A Brief Stop in Clacton-on-Sea

Saturday 3 August 2013. We were heading to Harwich to board the Thomson Spirit for a cruise to the Norwegian Fjords. This would be a couple of firsts. We've never been that way - what way? - Norway before and we've never sailed out from an English port before.

We had been in Great Yarmouth a few weeks before and due to traffic conditions found the return journey take an incredible nine hours. We did not want to miss the boat... So we set off at the perhaps ridiculous time of 3:45 in the morning and, hardly needs to be said, no traffic... The hardest part of the journey was going so long before the service stations started serving breakfasts...

So by ten o'clock we were only a few miles from Harwich, much too early to board the ship and so we decided on a slight detour to Clacton-on-Sea. The sun decided to make a bit of an appearance too so it was a very pleasant, if somewhat short, visit.

There's a bit of a dip in height from the main street to the pier and a bridge goes across the service road down to the pier entrance. The pier opened in 1871 originally to allow passengers to arrive by boat and was lengthened from 160 yards to 394 yards in 1893.

Today it holds a large covered fairground and amusement arcade with a 50ft helter skelter on the decking. From the pier we noticed a couple of Martello towers along the coast to our left. One hundred and three such towers were built in England at the time of threat from Napoleon Bonaparte and 47 of them survive.

A far older reminder of history was found here in 1911. A wooden spear dating back to 400,000 BC, give or take a month or two was found, though the name tag had dropped off so we don't know whose it was. 400,500 years later Clacton was given its name. It derives from Clacc Inga Ton (the village of Clacc's people), Clacc the Saxon being so called because he used to keep a bit of folded up cardboard in the spokes of his bike.

OMG!!! The place has a Wimpy!!! I just love their quarter pounders. You can keep American Whoppers and stuff served up by clowns, Wimpy was a British firm and didn't deserve to be wiped off the face of England just because Burger King bought them out. That was in 1989. In 2007 they were bought by Famous Brands, a South African firm and started to be seen on motorway service stations. These had been disappearing again and I was starting to despair of ever tasting that quarter pounder sauce again... And now I find one at 10:30 in the morning and my metabolism definitely isn't up to burgers between meals these days... Ho hum... maybe on the way home (no... we were off the ship the following week by 8:00am and a quarter pounder for breakfast is definitely not an attractive option any more for me!) Anyway - maybe this signifies a return to the high street - let's hope so!

And I kept this for the last - I saw this Zoltar fortune telling machine on the pier. Looking brand new. Maybe it was brand new, but it would be nice to think it was an original that had been restored. Darn again! I just checked and they are still being made!

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More from London, 1981

In the previous entry I finished with a couple of shots of a hotel room I stayed in back at the end of January 1981. It was my first trip for work and my first stay in a hotel with more than 12 rooms...

It's hard to take photographs of London that will have changed a lot in even thirty years. London does have some buildings that have disappeared in order to make space for things like more modern office blocks mainly. The gherkin building etc.

But the buildings that get demolished in London tend not to be the ones that you would photograph as having some great architectural features anyway. So to illustrate the point...

Admiralty Arch in 1981 looked exactly as it does in 2010. The thing that makes this photograph so nostalgic is that Austin Princess, heading past the Mall into Trafalgar Square.

My Dad used to have one of those Austin Princesses. He bought it after having a purple (yeuch!) Austin Maxi. The thing I remember most about those two British Leyland cars is that you could take hold of the gear stick and move your fist in a large circle of about a foot diameter and the gear lever would not snag at all but would happily perform the same circle. It's just not right...

My brother used it after Dad had finished with it, until the point where the rust had disappeared into one or two rather gaping holes in the doors and body... It was either going for scrap or... actually he sold it to a visiting Monster Truck show and they crushed it in their show by driving over it in a pick-up truck with rather large wheels...

Likewise the interest in this shot taken on the same trip is the already rare Commer Karrier van parked on the kerb. These were once seen everywhere. The forerunner I suppose of Ford's hugely successful Transit van. They were used a lot by the Post Office and could be seen beetling around the train station, picking up mail and packages delivered by rail.

In fact the only photograph from the trip that had any architectural or non-vehicle-related interest was this one.

Piccadilly Circus, with the traffic still passing either side of the statue of Eros (even though it wasn't meant to be Eros in the first place). Also the familiar neon signboards have yet to be replaced with video walls. JVC were about to become giants but at the time were only known for those new-fangled VHS tape thingies. And Wimpy - ah... Wimpy! Britain's own burger chain where burgers were served on a plate with chips and peas and cutlery... Or you could have a sausage bender, where the sausage was nicked and cut so that it could be rolled into a circle...

McDonalds and Burger King were on the horizon but had not yet ousted Wimpy who in this photograph are still advertising hamburgers in the window.

The Trades Descriptions Act came out in the late 1960s but it had taken them a while before they decided that as burgers were made of beef not ham, they should be termed beefburgers!

Actually hamburgers were so known because they were mainly introduced to America from the German port of Hamburg... They were introduced into Germany by that most gently persuasive of salesmen, Ghengis Khan, whose hordes didn't stop to eat so they had to eat hand held food whilst riding. To help them do this they ground their meat and shaped it into patties, placing them under their saddles so that they would be tenderised by the continous bouncing of their bodies. I'm sure McDonalds have a different way of tenderising their burgers these days though...

And finally...

...because I knew you really wanted to see this! This is the remains of the Austin Princess with my nephew standing proudly in front of it, following its demise under the wheels of the monster truck. It was now a wedge at both ends instead of just one...