Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Last year I noticed that overnight my site was backlinked by 1000's of spammy links.
All with same anchor text and all really awful unrelated sites (law, money, mobile phone, pr0n sites, etc). I've not been hit with any penalties (or at least been messaged with anything to that effect), and I still float around top 10 for that anchor text, but I don't like having 1000's of spammy links with exact anchor text pointing to my site. Especially when all the other competitors have a fraction of the number of links. What would be the best way to combat these links before they do serious damage to my rankings.
If you want to see for yourself, the site is www.alexkilbeephotography.co.uk Thanks in advance.

My wedding photography website has grown organically over the last 4 years or so.
Each year it's been fiddled with, changed, tweaked, prodded - in short it's been mucked about with a lot.
To the point now where I think it's become a hodge potch of mucky code (theme installed on theme in stalled on theme and numerous plugins) and no real 'structure' to it. At the moment it hovers around #12 for my main area of focus - people looking for a wedding photographer in Essex, England. So 'wedding photographer Essex'. I try to write blog posts regarding venues in Essex where I've photographed weddings. Despite trying to follow best practice, and with weak/low competition, these posts very rarely crack top 10. Last year when I was top 2 for wedding photographer Essex I was victim of a spam link attack. At the time I asked for advice and was told not to worry as Google didn't count these links. Now I'm feeling that along with the bloated website, lack of proper site architecture and other little issues, these links are contributing to restricting my pages from ranking in top 10 spots. Backlinking, while always helpful, doesn't seem to play a major role when trying to rank for venue related searches according to backlink reports on competitors. I'm thinking that it might be an idea to rebuild the site and content from the ground up. This time with a proper site structure in place and conforming to best practice.  Obviously this is probably the most extreme course of action. Or does my site just need a little TLC to get it ranking better?
The site in question is:
www.alexkilbeephotography.co.uk Thanks