Thursday, January 25, 2007

Withernsea

Withernsea, population around 4000, is a seaside resort town in the East Riding of Yorkshire which forms the focal point for a wider community of small villages in Holderness. Its most famous landmark is the white inland lighthouse, standing around 38 metres above Hull Road. The lighthouse, no longer active, now houses a museum to 1950s actress Kay Kendall who was born in the town.
Like many seaside resorts, Withernsea has a wide promenade which reaches north and south from Pier Towers, historic entrance to a rather unlucky 364 metre long pier, built in 1877 at a cost of £12,000. The pier was gradually reduced in length by consecutive impacts with local seacraft, colliding with the Saffron in 1880 before being smashed by an unnamed ship in 1888, again by a Grimsby fishing boat and again by the Henry Parr in 1903, leaving the once grand pier with a mere 15 metres of sorry wood and steel. Town planners decided to remove the final section during construction of sea defences during this period.
Withernsea, like many British resorts, has suffered from a decline in the number of visiting holidaymakers over the last decades of the 20th century. The once sparkling neon lights of the numerous amusement arcades lining the stretch behind Queen Street now seem decrepit and are a magnet for the town's undesirables and burgeoning drug problem. Even the once popular Teddy's nightclub is now renamed — with no reference to the naughty postcard humour of old.
The town is also home to a nine-hole golf course, a large school complex and an RNLI lifeboat museum. There are several miles of pebble beaches over which large clay cliffs loom. Coastal erosion is a significant problem for coastal villages in the area, and much of the local council's money has been spent on upgrading the town's sea defences: huge stone boulders now protect the sea wall.


Adult Halloween Costumes, Fantasy Football

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home