Skegness Attractions and Skegness Tourist Information

Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve is Skegness’s very own National Nature Reserve, part of the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust it’s three and a half miles down Drummond road. The beginning of Drummond Road can be found opposite Tower Cinema.

If you are fit enough you can cycle to Gibraltar Point. The top of Drummond Road is not too busy, the beginning of the road can be a little hectic during holidays with cars trying to park in the car park, if you have children I would suggest cycling on the path at the beginning part of the road.
Don’t cycle on footpaths in Skegness a £30 fine for cycling on footpaths in Skegness was introduced in October 2009!

The rest of the road is a quiet country road, half way up Drummond Road there is a cycle path on the right hand side, but it doesn’t go all the way to Gibraltar point.

Skegness Bottons Pleasure Beach is located on the Skegness Sea Front

Admission Prices:
£12.00 for a full day wrist band.
£8.00 for an evening wrist band.
Or you can buy tokens a pound each.

My kids have dragged me to Bottons Pleasure Beach many times, we go at least 3 times a year, and it’s always a fun filled evening for them and me, which lets face it as parent it’s always a bonus since we usually get left out of the fun drinking tea/coffee as slooowwwly as possible!, while the kids run off and have a blast.

Skegness Bottons Pleasure Beach is a traditional fun fair, it doesn’t have any of the big rides like roller coasters, (it’s not an Alton Towers sized attraction) but it does still have enough for the thrill seekers with the pirate ship and the surf rider in particular and if your up for a good spin every ones all time favorite the waltzer.

Skegness Tower Gardens is the only recreational grounds in Skegness, it has three/four playing fields one main grass area with smaller fields where ball games can be played.

The park is a beautiful scenic place to have a picnic or sit and enjoy some peace and quiet either on the grass areas or under one of the many trees that’s in Tower Gardens.

If you have little ones you can feed the ducks on the pond or let them play in the kiddies play area. Tower Gardens small kiddies play ground is for children aged 0-12, for older children there is a small assault course this could do with being updated and improved, but it’s OK for the older kids to let of a bit of steam for a few minutes. I often race my kids on the assault course

There are two secondary schools in Skegness, The Skegness Grammar School, which is obviously a grammar school and St Clements College a comprehensive school.

The unfortunate thing with St Clements College is the Skegness Grammar School is selective and pretty much gets the top 25% of students from the Skegness and surrounding areas. This has resulted in many of the students at St Clements College listed as requiring special educational needs, lost the source now, but read about 1/4 of their pupils are SEN! From the BBC website almost 35% of the 171 students who sat GCSE’s at St Clements College in 2008 were special needs! In comparison of the 111 students from Skegness Grammar School who sat GCSE’s in 2008, none of them had SEN. So it’s unfair to directly compare these two schools (that being said our experience of both Skegness secondary schools has been far from impressive).

There are several attractions in Skegness for small children, but because my children are all too old for these attractions, (youngest is 13 years old now) I’m afraid I can’t give an in depth review for fun things to keep your toddlers happy during your holiday in Skegness.

I hate to give the usual blurb about an attraction, you know the type of information, seen through rose coloured glasses making out this is the best attraction since sliced bread, which never helps anyone let alone visitors with children to Skegness, you always find they are never true

That’s why my reviews come from a first hand experience of a Skegness Attraction, I like to give a truthful and honest run down of an attractions (the good, the bad and the ugly) and I hope that’s what makes the Skegness Attractions Reviews unique.

The SEAS Festival is coming to Skegness on the 25th September – 3rd October. See Skegness SEAS Festival Review.

I’m a little dubious about this Arts Festival, I’ve been going through the list of events and it all seems very adult based and dry, there’s not much at all for families and the fun factor seems to be missing, but we’re willing to give the SEAS Festival a try.

The SEAS Festival seems to be aimed at, as my old mum would say Arty Farty types, you know the one who like to feel self important by pretending they know more than you!

Drives me nuts!! I’m artistic myself and I feel that artists should be allowed to just express themselves without coming out with some ridiculous reason for trying something new and creativity. Artists should have the freedom to express themselves, for no other reason than they want too.

Every year at around the second week in September Skegness Bottons Pleasure Beach closes it’s doors at the end of the summer season with a free fireworks display on the Skegness beach.

For a free fire works display it’s quite good, we’ve been to the Lewes fireworks displays and torch led prosessions in the streets (it’s like 12 hours of fireworks all over the town of Lewes) which are awesome, so we know what makes a great fireworks show.

This year we finally worked out how to use the fireworks setting on our digital camera and at long last got some good quality firework photographs

The fireworks videos turned out quite well also, we rarley try the digital cameras movie making abilities.

First time we’ve put one of our videos online as well (uploaded to Youtube).

The Skegness WebCam picture below is brought to you by Skegness RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) and BBC.co.uk.

The camera is set on top of the Skegness Royal National Lifeboat Institution tower looking across the Skegness beach.

The Skegness WebCam updates every 10 minutes.

Skegness WebCam

The Skegness WebCam pans across the beach andsometimes points towards Bottons Pleasure Beach, sometimes you’ll see their big wheel.

Archived Skegness WebCam Pictures

Click for full size image

Skegness RNLI

When I was around 12 years old I was on holiday in Skegness, Ingoldmells (caravanning on the Eastgate caravan site) and I went out from Ingoldmells beach in a two man dingy and the current caught me! From the beach I could be seen on the horizon and the Skegness life boat had to be called out to get me, apparently a life boat had broken down so it took some time to pick me up.

We all know how much a holiday by the sea can cost, with every attraction trying to snatch the money out of your wallet.

So Skegness Attractions has come up with the Skegness for Free Guide, giving you ideas of things to do for Free in Skegness.

Skegness Beach

Number one has to be the Skegness beach, miles of the East coasts golden sands, much better than the pebble beach they have at Brighton on the East Sussex coast. I should know I used to live near Brighton before we moved to Skegness. One of the reasons we moved to Skegness from down South was the pebble beaches, we got sick to the back teeth that the kids couldn’t build a sand castle and sunbathing on aggregate isn’t very comfortable or relaxing , so we moved back to the East coast for the glorious sand.

The Embassy Theatre has a lot to answer for, we have been struck with the theater bug since we moved to Skegness. Who knew, certainly not us until we gave it a go as a family and the verdict is WE LOVE THE THEATER!

I would recommend the Embassy Theatre as one of, if not the best Skegness Attractions for families visiting Skegness. If you have never given the theater a go, trust me, go see what shows the Embassy has on when you are visiting Skegness (just try the theatre once). Even my husband now enjoys the theater and admits that had it not been for me wanting to see the Chinese State Circus as a family he would have never thought to even try a theatre performance let alone go multiple times a year. My husband prefers to watch things on TV in comfort, but since trying out the Embassy theatre he sees there is something to being up close and personal to the performance.

Hardy’s Animal Farm is quite far down Anchor Lane in Ingoldmells, Skegness particularly if your walking like we where, so stick with it and you’ll get there eventually

I must say I was quite nervous that my 11 year old son wouldn’t like Hardy’s Farm. When we arrived, the outside although clean and tidy didn’t give any indication as to what to expect. It was so sparse of anything interesting I actually asked my son if he was sure he wanted to go in!

Hardy’s Animal Farm Gift Shop

The entrance is attached to a gift shop and I have to say it is very spacious. Hardy’s Farm have excelled with there gift shop where other attractions fail.

Hardy’s gift shop had lots of beautiful trinkets and souvenirs, but where it pleased me the most was the space and lay out, you can wander around freely, the atmosphere is relaxing, and the lady who greeted us was helpful and welcoming.

Summer of 2009 saw the SO Festival visit the seaside town of Skegness.

The SO Festival started off with a big top being erected on Tower Gardens playing field. Two performances played, a 1940s style Berlin show with Mary Carewe and Sinfonia ViVA (East Midlands based orchestra) and an alternative comedy led by Mitch Benn, with Steve Hall, Alistair Barrie and Ray Peacock.

I personally didn’t see either of these performances since the 1940′s show isn’t my type of thing and the comedy show scheduled for 10pm, well I’m a mother with 2 young teens so it was a no go from the start for us, so on the first night I dumped the SO Festival and went to see the Chicago Blues Brothers at the Embassy Theatre with my kids instead (had a great night out).

If anyone saw the two shows feel free to add a comment below.

Chicago Blues Brothers show is fun for the whole family. I loved the fact that some people went to the show with the Blues Brother hats and dark sunglasses. I thought I wasn’t really into Blues and Motown music, it’s a little before my time, but apparently I am, we had a great evening. Both me and the kids knew the music quite well and even the stuff we didn’t recognise still got us moving.

A few of our favourite songs were Minnie the Moocher, Flip Flop Fly, Respect by Aretha Franklin, Every Body Needs Somebody, Raw Hide and Keep on Lifting me Higher and Higher. A few of these songs had audience participation which was fun.

Opening hours, prices etc… for LaserQuest are at the bottom of this page.

As a family (Mum, Dad and two sons) we’ve been to LaserQuest at Skegness Pier just once, this is because I (Dad) have a bad back (just had an operation to fuse a couple of discs as it happens) so regular Laser Quest games for the entire family wasn’t an option

If it was, I’d go to LaserQuest at least once a fortnight, as a Dad with two teenage (almost teenage for the youngest) sons, the idea of running around with a gun shooting my kids is VERY appealing

When we went as a family I was only able to play one game (back hurt too much), but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I forget who won (LOL), but we all went home checking our LaserQuest game score printout to see who’d done what and making excuses as to why we’d got shot so many times in the back!

My youngest son and I went to see route 66 at the Embassy Theater in Skegness. Route 66 started with the roar of a Harley Davidson which adorned the stage the band exploded into born to be wild and the show began. We had a great time watching an astounding show.

We’ve been to see shows like Route 66 with a similar line up of songs from the same era, one that jumps to mind was That’ll Be The Day that claims to have songs from the 80′s my decade or there about’s, but the songs from the 80′s where far and few between. It was all older songs from the 50′s and 60′s we’d never even heard of which made me feel left out and thoroughly disappointed.