The land takes on a flatness as you near the coast, cloud blurs with sea, and gulls chase the tractor as it churns up the dark, damp earth. Lincolnshire was once a land of Roman forts and RAF stations, a county famed for iron mining, cabbages, cauliflowers, Thatcher. Today it has a population that is largely white and increasingly elderly, and a cluster of fading seaside resorts: Cleethorpes, Chapel St Leonards, Skegness.
Last year, Skegness was named the country's most traditionally British town, where Britishness is measured in tearooms, cricket clubs, pubs, chip shops, holiday camps, stately homes and theatres. In Skegness there is one of each for every 162 residents. It was a small fishing village once, but the arrival of the railway in the late 19th century brought crowds of holidaymakers and pleasure seekers, spawned guest houses, caravan sites, the country's first Butlins, and a pier that used to stretch 562m into the North Sea, but now comes to a stop by the water's edge. This year, as Britons are expected to forgo holidays abroad and head to our own coastal resorts, Skegness is embarking on a £140,000 regeneration project: new flowerbeds, picnic benches, litter bins, to entice the crowds.
On a warm spring morning the town is bracing itself for the holiday season which will begin this Easter weekend. Already there are some early visitors, zig-zagging like drowsy bees through the streets in search of fun, the air filled with the smell of chip fat, onion rings, fresh doughnuts. In the Imperial Restaurant, with its morning specials and its sachets of ketchup behind the counter, young mothers, pensioners and daytrippers order knickerbocker glories and banana splits, hold muttered conversations between sips of tea. A woman waits for her pudding, and under the table her feet dance to the Shakira song on the radio. A man eats a Full English and reads a copy of the Skegness Standard, with its news of a new ice-skating rink for the seafront and cuts in illuminations spending.
The Woolworths is closed now on Lumley Road, and along the street the charity shops are spreading: seven, soon to be eight. But there is a sense of resilience here too, there in the gaiety of the pansies in the flower tubs, the women bare-legged in the sunshine, couples deep in conspiratorial conversation on wooden benches, babies in pushchairs, the yip-yip of dogs, the clop of heels along the pavement.
John Riches's family has owned the Jolly Fisherman Rock Company since 1960. As well as the traditional sticks of rock there are sweet dummies, jars of edible pebbles and bags of humbugs. Skegness has changed in the last 50 years, he nods. "The sweets have got a lot ruder," he adds, with a glance to the array of marshmallow penises. "Which isn't necessarily a good thing, but unfortunately they sell."
Down on the front, the funfair is waiting for the season too. The Rock'n'roller, the Giant Wheel and the Pirate Ship sit motionless; the log flumes on the Wild River are paused in mid-descent. The beach is largely empty - a stretch of grey-gold sand between the wind farm and the promenade, where people walk dogs, fly kites. On the Grand Parade, they straggle between the amusement arcades, a woman with glazed eyes feeds change into two adjacent slot machines, a claw hovers over a pit of cuddly lions, and there rises the noise of rattling coins and electronic jingles, while over it all comes the voice of the bingo caller, ringing out bright and jovial: "Flirty Girty: number 30!"
Are we still a nation of guest houses and holiday camps? Do we still measure ourselves in tearooms and theatres? As the recession deepens and we are forced, out of economic necessity, to return to our seaside resorts, we may find ourselves reconsidering our Britishness. It is now more than a century since the Great Northern Railway Company unveiled its famous Jolly Fisherman poster, encouraging Easter daytrippers to take the train to Skegness, and Britain has changed immeasurably in those 100 years. The sweets are ruder, the flower beds are newly planted, the song on the radio plays a different tune, but will we still find the Britain we remember?
• This article was amended on Wednesday 8 April 2009. We mentioned Skegness's regeneration project, aimed at "enticing the crowds from nearby Scarborough" with new flowerbeds and picnic benches. While for Skegness residents Scarborough may loom large as a competitor for visitors, it is around 100 miles by road. This has been corrected.
