Tollesbury Pier
Tollesbury was once meant to be a resort.
The Crab and Winkle – properly, the Kelvedon and Tollesbury Light Railway – reached the village on 1 October 1904, built mainly to carry soft fruit to the Wilkin & Sons jam factory at Tiptree. Then the Great Eastern Railway had a bigger idea. In 1906 they got permission to push the line a further mile and a half, out across the marshes to a brand-new pier on the Blackwater.
The plan was ambitious: a continental packet station, a weekend yachting resort, and streets of new housing behind it. The pier opened on 15 May 1907 and ran 1,770 feet into the estuary – it had to, because the water here is so shallow at low tide.
The traffic never came. The resort was never built. The terminus amounted to an old railway coach body and a small red brick hut, forty yards from where the pier began, and the line closed to passengers on 18 July 1921, just fourteen years after it opened.
The War Department took the site in 1939, and in 1940 part of the pier was blown up as an anti-invasion precaution. What survived was demolished when the railway was lifted in 1951, and the great flood of 1953 took most of the rest. For years a few rotting timber stumps showed above the mud at low water. Even those have gone now.