by thefloods of 1953, when 35 residents died; most settlements were swept away.[30]
Clacton Pier was the first building of the new resort of Clacton-on-Sea; it opened officially on 27 July 1871. It was 160 yd (150 m) in length and 12 ft (3.7 m) wide.[31] It was built originally as a landing point for goods and passengers, as Clacton was becoming an increasingly popular destination for day trippers.
In 1893, the pier was lengthened to 390 yd (360 m) and entertainment facilities were added.[32] Bought by Ernest Kingsman in 1922, it remained in the ownership of the Kingsman family until 1971.[33] In March 2009, the pier was purchased by the Clacton Pier Company, who installed a 50 ft (15 m) helter-skelter as a new focal point.[34]
A 48-turbine wind farm is located 4.3 miles (7 km) south-east of the Clacton coast. It has been in commercial operation since 2010 and has an overall capacity of 173 MW.[35]
Clacton has anoceanic climate (Köppen "Cfb"), but with lower precipitation than most of the UK and Western Europe. This makes for warm and relatively dry summers, and also fairly chilly winter days. For the 1961–1990 observation period, Clacton averaged 103.7 days with at least 1mm of rain, and 24.3 air frosts a year- comparable to south west coastal locations.
| Climate data for Clacton 1961–1990, 16 m asl. | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Year |
| Mean daily maximum °C (°F) | 6.1 (43.0) | 6.3 (43.3) | 8.6 (47.5) | 11.0 (51.8) | 14.8 (58.6) | 18.2 (64.8) | 20.3 (68.5) | 20.3 (68.5) | 18.1 (64.6) | 14.5 (58.1) | 9.7 (49.5) | 7.2 (45.0) | 14.5 (58.1) |
| Mean daily minimum °C (°F) | 1.8 (35.2) | 1.9 (35.4) | 3.1 (37.6) | 4.9 (40.8) | 8.3 (46.9) | 11.2 (52.2) | 13.3 (55.9) | 13.5 (56.3) | 11.7 (53.1) | 9.3 (48.7) | 5.0 (41.0) | 2.8 (37.0) | 7.2 (45.0) |
| Averageprecipitation mm (inches) | 49 (1.9) | 31 (1.2) | 43 (1.7) | 40 (1.6) | 40 (1.6) | 45 (1.8) | 43 (1.7) | 43 (1.7) | 48 (1.9) | 48 (1.9) | 55 (2.2) | 50 (2.0) | 535 (21.1) |
| Mean monthlysunshine hours | 58.3 | 75.6 | 117.6 | 155.9 | 207.8 | 211.9 | 200.1 | 199.3 | 153.4 | 117.9 | 75.0 | 54.2 | 1,627 |
| Source:Met Office[36] | |||||||||||||
Clacton's population increased substantially during the 20th century from 7,456 at the 1901 census to 25,000 in the 1960s, 45,065 in 1991 and reaching over 53,000 by 2001.Population as 107,237 according to Dataloft Inform, Land Registry, 2011 Census.
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The town is served by two secondary schools,Clacton Coastal Academy andClacton County High School.
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Clacton-on-Sea is located at the terminus of theA133 road, which runs between Clacton and Colchester.
The town is served byClacton-on-Sea railway station, a terminus of theSunshine Coast Line which links the town withColchester. Trains are operated byGreater Anglia.
Clacton Airfield has been active since its use by theRoyal Air Force during the Second World War. It does not operate scheduled passenger flights. In the 1990s, the airfield was featured in theBBC Television seriesAirport.
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The following were all born or have lived in Clacton-on-Sea:
On the Easter weekend of 1964, rival youth gangs ofMods and Rockers descended upon Clacton-on-Sea. They created mild havoc by fighting with each other.[38][39]
The music video for "Always on My Mind" by thePet Shop Boys was filmed in Clacton, which was also the setting for their filmIt Couldn't Happen Here.[40] Parts of the 2019 filmYesterday (working titleAll You Need Is Love) were also filmed in Clacton.[41]
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