Whitby West Cliff: Royal Crescent

For a place that has always been far out of the way, Whitby has a remarkable tenacity as a holiday resort.

Even before the early arrival of the railway, the Whitby Public Baths Company tried to promote sea-bathing at the foot of the West Pier, where baths were “replenished with the purest sea and fresh water; and are fitted up with the greatest regard both for the comfort of the valetudinarian and the gratification of the pleasurist”.

A further attempt to utilise another spring led to the building of the Victoria Spa in Bagdale in 1844. Neither of these projects was a lasting success.

A locally-sponsored Whitby Building Company issued a prospectus proposing fourteen lodging-houses on the West Cliff Fields in 1843.

The following year George Hudson, the “Railway King”, who had taken over the Whitby & Pickering Railway, purchased the West Cliff Fields, apparently to establish an interest in the town that would enable him to become its MP. (In fact, he was elected as Conservative MP for Sunderland, where he was expected to promote the Monkwearmouth Dock and the Durham and Sunderland Railway, in 1845, and the Whitby seat went to his associate, the engineer Robert Stephenson, who was returned unopposed in 1847.)

Hudson proceeded, under the auspices of the York Building Company, to construct boarding houses and hotels as a speculation.

By the time East Terrace was finished so was Hudson, discredited by his manipulation of railway finances.

Whitby achieved modest growth as a resort: its population grew from 10,989 to 12,051 between the 1851 and 1861 censuses. Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell stayed here in 1859, and accumulated background material for her novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). Other nineteenth-century authors who visited Whitby include Alfred Tennyson in 1852, Lewis Carrol in 1854, Charles Dickens in 1861 and his friend Wilkie Collins, who wrote the novel No Name (1862) while staying in the town. The Punch cartoonists John Leech and George du Maurier were visitors respectively in the 1860s and 1880s and incorporated Whitby scenes into their published work.

The West Cliff Estate passed to the self-made industrialist Sir George Elliot, Bt (1814-1893), who projected the Royal Crescent (John Dobson 1876-9) and the West Cliff Saloon and Promenade (1880, now the Spa Theatre).

One look at the architecture of the Royal Crescent and the gothic Church Square behind it (St Hilda’s parish church itself dates from 1884-6) tells the tale of over ambition and half-completion. There were simply not sufficient Mrs Gaskells to fill the place.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The Crescent, Filey, North Yorkshire

Filey has unexpected charms. It’s a good place to reach by rail. The station is a particularly well-preserved example of the work of George Townsend Andrews (1804-1855), with an overall iron truss roof and a standard North Eastern Railway footbridge slotted into the train-shed walls.

The short walk to the sea is unremarkable, until you reach the cliff edge. Ahead is the North Sea, which in the nineteenth century was called the German Ocean. In each direction spectacular cliffs stretch to Filey Brigg in the north and southwards towards Muston, Hunmanby and Reighton.

Facing the coast, but separated from the cliff-edge by ornamental gardens, is the Crescent, an elegant ensemble of Regency terraces, constructed for an enterprising Birmingham solicitor, John Wilkes Unett (1770-1856), who commissioned plans for a resort to be called New Filey from the Birmingham architect and surveyor Charles Edge in 1835.

There is a subtle demarcation between the Crescent area and the Old Town. The two are interdependent, but Unett’s speculation was aimed at “those who possess a relish for the pure exhibitions of nature, and take with them a little society”.

Visitors came to Filey, as a quieter alternative to Scarborough, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and initially they came by road. In the 1820s two stage-coaches operated, each on alternate days, six days a week. Local sailors and their wives recognised that catering for tourists was at least a supplement to the unpredictable fortunes of the fishing trade.

The Hull-Scarborough railway opened in 1846. It could have encouraged an invasion of excursionists, but they seem to have headed for Bridlington and Scarborough. Instead, Filey attracted a constant stream of visitors of high social standing and net worth. Charlotte Brontë visited in 1849 and 1852; Sir Titus Salt came in 1871, and Frederick Delius was a regular visitor from 1876, when he was fourteen, until 1901.

Filey was also the discreet resort of British and foreign royalty. Leopold II, King of the Belgians in 1873 made the first royal visit: he was Queen Victoria’s cousin, and he was followed by her son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh (1880), her grandson Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence & Avondale (1890) and her daughter, Princess Louise, later Duchess of Argyll (1899).

German relatives of the British royal family also visited – the Prince & Princess Louis of Battenberg (1900) and Ernest Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse, and his family (1910). Indeed, well into the 1930s Princess Mary, the Princess Royal, who was married to the Earl of Harewood, used to bring her young sons for holidays to Filey.

Ironically, Filey’s major claim to fame in the holiday industry was the Butlin camp, started in 1939 and completed as RAF Hunmanby Moor. After the war it flourished, to the extent that it had its own branch line and railway station. The camp’s maximum capacity was 11,000 holidaymakers, and it ran successfully into the 1970s:  http://www.butlinsmemories.com/filey/index.htm.

It’s a fair bet that most of the thousands of visitors to Butlins never went near Filey itself.

The Butlin’s branch line closed in 1977 and the camp lasted until 1983. It has completely disappeared under redevelopment.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Saltburn-by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire: the cliff-lift

The contours of Saltburn provided a major inconvenience from the start, simply because the streets are over a hundred feet higher than the beach. A writer in The Middlesbrough Weekly News and Cleveland Advertiser (November 1st 1867) remarked,–

One of the first objections to Saltburn as a seaside resort, especially by elderly people, or even by any whose tendency to embonpoint makes them averse to bodily exertion, is the fact that it is SUCH A HORRIBLY TIRING PLACE.  To go down to the beach involves a certain amount of unpleasant jarring of the system, and to come up again such a waste of muscular power…

John Anderson, the railway contractor who owned the Alexandra Hotel and designed Saltburn Pier, resolved this difficulty with a vertical hoist linking the Marine Terrace, just outside the Alexandra, with the pier.

This structure was built of timber, and powered by water-gravity: it opened in July 1870, and carried up to twenty passengers at a time in its cage for a halfpenny each way.

It was closed precipitately after an inspection in 1883, and replaced by the inclined cliff-lift (also water-gravity powered) which continues to operate on the same site.

The cliff lift was developed by George Croydon Marks (1858-1938, latterly Lord Marks), chief engineer of Tangye Ltd, the company that had devised the first cliff lifts in Scarborough from 1869 onwards.  It lifts passengers 120 feet from the promenade to the streets.

The two cars, connected by cable, carry water-tanks beneath their carriages: the uppermost tank is filled with water and the lower tank emptied, so that the weight-differential lifts the lighter car as the upper one descends.  Operation is controlled by the banksman in the upper cabin.

The Saltburn cliff lift is the oldest water-balanced funicular still in operation in Britain, and was upgraded for the first time in 1998 when a supplementary hydraulic braking system was added. Superficial modernisations have been reversed:  the 1979 passenger cars were restored in 2011 and the upper banksman’s cabin was refurbished in 2014.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Saltburn-by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire: the pier

One of the first purchasers of Improvement Company land in Saltburn was John Anderson, a railway contractor who had worked for the Stockton &Darlington Railway and who also had ironworking interests locally.

He built the Alexandra Hotel, intended to be the centre-piece of Britannia Terrace, and invested funds and enormous energy in the resort.

He was the driving force behind Saltburn Pier, such that construction was well under way before the enabling Act was passed, and the structure was open to the public in May 1869, only eighteen months after the initial public meeting to propose the idea.

The original length was 1,500 feet, but after a storm on October 15th 1875 in which a section of Saltburn Pier collided with Redcar Pier, Saltburn Pier was shortened to 1,250 feet.

The Pier Company was wound up in 1879 and its assets transferred to the Improvement Company and then in 1883 to the Owners of the Middlesbrough Estate.   The pier head was widened, with new refreshment rooms and kiosks, a bandstand and gas lighting, in 1884, and subsequently with electric lighting in 1887.

A collision in 1924, when the china-clay carrier SS Ovenbeg punched a 210-foot gap in the pier, was repaired by 1929, and a theatre was added the following year.

The local council took over the pier in 1938, and at the start of the war it was breached as a precaution against invasion. The gap was not repaired until 1952, and gales in the following winter required repairs that took five years to complete.

Storms in 1971, 1973 and 1974 successively shortened its length to 1,100 feet, and after a demolition threat and a popular campaign to save the pier it was truncated to 681 feet and reopened in 1978.

Refurbished by a £1.2 million lottery grant in 2000 and listed Grade II*, Saltburn pier is now celebrated as the only surviving seaside pier on the Yorkshire coast.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.