Oldest Boarding House in Skegness
Written by Angela Gooch on March 7th, 2008 in Historical Buildings.
IN a town where old buildings are something of a rarity, it is a sad occasion when one of the few disappears. In March 1962, what was believed to have been the oldest original boarding house in Skegness crumbled under the hammers of a demolition gang.
The familiar old building, with its ground floor below pavement level, had stood in High Street, once Skegness’s main thoroughfare, for an estimated 150 years.
The house had stood empty and condemned for the previous two years, until the site was purchased by Currys Ltd. for future development. Then the demolition men moved in, and after five days of crashing hammers and flying dust, no trace of the building remained.
One interesting feature of the building was its extensive timber work. Four lorry-loads of timber were taken from the site, far more than would be used in modern construction.
ROTTEN BRICKS
In the opinion of one workman, only the timber was holding the house up, as many of the bricks were damp and rotten.
Stuffed into one of the windows in order to combat draughts, workmen found a tattered copy of the “Police News,” dated Saturday, January 10th, 1880. The front page carries a large and vivid artist’s impression of the Tay Bridge disaster, which happened twelve days previously.
The house had quite a history as business premises. It was originally a boarding house, and one side of it was once a cafe. Many years ago a fortune teller plied her trade from one of the front windows, and two springs under the building provided fresh water, which was drawn off in buckets and sold to passers-by.
One person who shed few tears when his old home disappeared was Mr. William Small, who in1962 lived in Lancaster Avenue. He said: “I waited 21 years to get out of that house. The roof was bad, the foundations were shocking, there was no hot water and it was always damp. I was glad to leave.”
