We were delighted that our recent short publication, Southend, Victorian Town and Resort by Ken Crowe et al was reviewed by Simon Coxall in the most recent Friends of Historic Essex newsletter. We thank Simon and the Friends for permission to reproduce the review on our blog.
Ken Crowe, with I. Yearsley, J. Butler, E. Simpson & J. Williams, The Victoria History of Essex: Southend, Victorian Town and Resort (London, 2025), pp. xi & 131. ISBN 978-1-915249-87-6, £14.99.
Essex has more than its fair share of ancient settlements. Places where good soils and fresh streams like Prittlewell’s ‘babbling brook’ attracted people to put down roots. A few places however, though proud of their ancient past, are a fascinating product of that commercial spirit born of a revolutionary age powered by the steam engine and the pursuit of leisure.
Ken Crowe’s newly published book, the latest in the Victoria County History series, lifts the curtain on the performance that saw Prittlewell grow from a village of 13 houses in 1769 to the burgeoning Victorian resort and borough of Southend in the late 19th century.
Like so much of Essex the villages of Leigh, Eastwood, the Wakerings, Prittlewell and Shoebury have their beginnings as rural settlements. With their churches and a few cottages each made an often scratchy living tilling the land, fishing the waters and farming the oyster beds. Manorial lords whether the Boleyns, the Rich, Earls of Warwick, or the religious estates of Prittlewell Priory reaped the dividends, while a day trip back then might merely involve a visit to the ancient markets of Rochford or Rayleigh.
Then, as revolutionary wars spread across Europe, a coach service stretched out from London to the distant ‘south-end’ of Prittlewell. The 8 hour rickety ride has only some similarities with arterial road queues of later ages. But it was steam that kick-started Southend’s seaside boom.
Who knew the famous Southend pier had its origins in landing stages for the steam packets plying the Thames down from London? Built in 1846, despite the perennial wrangles over its maintenance, by 1895 the pier welcomed 600,000 visitors in the summer season. But it was the arrival of the railway that like some ‘build a city’ computer game would sculpt the Southend we know today.
The genteel folk of the Royal Terrace may have had reservations about the iron horse’s arrival, but cutting the journey time from London to just over an hour ensured the town a prosperous future. Driven by entrepreneurs, Southend’s ‘dry and salubrious air’ attracted crowds of Londoners seeking ‘a popular and delightful place of summer sojourn.’
Early settlers let their rooms to day trippers. Railway excursions with lunch thrown in attracted future buyers of seaside mansions created from the ground-up by Southend’s burgeoning brickworks. Bathing machines, donkey rides, ventriloquists, Italian ice cream and ‘speak your weight’ amusements soon followed. Already the West cliffs beckoned City workers fresh from their commute from the capital, while the flat lands east of Pier Hill found room for the less well-heeled. It was not long before first generation settlers expressed concern about incoming tides of the ‘lower class of excursionists’. By the Edwardian period, Prittlewell’s population had grown from 1,541 to 57,772 in just a hundred years.
Ken’s detailed exploration of the birth of Southend conjures up a town very much on the frontiers of the nascent tourism industry. Here hard-nosed business combined with the frothy jollity of countless Londoners, who, freed by the first ever Bank holidays in 1871, created the resort we know today. As one who trod its streets for several years, Ken’s book brings its Victorian avenues, smugglers inns, its leafy squares, grassy cliffs and bustling streets to life. The Victorian mansions, grand hotels and terraced former boarding houses of a town created almost overnight which Ken guides us through, all of them witnesses to a Victorian revolution no less industrial.
This scholarly work presents an indispensable platform from which the Victorian history buff and family genealogist can construct countless individual stories of hard graft, of hilarity, joy and sorrow.
Reading it, I am reminded of the words of a favourite Essex author – Dorothy L Sayers, who has her hero in The Nine Tailors reminding his colleague in the detection of crime : ‘At Southend you would call it ozone and pay a pound a sniff for it.’
Simon Coxall, FHE Committee Member and landscape archaeologist
We have copies of the book available for sale at a cost per copy of £16 including United Kingdom P&P from VCH Essex, c/o Essex Record, Wharf Road, Chelmsford, CM2 6YT
Cheques should be made payable to Victoria County History of Essex Trust.
Overseas purchasers please contact us for additional postage costs.
Victoria County History of Essex 