The Clacton Tower

The clock tower
designed for Clacton
town centre

There's probably a good reason why you might never have heard of Clacton's tower, because it was never actually built. There were however two plans drawn up for the town around the same time, one which seemed quite reasonable, and the other quite eccentric.


During the Victorian period, the concept of day and weekend trips to the seaside had taken the country by storm. The new railway lines and their relative affordability for the middle-class, had opened up a whole new industry in tourism all around the country. A quintessentially English obsession with the seaside had been born, and with that came the desire to develop many coastal towns up and down the country to facilitate the growing tourist trade. At that same time, British towns began a rather strange habit of building great clock towers in town centres, particularly near beach resorts. Built examples of these can be seen in towns such as Margate, Herne Bay and Weymouth, they are often known as Jubilee Clocks as they were built largely as a celebration of Queen Victoria's reign in a grandiose Gothic style. Clacton never received such a building, but designers came up with some very elaborate designs.


In 1889 a Mr. T. H. Baker designed a Gothic style clock tower for the Clacton Improvement Association. It was to be made of doulting stone and would have stood at a height of eighty feet with a viewing gallery available for public access at around forty feet. It would have had four clock faces, each with a chiming bell, and a public drinking fountain at the base.

Henry Ough's viewing tower
design for Clacton seafront.

Had it have been built it would have stood upon the cross road between Pier Avenue, Station Road and West Avenue (opposite where the McDonalds stands today.) Sadly, instead of a clock tower, the site today has a very pathetic looking water feature.


This design however paled in comparison to the idea London architect Henry Ough had for Clacton's promenade a few years earlier in 1886. He proposed building a huge ornate viewing tower that would overlook the sea and the surrounding Essex countryside. Standing at 184 feet (just under two thirds the height of Big Ben,) the tower would have contained multiple viewing galleries on different levels each with their own covered balconies accessible to the public by lifts and a stair case. Each level would have served a different function with a smoking, reading and refreshment room.


Unfortunately a global recession around the same time shelved the project, plus it was probably realised a little later that the idea was perhaps just a little too extreme for a small coastal town to take seriously.