Qualla: Spalding, Lincolnshire

Spalding, Lincolnshire: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Immanuel Giel, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 2 October 1979 at the Keymarkets supermarket in Spalding, a cashier passed a packet of something across a glass plate, a laser flickered, and a till read its first barcode. It was the first time it had happened in the United Kingdom. Spalding was the test site - a market town of around thirty thousand people in the heart of the Lincolnshire Fens, on the River Welland between Peterborough and the Wash, surrounded by some of the richest vegetable-growing soil in Britain. The town has been doing things first for a long time. Spaldingas tribesmen settled here in the 6th century. Crowland Abbey monks held land in 1086. Dutch flower-merchants brought tulip bulbs in the 1930s. And from 1959 to 2013, and again since 2023, the Spalding Flower Parade has filled the town with floats decorated in millions of tulip petals - a celebration of the colour, the work, and the curious Dutch-Lincolnshire blend that defines this corner of England.

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Image: Immanuel Giel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Spalding, Lincolnshire: Tulip Country

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Humphrey, CC BY-SA 2.0. Spalding sits on the silt of an old estuary - the kind of soil that was reclaimed from marshland by 17th-century Dutch engineers and has been growing flowers and vegetables ever since. The land is flat as a tabletop. The drains run dead straight to the horizon. In late April and ...

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Image: Richard Humphrey | CC BY-SA 2.0

Spalding, Lincolnshire: The Flower Parade

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Johnson, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first Tulip Parade ran on the first Saturday of May 1959. Volunteers built float frames - some of them at the Chain Bridge Forge - and decorated them with tulip petals fixed individually to wire mesh. The themes changed year on year: nursery rhymes, fairy tales, world culture...

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Image: David Johnson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Spalding, Lincolnshire: Ayscoughfee Hall and Lutyens's Pavilion

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nhojjohn, CC BY-SA 4.0. At the heart of Spalding's old town stands Ayscoughfee Hall, a 15th-century gentry house that the Urban District Council bought in 1898 to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The hall is now a museum. Its formal gardens hold one of Edwin Lutyens's most distinctive war mem...

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Image: Nhojjohn | CC BY-SA 4.0

Spalding, Lincolnshire: Fenland and the Future

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SmileyRose, CC BY-SA 3.0. Spalding has had two of its own power stations since the Millennium - a 860-megawatt gas-fired plant opened in 2004 by InterGen, and a 300-megawatt expansion that opened in 2019. Plans for a £160 million battery energy storage system on adjacent land were submitted in 2021. The t...

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Image: SmileyRose | CC BY-SA 3.0