Walton-on-the-Naze is not a place I'd been to before. I'd always liked the sound of it but growing up in Hampshire it wasn't a coastal resort that was really on my radar and living most of my adult life in South East London it's far easier, quicker, and cheaper to head down to Brighton or Bognor Regis for the day.
But it's not THAT far from me and, of late, it had piqued my interest so I decided when I got a free sunny day I'd make that trip. I didn't think anyone else would have been particularly interested in visiting the northern extremities of Essex so I didn't ask anyone else along.
Solo visits can be fun. You travel at your own pace, you stop when (and where) you want, and you don't need so much of a plan. But company is always, well usually, better. Yesterday there were times when it would have been good to have a kind face or two to share a joke over a pint with and I'd quite liked to have someone to watch my stuff when I got in the very inviting looking water for a dip. Maybe someone to throw a ball around with but I'm off to Turkey in August and I've got a feeling that my nine year old god-daughter will keep me very occupied on that score. And on the water slides!
That'll be a proper holiday but yesterday was still a proper day. I'd taken the Windrush line up to Whitechapel, and the Elizabeth line to Stratford, where after getting ripped off for a bottle of soft drink and some CurlyWurly squirlies in WHSmith I boarded a (disappointingly expensive yet pleasingly empty) Greater Anglia train as it took me through Chelmsford and Colchester.
The train would continue down to Clacton but I had to change at Thorpe-le-Soken for a branch line out to the Naze. The connecting train was waiting on the opposite platform and it wasn't long before we pulled in to Frinton-on-Sea and I made the snap decision to jump off there and make the short walk up to Walton-on-the-Naze. Why not? Nice day for it!
For some reason I had it in my head that there was some link between Dad's Army and Frinton-on-Sea but the fictional Walmington-on-Sea in which it was filmed is, in real life, the inland Norfolk town of Thetford. I'm not sure where I got that misinformation from but I was more certain about the one other thing I knew about Frinton and that is that it used to be the only town in the UK without a pub.
That changed when the Lock and Barrel opened in 2000 though hotel bars and the golf club - as well as a veteran's club - were serving drinks long before that. It's still not a place you'd imagine anyone visits for its nightlife but it's pleasant enough and it's got a lovely beach. Edward VII (when he was still the Prince of Wales) used to frequent the golf club and Winston Churchill rented a house there.
It was the last place in England to be attacked by the Luftwaffe (in 1944) and two radio DJs you may have heard of have made it their home. The octogenarian Diddy David Hamilton and Mike Read whose career spanned being slightly cool (to small kids at least) on Saturday Superstore and Pop Quiz to becoming unimaginably cringeworthy with the UKIP Calypso. It's probably worth nothing at this point that both Frinton and Walton are in the Clacton constituency so their MP is none other than Nigel Farage. I didn't see him yesterday but it's widely held that he hardly ever visits or indeed does any work.
The first glimpse of the sea, especially after a long absence - which this was, always lifts my spirits and fills my heart with joy and Frinton's beach was no exception. As you would expect on a scorching Sunday afternoon the beach was full. There was only a small stretch of sand out to the sea (wind turbines calmly spinning on the horizon, the odd yacht sailing by) but lengthwise the beach stretched on for miles.
Many were in the sea, splashing each other, throwing balls about, mucking about. Those on the beach made sandcastles, kicked balls around, ate picnics, swigged cans of beer, or simply sunbathed. Days at the beach with one's family are little treasures and as I never married and never had kids they're unknown treasures to me
I'm not complaining though. I had loads of lovely family holidays as a kid, I've had some as an adult, I have amazing days out - and weekends away - with the TADS and other walking groups and I've got two foreign holidays planned. The Turkey one I already mentioned and a September trip to Sicily. The first will be like a family holiday (of sorts) and the second will be a solo venture so probably lots more looking at old buildings involved.
The main buildings I saw yesterday were beach huts. Hundred of them. Various pastel shades, one with Audrey Hepburn on. Sometimes they stretched two to three back, sometimes five or six. I kept walking between beach huts and coast until I reached the pier in Walton. Quite a long pier. Not much on the end of it but arcade games, a few funfair rides, and places selling chips and burgers on the land side. I had a delicious salted caramel ice cream and sat enjoying the sun for a while. The smell of chips was tempting but I thought I'd hold out.
Walton-on-the-Naze isn't big. With a population of just over 12,000 it's only a little bigger than my home town of Tadley. Due to the beach, it probably gets a few more visitors though. It began life as a farming village several miles inland but over the centuries coastal erosion has turned it into a seaside town. It's still eroding though. Estimates say by about two metres per year.
Sea walls, ripraps, and groynes can only do so much and soon, they reckon in about fifty years, the Naze Tower (at the top of this blog, more later) will fall into the sea like so many pill boxes already have done. Eventually the whole town will be taken by the sea. The climate crisis makes that all but certain.
The pier itself is one of the country's earliest. Built in 1830, it once had a (newer) rival pier but it saw that off and even though some of it collapsed during a 2021 storm it remains an impressive 330ft long. That's no Southend but what is?
Arthur Ransome's Secret Water (a 1939 book in his Swallows and Amazons series) is set in the town and even gets a shout out in an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth and the Blur song Tracy Jacks (Tracy gets a train there). It's also a seaside location of choice for the Fowler family in Eastenders.
I gave the Revved Up biker's cafe a miss but I did stop for a selfie in the designated photo place and was rather touched by the offer of free buckets and spades and other seaside toys for kids to borrow while they enjoyed their day at the beach. Obviously a lot of people in this area will have voted for UKIP and though that's a dispiriting and frightening proposition I know that UKIP voters are still people and many of them are still kind.
I don't really have a choice as plenty of my family have supported Farage and some continue to do so. Strangely enough my impotent leftist yelps failed to convert them to my way of thinking and when I started to adopt more centrist, conciliatory, positions I found that some people I had thought were friends now deemed me to be a fucking Tory. In fact some of their anger reminded me a little bit of the kind of anger we so often associate with supporters of the Clacton MP.
But I hadn't come to the Tendring district of Essex to ponder the political persuasions of its people (or my friends and family) and had, in fact, not even realised that Farage's constituency stretched this far. Soon the path would take me away from the coast and up to the quaintly named Joy Otter Walk
Some nice houses up there and many of them featured wooden panels and clapboard. I pondered how the architecture of Essex (as witnessed on a previous TADS walk to Canvey Island) often seems more inspired by that of the Netherlands than the rest of the UK. In the days before trains it was probably just as easy to take a boat to Holland as it was to ride a horse to London.
A short, and pretty easy, climb later I was up in common land, purple flowers surrounding, and even, blissfully, passed through a shaded dingly-dell of a canopy before reaching the aforementioned Naze Tower itself. I didn't go in it or up it but I did order a can of 7-Up and a tasty, if small and overpriced, cheese toastie from the friendly ladies at the cafe attached. I enjoyed that.
The Naze tower itself, an Hanoverian tower apparently, was built in 1720/1 and was designed to help ships navigate their way around what is otherwise a fairly featureless piece of coastline. It's 86ft high and there's a 111 step staircase to the top. There's a museum in there now and I'm sure it'd be interesting but a rest, and a toasty, won out for me.
You didn't need to go up the tower to enjoy good views and if you look northwards you can see the cranes in the harbour at Harwich, and the confluences of the rivers Stour and Orwell as they lead down to Manningtree and Ipswich respectively. Felixstowe, too, is on the horizon which, like Ipswich, is in the county of Suffolk. A county I've only ever passed through and one that's on my mental list for a future visit. Would love to do a walk around Constable country.
For now, I headed back down the way I'd come up. On reaching the centre of the town I had a pint in the garden (well outdoor area) on the Royal Albion and another in The Queen's Head where I heard my second blast of Elton John's I'm Still Standing in one afternoon. Was also treated to Michael Sembello's Maniac (had not thought about that for a while) and the banging Proclaimers tune I'm On My Way (uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh).
The Queen's Head called last orders at 6.30pm (does the local MP know about this?) so I made my way to the station. I got there much quicker than I expected so enjoyed some sea views and spent some time reading about the area's history of witch trials. Very bleak but very fascinating.
Soon enough the train arrived. My phone told me I'd have an hour to kill at Thorpe-le-Soken so I thought I'd grab a beer in a pub there (a forty minute walk from station to pub and back) and maybe stock on some train booze but when we arrived there the connection was due in four minutes. And arrived in four minutes. So no final pub stop and no train booze. Which was probably a blessing in disguise anyway.
We rolled into London just as it was getting dark and I came home, after a lovely day, to a hot and sticky night's sleep. I'm looking forward to discovering even more of Essex and though I probably won't choose this area for a future TADS walk (a little bit too far for some for a one dayer and probably not quite enough to do for a two dayer) I'm glad I took my little solo venture out there. I had a nice day.