Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage by Mike Higginbottom – Festival of Ideas

The Yorkshire coast illustrates admirably how nineteenth-century holiday resorts almost invariably owed their origin to the growth of the railway-system, but depended for their success on the fickleness of public popularity. Scarborough began as a spa-town in the 17th century, lost some but not of all of its gentility with the arrival of the railways, yet boasts proudly of the writings of Sir Osbert Sitwell, the architecture of Cuthbert Brodrick, the paintings of Atkinson Grimshaw, and – at the church of St Martin-on-the-Hill – the most remarkable collection of Pre-Raphaelite ecclesiastical art in the north of England.