Cleethorpes Heritage Walk

Introduction to Cleethorpes Heritage Trail

Thanks to Awards for All, Lottery funding, we published the Cleethorpes Heritage Trail in an attractive illustrated brochure available free from the Tourist Information Centre and Libraries.

We have placed commemorative plaques on some of the historic sites on the course of the trail, which was officially opened by Councillor Colin Eastwell, Mayor of North East Lincolnshire.

Green Plaque Heritage Trail

Welcome to the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society's Green Plaque Heritage Trail

We hope that this series of short walks, each of them under 1hr in length, around North East Lincolnshire will help you to learn a little more about our townscape, its people and its heritage.

THE CLEETHORPES HERITAGE TRAIL

Take a walk with us now as we step back in time and discover a little of the history of Cleethorpes.

We begin our trail at Cleethorpes library and tourist information centre on Alexandra Road, or Itterby Road as it used to be called before the visit of Prince Albert Victor in July 1885. It's hard to imagine now, with all the hustle and bustle of seaside life, that this was once a track between the two fishing villages of Itterby and Oole. The growth in the popularity of seaside holidays and the advent of the railways with its resulting rise in population helped these two Thorpes (or hamlets) to expand into each other forming what we now know as modern day Cleethorpes. After leaving the Library building walk towards Alexandra Road and turn right. Before crossing Yarra Road, look over to your right, you'll see the Old Post Office, built to serve the people of Cleethorpes in 1907

Heading up the hill towards Itterby, we pass the Baptist Chapel. A new chapel now stands on the same spot where the first Baptist Chapel stood for many years, not only bringing hope and solace to the locals but also used as a billet for the 3rd Battalion of the Manchester Regiment while they were stationed in the area with up to 4,000 other troops, practising trench warfare before being shipped off to fight in the First World War killing fields. Cleethorpes must have seemed like a fortunate posting for these young men, far from the dangers of the front line, but that all changed on April 1st 1916 when the realities of the First World War were brought to our very doorstep. A Zeppelin airship on its way home, jettisoned its bombs before flying off over the North Sea back to Germany, demolishing the chapel and killing 31 men. By taking a short detour from this trail and retracing your steps back to Yarra Road, you can find, at the rear of numbers 28 and 30, one of the few remaining First World War air raid shelters in the UK, built by a local chemist in the months following the bombing raid.

At the top of Alexandra Road is a quaint shopping area called Sea View Street. This was at the centre of the Thorpe of Itterby and has lots of old buildings with links to its heritage. Number 16, on your right hand side as you walk away from the sea is the oldest shop in Cleethorpes. It was opened to cater for the many visitors to the area that started arriving when the new trend of holidaying at the seaside really took off, in the early 1800s.

At the Fisherman's Arms, take a look along Wardall Street. Much of it has long since been demolished but it still holds a couple of interesting buildings. The Fisherman's Cottage on the corner, for instance, is the oldest dwelling in the resort and the tiny cottage next to it was used as a makeshift hospital during the Second World War. Wardall St hit the headlines in the 1850s when the cramped and overcrowded conditions during the height of the summer season and the poor state of the Cleethorpes oyster pits, coupled to bring the deadly disease, Asiatic cholera to the area. It arrived during the last 2 days of August 1854 when 16 locals were struck down out of a population of 800. Over the next 3 weeks that number rose to 60. Later records show that Wardall St was the centre of the epidemic with 17 of the summer visitors to the area buried in the graveyard of the Parish Church of Old Clee, a few miles further inland.

Carrying on down Sea View Street, take a look through the gates at the Water Wheel antiques, to see the old village abattoir and the site of the old bake house. Further along, on the corner of Sea View Street and Cambridge Street, is the site of the old Dairy, whose name is proudly emblazoned on its doorstep.

As we turn right into Cambridge Street, we leave Itterby behind us and head towards Oole. Cambridge Street, like a lot of streets in Cleethorpes, was named after the largest landowner in the area, Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, who bought up large swathes of land in Cleethorpes in 1616, following a bequest of £40000 from Peter Blundell of Tiverton. The rent money received from their Cleethorpes estates helped to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of this prestigious college.

Cleethorpes Town Hall (1) built in 1903/4 stands tall and proud on the right hand side where Knoll Street meets Cambridge Street. Situated halfway between the two ancient hamlets of Oole and Itterby, Cleethorpes Town Hall houses another of the area's past links with world conflicts, in its basement. During the 1950s, the Cold War threat of a nuclear attack reached Cleethorpes and council officials, worried that the area might be a target, constructed a nuclear fallout shelter deep below ground underneath the Town Hall, complete with its own shower facilities to wash off any possible dusting of radioactive debris.

Carry on walking along Cambridge Street until you reach a passageway called Cuttleby, on your right hand side. Cuttleby used to be the main thoroughfare from Itterby to Oole and as you walk along this track today, it's easy to imagine yourself passing the fields where the cattle, destined for the Sea View Street abattoir were penned. At the end of Cuttleby is Albert Road, with Mill Place straight across the road from you, where the 5 sailed mill, powered with the fresh winds from the North Sea, used to be.

Turn left at Albert Road and after passing St. Peters Church Vicarage, (2) on your left hand side, resplendent in its head to toe covering of Virginia creeper, we arrive at what is now the main shopping area of Cleethorpes. With St. Peters Church, (3) consecrated on St. Peter's Day 1866, on your left, turn right onto St. Peter's Avenue or as it used to be known, Oole Road. The coming of this large Anglican Church changed Oole Road forever. Soon after it was opened, elegant terraces were erected all along either side of this tree lined Avenue, which leads towards the High Street. The growth of Cleethorpes over the next century meant that the few shops in Sea View Street, could no longer cope with the demand for goods and services, especially with the huge influx of tourists during the summer months, so these private houses along the Avenue, were gradually, one by one, replaced by shops. As you walk along St. Peters Avenue towards Short Street on your right, take a moment to look back above the shop front level at the bedroom windows of this busy shopping street and imagine a once elegant Victorian terrace with ornate, cast iron railings surrounding their neatly tended gardens.

Turn right into Short Street which, as its name implies, takes you quickly into Cleethorpes Market Place, the centre of the ancient hamlet of Oole. It was here, on Tuesday 3rd July 1781, that John Wesley preached his sermon to the locals in the little field "between the long farmhouse and the High street, taking his stand beneath a tree." He had travelled here across the marshes from Grimsby and gives a report of his visit in his journal, "Tuesday 3. I preached at Claythorpe, three miles from Grimsby. Here likewise there has been an outpouring of spirit. I could not go into any of the little houses, but presently it was filled with people and I was constrained to pray with them in every house, or they would not be satisfied". Carry on walking away from the Market Place towards the junction with Alexandra Road and our first glimpse of the sea.

As you reach the junction of Alexandra Road and Sea Road take a look at the large public house on the near left hand corner. The present day Dolphin Hotel was built on the site of one of the first seaside hotels in the country, visited by John Byng, later Lord Torrington who described it in his visit to Lincolnshire in 1791, "A bathing place of better complexion than the two others we have seen upon this coast" and "the best of the Lincolnshire bathing shops". The Dolphin Hotel was used for Town Council meetings up until the building of the new Town Hall and it was also here, that the official signing of the Clee Enclosure Act took place in 1846, which changed forever, the use of the open fields between Itterby and Oole, opening up the land for development.

After crossing the road towards the DolphinGardens with its centre-piece sculpture of dolphins, commissioned by the award winning Cleethorpes In Bloom committee in 2007, when it was declared RHS Britain in Bloom Best Coastal Resort in the UK, turn left until you reach Station Approach, with its steep descent towards Cleethorpes Railway station

Making your way down Station Approach, towards the beach, you can't fail to notice the Victorian Clock Tower (4) in front of you and neither could the millions of happy holiday-makers that have arrived or departed from the station since its construction in 1883. Wherever you were on the beach or promenade, this four sided clock was a constant help to tourists, giving them the correct time to catch their train for their journey home.

On reaching the North Promenade take a look at the Mermaid Restaurant (5) on your left. Its light and airy sea view room, was initially built as a rest room for railway travellers and it still remains the only building in Cleethorpes made solely of iron, glass and wood with no bricks or cement at all.

Cross the road here and walk towards Cleethorpes Pier which was opened on August Bank Holiday 1873, when nearly 3,000 people paid 6d to walk its 400 yards, stretching out as far into the Humber as the low water mark is today. It suffered from a series of fires and, after being breached in the Second World War to prevent enemy invasion, was never repaired, the cost was considered too high. 200 tons of its salvaged timber was used to rebuild LeicesterCity's blitzed football grandstand and the remaining timber and steel girders were used in the building of the nearby Wonderland Sunday market.

Turn and face inland when you reach Sea Road, with its central reservation of decorative flowerbeds. Look at the undulations of the land at this point and see how the Pier Gardens on the left and the Dolphin Gardens on your right, both slope down to the road. This track from Oole, to the sea, used to be called Folly Hole and was the site of the long-gone Folly Feast, when drunken revelry was the order of the day during the summer season. "The scenes of riot and drunkenness practised on these days became so notorious that the magistrates determined to put them down, this they accomplished in the year 1786". Surrounded as it is today by pubs and nightclubs, our ancestors' desire to bring sobriety and order to the resort, appears to have fallen by the wayside.

Just before you reach the top of Sea Road, turn left into the Pier Gardens or as they used to be called, 'The Pleasure Grounds', when they were commissioned by the Directors of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire (Mucky, Slow and Late) Railway Company in 1883 and described by the Grimsby Observer at the time as "A smiling garden, artistically laid out with due regard to the natural undulations of the ground. The jagged and dangerous edge of the old cliff has given place to the grassy slopes with rustic and picturesque paths down to the lower grounds and promenade".

Walking through the Pier Gardens today, towards High Cliff, gives you a sense of just how high and dangerous these crumbling, clay cliffs were. Look out towards the North Sea, Spurn Lighthouse can clearly be seen on the horizon, as too can the guardians of the Humber, Bull Fort and Haile Sands Fort, both built during the First World War at a cost of more than a million pounds, to prevent enemy submarines from entering this important shipping lane.

As well as looking out to sea, look inland at this point at the parade of shops with its decorative wrought iron colonnade, sheltering the many wine bars and bistros, that now line this grand Victorian Colonnade, whose centrepiece The Empire theatre, was opened in 1896 as the Alexandra Hall. It still provides light entertainment to tourists even today, as an amusement arcade, more than a century after its construction, but not all of the entertainment of yesteryear along this terrace was considered quite so innocent. In 1953, worried that the world famous, saucy seaside postcards of Donald McGill were about to corrupt the nation, the police raided 17 local shops and seized thousands of postcards. George Orwell in his collected essays wrote of these 20th century works of art. "Get hold of a dozen of these things, if you pick out from a pile the ones that seem the funniest, you will probably find that most of them are McGill's". Bombarded as we are today with a mountain of top shelf material these postcards seem very innocent indeed but little over half a century ago they caused a lot of trouble for their creator. Donald Mc Gill was found guilty under the 1883 Obscenity Act at Lincoln Crown Court and his postcards removed from the shelves of gift shops and newsagents throughout the country. If you were to take a detour from the heritage trail and take a stroll under the shade of this Victorian colonnade you will find at least two shops selling Donald McGill type postcards even today. Not as well drawn as McGill's, not as funny as McGill's but back on sale and no longer deemed obscene.

Passing the memorial to the many airmen, that flew over Cleethorpes from the Lincolnshire airfields, on their way to the war-torn, European mainland, you reach Ross Castle (6). This imitation antique observation point was built by the Railway Company in 1885 to compliment their pleasure grounds and was named after their secretary Edward Ross. Made of ironstone slag and lime putty, this Victorian folly was built to represent the height of the cliffs at this spot, before the redevelopment of the resort.

As you reach the top of High Cliff, you also reach the end of this Heritage Trail. There are many tales of wreckers working the High Cliff at Itterby, confusing the passing ships with lanterns lit on stormy nights. Many a merchantman en route to the safe harbour at Grimsby, was run aground beneath these cliffs and many a tale is told of a large cargo of red flannel, destined for the soldiers of the Crimean War, which was 'rescued' from one of these wrecked ships and shared amongst the locals who would wear it next to their skin, where it would never see the light of day again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

• The Story of Cleethorpes and the contribution of Methodism, by Frank Baker.
• Cleethorpes, The Creation of a Seaside Resort by Alan Dowling.
• North East Lincolnshire Council Web Site (www.nelincs.gov.uk)

Notes

(1) Built 1903-04,Herbert C Scaping of Grimsby, Architect, Egbert Rushton, engineer and surveyor, and Henry Marrows, builder for Cleethorpes and Thrunscoe urban District.

(2) 1851-2 by Edward Micklethwaite of Grimsby, with tower addition to rear in 1869 by David Thompson, surveyor of Grimsby.

(3) 1864 by James Fowler of Louth. St.Peter's Church became a Parish church in 1889.

(4) & (5) 1884 with alterations in 1960. Clock Tower and Refreshment Rooms by Lockerbie and Wilkinson of Birmingham, makers for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway Company.

(6)Ross Castle, built 1885 for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway Company.

Copyright (c) Grimsby, Cleethorpes & District Civic Society