Wednesday 1 September 2010

Some comments on Cleethorpes and Skegness...

Drunkenness stalked the street... the tremendous worship of Bacchus at Cleethorpes on Good Friday proclaimed the nearest approach to an earthly pandemonium that I have ever been able to discover...
The Grimsby Observer, August 7th 1878


         Skegness:
...it deserved its ragged-sounding knickname. It was a low, loud, faded seaside resort. It was utterly joyless. Its vulgarity was uninteresting. It was painfully ugly. It made the English seem dangerous. And at last, it made me want to leave – to take long strides down its broad sands and walk all the way to Friskney Flats. But there was no walking here – too muddy, too many of the canals and ditches they called ‘drains’ here, and no path.
 Paul Theroux  (1984)    The  Kingdom by the Sea    p.341

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