Local & Reliable Skip Hire in Spalding.

Local area guide

Skip hire in Spalding

Spalding is a market town in Lincolnshire, sitting on the River Welland in the heart of the Fens around 16 miles south-west of Boston, with a population of around 32,000. It grew around a Benedictine priory founded in the eleventh century and became a significant market town serving the reclaimed marshlands of south Holland — the Lincolnshire district whose name, meaning land on the spur of the hill or perhaps simply low land, predates any connection with the Netherlands.

The connection with the Dutch is nevertheless real. The draining of the Fens in the seventeenth century was led by Dutch engineers, most notably Cornelius Vermuyden, and the flat, fertile silt landscape around Spalding came to resemble the Netherlands closely. In the late nineteenth century it became the centre of the British bulb industry, and by the mid-twentieth century the fields around the town produced tulips, daffodils and hyacinths on a scale that rivalled Holland itself.

That industry gave Spalding its best-known event. The Spalding Flower Parade, held each May from 1959 to 2013, drew crowds of up to 100,000 to see floats decorated with millions of tulip heads — one of the largest floral events in Europe. Springfields, a showground and gardens created to promote the bulb industry, remains, now alongside a large outlet shopping centre. Agriculture and food processing continue to dominate the local economy, with major vegetable packing and processing operations drawing a substantial workforce, including a large Eastern European community.

Spalding's most distinctive institution is the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, founded in 1710 and one of the oldest learned societies in Britain — early members included Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope and Joseph Banks. Its museum holds an eclectic collection amassed over three centuries. Ayscoughfee Hall, a fifteenth-century wool merchant's house with formal gardens, houses the town museum, and the Welland running through the centre, with its Georgian houses along the banks, gives Spalding a distinctive riverside character.

Spalding sits on the A16 and A151, with Spalding station giving services to Peterborough, Lincoln and Sleaford. Housing ranges from Georgian and Victorian property along the Welland and in the town centre — much of it a conservation area — to Victorian terraces, interwar and post-war housing, and very substantial modern development on the town's edges, with property among the more affordable in the east of England.