About this Event
The Yorkshire coast illustrates how nineteenth-century holiday resorts almost invariably owed their origin to the growth of the railways, 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 a proud literary, artistic and architectural heritage.
Whitby West Cliff, harking back to Georgian days, Saltburn-by-the-Sea, epitomising Victorian order and grandeur, and what little there is at Ravenscar, planned in the 1890s, were all precipitated by railway-extensions at different times in the nineteenth century, all characterised by considerable optimism on the part of their sponsors, and none of them completed according to their initial design. Each of these sites, frozen in time by economic depression, financial miscalculation or both, provides an unusual insight into what was and what might have been.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Carpenter Room Sheffield Central Library, Surrey Street, Sheffield City Centre, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
