One week, from Monday to Friday on Channel 5 television, there was a television programme called, Susan Calman’s Grand Week By The Sea, where she visited five seaside towns in England: Great Yarmouth, Brighton, St. Ives, Southend and Brighton, whilst watching this we realised that the only one we hadn’t visited was Southend, so we decided to put that right and one weekend we got in the car and headed North towards Southend.
We left Southampton for our two hour and 15 minutes journey, which was broken up by two tunnels, one of which was the Dartford Tunnel, which has an easy pay online system, so there’s no need to fumble around for your debit card or cash!
We parked up and it was a ten minute walk to the seafront, where we immediately went to a viewing point to take in the view.
Southend looks like a typical English seaside town, with a huge pleasure park, hotels and bed and breakfasts, plenty of fish and chip shops, a couple of crazy golf courses and of course the longest pleasure pier in the world!
So we decided that a walk along the pier was the first thing we should do, all 1.33 miles of it. We purchased a ticket for £5.10 each, which was for walking one way and catching the train back, yes, a train!
This was the view looking down the pier, at first it didn’t seem that long, but the end of the pier seemed to take forever to get to.
It took us about 30 minutes at a leisurely walk, to walk the 1.33 miles, and once we reached the end of the pier, we felt that we deserved an ice cream and my hubby, who considers himself a bit of a connoisseur, thoroughly enjoyed his rum and raisin one!
Right at the end of the pier is the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, with a sun deck for stunning views of Southend from over a mile away. (See header photograph). There is also a RNLI gift shop and you can get up close to the lifeboats.
From there we took the train back to the mainland, which took longer than we thought it would, but it was nice not to have to walk back again!
A walk along the seafront and we came across a crazy golf course and we decided to play a round. Hubby normally wins when we play, but today was a different story, I didn’t just beat him, I thrashed him by 14 strokes!
By this time we were quite peckish and felt it wouldn’t be right if we didn’t have fish and chips! We went to Britannia fish and chip shop on the seafront and it was delicious!
Time was getting on and our car parking ticket was nearing expiration, so we made our way back to the car park, walking through the town centre.
The journey home was different in that we didn’t go back through the Dartford Tunnel, but over the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which I have to say is quite stunning. It is known for heavy traffic congestion, but we sailed through it.
All in all, it was a lovely day out, not too expensive, it was great to walk along the promenade, people watch and have a go in the amusement arcade – your typical British Staycation!
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