What's on in Mablethorpe

Early history

There were originally three medieval Mablethorpes: St Peter, St Mary and Mablethorpe Magna. By the early 1500s, Mablethorpe St Peter had been completely lost to coastal erosion — the church and most of the village finally collapsed into the sea during a great storm in the 1540s. Mablethorpe Magna had already been abandoned. Only Mablethorpe St Mary survived inland, its parish church (parts of which date to the thirteenth century) still standing today.

For centuries Mablethorpe was a small farming and fishing parish, buffered from the worst of the North Sea by an evolving system of dunes and (later) sea-banks. The constant threat of flooding was the defining fact of life on this coast — a reality that would return catastrophically in 1953.

Seaside growth

Mablethorpe's transformation into a holiday town began in the early 1800s, but accelerated dramatically with the arrival of the railway in 1877. Suddenly the wide flat sands — which had been an obstacle for fishermen and farmers — became Mablethorpe's biggest single asset. Day-trippers arrived in their thousands from Lincoln, Boston and the East Midlands.

Among the early visitors was a young Alfred Tennyson, who spent regular childhood holidays in Mablethorpe in the 1810s and 1820s and later wrote about the empty beach and "the wide-faced sand" in his poetry. By the late nineteenth century Mablethorpe had a pier (1885), a promenade, several boarding houses, and was firmly established as Lincolnshire's second seaside resort after Skegness.

The tourism boom

The mid-twentieth century brought both the high point and the lowest moment in Mablethorpe's modern history. Through the 1930s and into the 1950s, the town's holiday economy boomed alongside Skegness — caravan parks proliferated to the north and south, the pier hosted regular variety shows, and the seafront fairground (later to become Pleasureland) drew big summer crowds.

Then on the night of 31 January 1953, the great North Sea Flood hit. A combination of an extreme storm surge and a high spring tide overwhelmed the sea defences. Forty people lost their lives in Mablethorpe; over 600 were drowned across the wider east coast and Netherlands. The town was rebuilt, the sea defences were massively reinforced (a programme of work that continues to this day), and Mablethorpe slowly returned to its rhythm — but the flood is still part of how the town remembers itself.

The pier, badly damaged in earlier storms, was demolished in 1965. Pleasureland and the promenade attractions remained popular through the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 2000s the town had pivoted toward family-orientated, blue-flag-beach tourism rather than the traditional fairground model.

Modern day

Modern Mablethorpe is a town of about 13,000 people that swells in summer with caravan-park visitors and day-trippers from Lincolnshire and beyond. The blue-flag beach (one of the very few on this coast to consistently hold the rating) is the headline asset; the high street has held on better than most coastal towns thanks to a strong independent retail tradition; and major investment in the past decade has begun to rebalance the town toward year-round visiting.

The seal sanctuary, the Sandilands cycle path, the regenerated Queens Park boating lake and the long flat beach mean Mablethorpe is once again exactly the kind of low-key, family-friendly seaside town the railway built it to be — just with much better sea defences than 1953.