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Clacton-on-Sea is a seaside town in the Tendring District in the county of Essex, England. It is located on the Tendring Peninsula and is the largest settlement in the Tendring District with a population of 56,874. The town is situated around (85 miles) northeast of London, (42 miles) from Chelmsford, (58 miles) from Southend-on-Sea, (16 miles) southeast of Colchester and (18 miles) south of Harwich. The town is a seaside resort on the southeast coast of England. The town's economy continues to rely significantly on entertainment and day-trip facilities and it is strong in the service sector, with a large retired population. The north-west part of the town has two business/industrial parks. In the wider district, agriculture and occupations connected to the Port of Harwich provide further employment. It lies within the Clacton United Kingdom Parliament constituency. Until the end of the 19th century it was known as Great Clacton. [edit] History
Clacton was a site of the lower Palaeolithic Clactonian industry of flint tool manufacture. The "Clacton Spear", a wooden (yew) spear found at Clacton in 1911 and dated at 450,000 years ago, is the oldest such spear to have been found in Britain.[1] There is plentiful archaeological evidence of scattered settlement in the area, including Beaker Folk traces at Point Clear to the south and round houses (as cropmarks) near the A133 extension from Weeley to the north. There may have been a pre-Roman (i.e. Celtic) settlement at Gt. Clacton and there were almost certainly scattered farmsteads as the important British Celtic settlement at Colchester was only about away. No traces of substantial Roman settlement have been found at Clacton though there are several Roman villa sites nearby (e.g. Alresford, Wivenhoe, Brightlingsea). After the Anglo-Saxon migration and the foundation of the kingdom of Essex, a village called Claccingtun ("the village of Clacc's or Clacca's people") was established. No pre-Norman buildings survive today. The Domesday Book of 1086 records the village as Clachintuna. 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 five Martello 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 1871 the Essex railway engineer and land developer Peter Bruff, the steamboat owner William Jackson, and a group of businessmen built a pier and the Royal Hotel (now converted to flats) on a stretch of farmland adjoining low gravelly cliffs and a firm sand-and-shingle beach near the villages of Great and Little Clacton. The town of Clacton-on-Sea was officially incorporated in 1872 and 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 the Great Eastern Railway already serving the well-established resort of Walton-on-the-Naze along the coast, built a spur to Clacton-on-Sea with a junction at Thorpe-le-Soken. Clacton grew into the largest seaside resort between Southend-on-Sea and Great 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 – though it had, and has, its more 'select' areas. For well over a century Clacton Pier has been an RNLI lifeboat station. Just before the Second World War the building of Butlin'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 World War II. 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, a Luftwaffe Heinkel 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, a V2 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 the V1 and V2 bombs aimed at London. 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 to Calais 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 of Jaywick, 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. In 1964 the town was in the national news when rival gangs of Mods and Rockers fought on the sea front and several arrests were made. (In mid-60s youth culture, 'Mods' favoured scooters and wore parkas, while 'rockers' rode motorcycles and wore leather and denim. The incident became known locally as 'The Battle of Pier Gap' following a headline in the local paper, the East Essex Gazette). 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. The pirate radio ship MV Galaxy, which broadcast Wonderful Radio London, was anchored offshore from 1964 until its forced closure in 1967. 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 as the poorest of all). Since around 1970 several well-known local buildings have been demolished, including the palatial art deco Odeon 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, and 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, where Max Bygraves made one of his first appearances, has closed. 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 in Colchester, Witham, Chelmsford or London. Clacton was in the news when its town centre and seafront areas were struck by an F1/T2 tornado on 23 November 1981, as part of the record-breaking nationwide tornado outbreak on that day. A large wind-farm, built in the early 2000s some 3 miles offshore on Gunfleet Sands, is visible from many streets and from various places in the flat hinterland of the town. However, in common with many seaside towns, unemployment has remained stubbornly high in Clacton itself compared with much of southeast England. [edit] A nineteenth century descriptionA Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Clacton from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:
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