Bandstand/Prittlewell Square slip at Southend. This slip was first studied in March 2001 when it showed an intact bandstand above grey silty ‘Ice Age’ deposits and a lower orange band, which I took to be, weathered London Clay. The whole lower half of the cliff had not moved and the slipped area approximated to the width of the bandstand. Finds of septaria could of course have moved down with the slump, or on their own; but appear to have come from ten to 15 m above mean sea-level if unmoved. After the area had been carefully landscaped for the council it collapsed again in the present more conspicuous manner during the winter of 2003/2004. The problem appears to be that the proto-Medway River has cut, or perhaps partly deformed, a north-south valley into the relatively low London Clay with flank elevations capped by gravels still unmoved above 20 m above mean sea-level, and a sequence of porous sediments concentrating rain water over broad front rather than a single spring on the impermeable, but now fractured London Clay surface. The present section was actually recorded in 1853 before landscaping as a cliff half a mile west of Southend (this is correct if he means the pier) shown as a series of horizontal layers in the notebook of Sir Joseph Prestwich housed at the Geological Society in London.

“Clay plus grave” (looks about ten feet)
¾ foot “carb. band” (?=carbonaceous silt)
“10 to 15 feet of sand and gravel (thin gravel layer in the middle of it is horizontal)
“Gravel” (looks about five feet thick)
“London Clay” (shown as grey not orange).

The wave cut platform

For many years the tourist to Southend might be forgiven for not knowing that in the first half of the 19th Century it was regarded as a significant site for collecting minerals and fossils from the London Clay during casual visits. An article in The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1794 praised the resort and included geology in the prospectus of the town then consisting only of the Royal Terrace above the cliffs just west of the Pier and some dwellings along the low lying East Beach. This quotation refers to the western of the two contrasting sites and to the radial needles of the mineral barite (barium sulphate) forming veins with sparry calcite prisms (calcium carbonate) in probably only one or two stratigraphical levels of the calcite cemented clay concretions. Both the cliffs and the wavecut platform extending from the head of the pier to Chalkwell Station consist of London Clay with these concretions in it but they are far less conspicuous and easy to walk about on that on Walton or the Isle of Sheppey beaches. This may because many were removed to make cement in the mid-19th century to make so-called Roman Cement and were not replace due to the slower rate of erosion at Southend. In the 1794 we read that there were:

“numerous round stones hanging from cliffs and dispersed on the shore, stars of different coloured spar, deep yellow to pale straw spotted with coruscent rays.”