Local & Reliable Skip Hire in Felixstowe.

Local area guide

Skip hire in Felixstowe

Felixstowe is a coastal town in Suffolk, sitting between the estuaries of the Orwell and the Deben on the North Sea, with a population of around 24,000. It grew as a Victorian and Edwardian seaside resort, given a considerable boost when Kaiser Wilhelm II's cousin, the Empress of Germany, holidayed here in 1891 — an episode that made the town briefly fashionable and left it with the ornate Spa Pavilion, the Town Hall and a long seafront of gardens, shelters and pastel-painted beach huts.

The town's overwhelming modern significance is the Port of Felixstowe, which handles around 40 per cent of Britain's container traffic and is by far the busiest container port in the country and among the largest in Europe. The port developed from the 1960s on the Orwell shore, and its cranes and stacked containers dominate the western side of the town. Ships from Asia, the Americas and Europe discharge here, and the associated haulage, rail freight and logistics operations are the dominant employer across the area.

Felixstowe has a notable military history. Landguard Fort, guarding the mouth of the Orwell, was the site of the last opposed seaborne invasion of England in 1667, when a Dutch force of some 2,000 men was repulsed by the garrison — an action regarded as one of the founding battles of the Royal Marines. The fort survives in its eighteenth and nineteenth-century form and is open to visitors, with the Landguard peninsula alongside now a nature reserve and a celebrated spot for watching ships enter the port.

The town also has a literary and cultural footnote: the Felixstowe of the 1900s was the setting for parts of M.R. James's ghost story "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad", and Felixstowe Ferry, a cluster of huts and boatyards at the Deben mouth, retains a beguilingly ramshackle character with a foot ferry across to Bawdsey.

Felixstowe sits at the end of the A14, with Felixstowe station providing a branch line service to Ipswich around 25 minutes away. Neighbouring communities include Trimley St Mary, Trimley St Martin, Walton, Kirton and Ipswich across the Orwell Bridge. Housing ranges from Victorian and Edwardian villas and terraces along the seafront and in the old resort quarter — many converted into flats — to interwar bungalows, post-war estates built largely for port workers, and modern development on the town's northern edges. The town has an older population profile alongside a substantial working port community.