Category Archives: Fun Palaces (seaside)

Reclaiming a wasting asset

Queen’s Pier, Ramsey, Isle of Man (2023)

Photo: © John Binns

When I wrote a blog-article about Queen’s Pier, Ramsey in the Isle of Man in 2011 there was little to suggest that it wouldn’t continue to decay, as it had done for twenty years, yet despite many delays and the tribulations of the pandemic, effective plans are at last in place to restore the Isle of Man’s largest surviving engineering structure.

The island is rich in industrial and transport archaeology because the Manx habitually leave redundant structures standing unless there’s a need or an economic reason to destroy them.

That’s why the island still retains steam and electric railways, a horse tramway, the Great Laxey Wheel and much else in situ and in use.

The flip-side of this conservatism is that the wheels grind slowly when decay becomes dangerous and restoration is urgent.

The last Steam Packet ship departed from Ramsey in 1970;  the disused landing stage became unsafe and was closed in 1979;  the little pier tramway closed in 1981.

In 1991, after the café at the pier head was burnt down, rebuilt and twice vandalised, the Manx Department of Highways, Ports & Properties closed the entire structure permanently and commissioned a survey which concluded that demolition would cost over £1 million and a full restoration £2.5 million.

The Manx government, Tynwald, continued to provide £40,000 a year for minimal safety maintenance, and a Friends of Ramsey Queen’s Pier group was formed in 1994, initially with the comedian Norman Wisdom, a Manx resident, as president.  The following year the pier was added to the Manx list of protected buildings to safeguard its future.

Discussions about restoration proceeded at a glacial pace, until in 2011 Tynwald allocated £1.8 million to stabilise the structure.

This led to a fresh report which planned a sequenced restoration in seven phases, each of them costing £1.2-1.7 million, overseen by the Queen’s Pier Restoration Trust (QPRT), which in 2016 began work on the fifty metres nearest the promenade.

The first three bays (of a total of sixty) were reopened to the public in 2021, with the return of the tramway’s locomotive and carriage from the Jurby Transport Museum.

The current phase involves restoration of Bays 4-8, of which the first three bays are close to completion.

This steady, methodical process of fundraising and practical work is an admirable exercise in co-operation between volunteers and the Government, which will clearly take a decade or two before the public can, in the words of the historian Richard Crowhurst, “stroll along these decks once again taking in the sea air, and partake of a cup of tea and a sandwich at the end”.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology 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.

Heart of the Tower

Blackpool Tower Circus

Blackpool Tower is the epitome of entertainment-industry entrepreneurial genius, owing its origin to Alderman John Bickerstaffe (1848-1930), who started life as a seaman and lifeboatman before he became pub landlord, and as Mayor of Blackpool saw off the speculators who wished to build one of a series of steel towers at resorts in the north-west.  John Bickerstaffe led the locally based company that created one of the most consistently profitable of all Blackpool’s attractions.

Blackpool Tower is a half-size replica of Gustav Eiffel’s Parisian tower, but the key to its financial strength has always been the building which encases the legs.  It initially incorporated restaurants and bars, a menagerie, an aquarium, an assembly hall that quickly became a ballroom, and at its heart a circus.

The complex first opened to the public on Whit Monday 1894, a rainy day on which 70,000 visitors immediately demonstrated the Tower’s full money-making potential by pouring through the doors to keep dry.  Admission to the building cost sixpence, with a further sixpence for the tower ascent and another sixpence for the circus show.

The centre-piece of the whole structure is the Circus, built between the four legs of the tower itself, with stabling for horses and other animals beneath the auditorium-rakes.  The Circus offered a succession of animal and acrobatic acts, culminating in a water-spectacle finale in which the circus floor sank within a minute into a 35,000-gallon water-tank.  For many years, holidaymakers on the promenade were regularly entertained by the sight of the Tower Circus elephants processing down to the beach for exercise.

Only in the circus can you see – encrusted within Frank Matcham’s Moorish plasterwork – the arches that brace the four legs which sit in deep concrete foundations.  In a 70mph gale the top of the Tower deflects no more than an inch, and there’s never been any likelihood that the Tower would end up – as Lord Haw-Haw claimed in a Second World War radio broadcast – lying on the sands beside the Central Pier.

The ceiling of the Circus, 55 feet above ground level, forms the floor of the elevator-hall from which the Otis Elevator Company’s lifts ascended the tower.  The hydraulic accumulators and jiggers which originally powered the passenger lifts, several small goods lifts and the circus water-spectacle were located within the tower-legs. 

In July 1897 an electrical short-circuit set fire to the wooden decking at the top.  The resulting spectacular blaze, which luckily began about 11pm after the lift had closed down, proved completely inaccessible and eventually burnt itself out.  The only permanent damage arose when a lift counterweight plunged down the north-west leg into one of the boxes in the circus auditorium, where it remains to this day, hidden behind mirrors.  The tower-top and the lift-service were restored in time for the 1898 season.

Animal acts at the Tower Circus ceased at the end of the season in November 1990.  Now the entertainers are clowns and acrobats, and the circus floor descends into the tank at the end of the show:  The Blackpool Tower Circus | The Most Famous UK Circus.

The only other place you can see this happen in Britain is the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

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 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  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.

Happy resort

Felixstowe, Suffolk

Over years of driving into East Anglia I have only associated Felixstowe with processions of container trucks hammering down the A14.

When I stayed at the Woodbridge Station Guest House I took the train to Ipswich and then on to Felixstowe to a happy surprise.  “Felix” is, after all, Latin for “happy”.

The mouth of the River Orwell has been strategically important, both for trade and defence, since Roman times at least, and grew markedly after the arrival of the railway in 1877 and the opening of the port in 1886.

The passenger train-service now terminates at the latest of the town’s three stations, Felixstowe Town (1898), which was built in response to an upturn in tourism after the 1891 visit of Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein (1858-1921), Queen Victoria’s great-niece and the wife of Germany’s last Kaiser, Wilhelm II.

The walk down Hamilton Road, now partly pedestrianised, leads to a clifftop view of the Pier (1905;  rebuilt 2017) [http://www.felixstowe-pier.co.uk], with the cranes of the distant docks to the right, and the promenade to the left.

On the way, you pass the former Ritz Cinema (1937;  still operating as the Palace) [http://www.palacecinemafelixstowe.com].

The seafront is dotted with opulent former hotels, of which the Felix Hotel (1903) is the most prominent.  This is where Princess Victoria and her family stayed in 1901 and, coincidentally, where Wallis Simpson took rooms while her divorce took place in nearby Ipswich in 1936.  (This was the occasion of the legendary American newspaper headline “KING’S MOLL RENO’D IN WOLSEY’S HOME TOWN.”)  The Felix closed in 1952 and became the headquarters of the fertiliser company Fisons Ltd for thirty years.  It is now, predictably, converted to apartments.

Landguard Fort [http://www.landguard.com] introduces visitors to the long history of Felixstowe’s defences.  This was the location of the last opposed invasion of England in 1677, and four of the original seven Martello towers in the town survive.

I had a typical seaside lunch, fish and chips at Fish Dish [http://www.myfishdish.co.uk].  When I told the guy behind the till that the place reminded me of Whitby he smiled and said he’d trained and worked at Whitby for thirteen years before setting up in Essex.

The pleasures of Felixstowe are simple.  On a sunny day you can sit on a promenade bench and watch vast container ships, loaded to capacity, making their way out of the port at surprising speed.

And, because Ipswich is a significant rail hub, you can visit Felixstowe from far afield without using a car.

Bognor Pier

Bognor Pier

Bognor Pier

King George V famously didn’t like Bognor, where he was sent to recuperate after surgery in 1929.  After his stay at Craigwell House in nearby Aldwick, he received a petition to grant the town the suffix “Regis” – literally, “of the King”.  I can’t possibly tell the story better than Wikipedia, citing Antonia Fraser’s The house of Windsor (2000):

The petition was presented to Lord Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary, who in turn delivered it to the King.  King George supposedly replied, “Oh, bugger Bognor.”  Lord Stamfordham then went back to the petitioners and told them, “the King has been graciously pleased to grant your request.”

Like many small seaside resorts at the ends of branch lines, Bognor is a rather sad place today, but it has a proud history as a genteel place to relax, founded in the late eighteenth century by the local landowner Sir Richard Hotham, and more energetically developed after the arrival of the branch railway in 1864.

It’s hardly an accident that Bognor Pier was begun in the same year, designed by Sir Charles Fox and his cousin J W Wilson and opened in 1865.  Originally a thousand feet long, it cost £5,000, but was subsequently bought for £1,200 by the Local Board in 1876.

The Board’s successor, Bognor Urban District Council, were glad to offload it to a private operator, who spent £30,000 dealing with dilapidations and constructing an entertainment complex at the shore end, comprising a theatre with a fly-tower, a picture theatre, an amusement arcade and a roof-garden restaurant, all of which opened in 1912.

During the Second World War, from 1943-45, the pier was HMS St Barbara, a naval observation station armed with anti-aircraft guns.

Its history became vexed from the 1960s onwards:  repeated changes of ownership meant that maintenance failed to keep up with onslaughts of storm damage.

Though it’s listed Grade II and the pier head building remains in part, only 350 feet of the pier itself survives, and repeated attempts to attract lottery funding for a major restoration have fallen apart.

Most recently, the energetic friends’ group, Bognor Pier Trust, learned that the current owners, Bognor Pier Leisure Ltd (BPLL), would not support a £5,000,000 lottery bid but were committed to maintaining the structure:  https://www.bognor.co.uk/news/future-of-bognor-pier-plunged-into-uncertainty-after-owners-withdraw-support-for-5m-funding-bid-1-7653934 and http://www.bognorpiertrust.co.uk/news-articles/no-lottery-bid-bognor-regis-pier.

The Trust has made a dignified decision to concentrate on other conservation projects in the town, and to remain ready to purchase the Pier if the current owners decide to sell.

Where that leaves the long-term future of the Pier itself remains to be seen.

End of the line: Hornsea

Former Hornsea Railway Station

Former Hornsea Railway Station

It’s appropriate that one of the best preserved Victorian buildings in Hornsea is the former railway station of 1854 designed by Rawlins Gould of York, a former assistant to the North Eastern Railway’s architect, the better-known George Townsend Andrews.

Hornsea grew as a seaside resort entirely because of the construction of the Hull & Hornsea Railway, promoted by a Hull timber-merchant, Joseph Armytage Wade (1819-1896) and constructed between 1862 and 1864.

It was at Wade’s insistence that the line was extended from the planned terminus at Hornsea Mere as far as the sea front, increasing the cost of the whole project from £68,000 to £122,000.

Like the comparable line from Hull to Withernsea, this line stood no real chance of success as an independent branch railway, and was taken over by the North Eastern Railway in 1866.

Commuter traffic was significant:  times were adjusted to benefit businessmen working in Hull, and services gradually increased to the end of the nineteenth century, from seven weekday return trips and one on Sunday in 1870 to nine on weekdays and three on Sunday by 1890.

Day trippers filled the resort, particularly at bank holidays:  on Whit Monday 1890, two thousand excursion passengers were recorded.

Visitor censuses consistently indicated that the majority of visitors were from Hull and most of the rest from the West Riding.

The railway closed in 1964, exactly a hundred years after it opened, and the station, after a period of neglect, was redeveloped as housing in 1987.

Whitby West Cliff

Whitby West Cliff:  Royal Crescent

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.

Far from the madding Yorkshire crowds

The Crescent, Filey, North Yorkshire

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: the cliff lift

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

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: the pier

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

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.

Saltburn-by-the-Sea: the Zetland Hotel

Saltburn-by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire:  Zetland Hotel, railway platform and rear entrance

Saltburn-by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire: Zetland Hotel, railway platform and rear entrance

The first public building in Saltburn was the Zetland Hotel, built by the Stockton & Darlington Railway to the designs of William Peachey, who also built the Methodist Church on Milton Street (1865) and later, as architect to the North Eastern Railway, built the gothic station at Middlesbrough.

The foundation-stone of the hotel was laid by Thomas Dundas, 2nd Earl of Zetland (1795-1873), from whom the land for the whole town was bought, on October 2nd 1861, and the hotel opened on July 27th 1863.

In its situation it’s strongly reminiscent of the Grand Hotel at Scarborough, but its Italianate styling is much lighter than Cuthbert Brodrick’s magnificent bombast.

The circular turret above the central bay of the Zetland was initially equipped as a telescope room.

So strong was the connection – through the Pease family – between the railway and the resort that the station platform was extended so that the buffer stops stood within feet of the back door of the hotel.

A covered train-shed protected passengers as they left the train and entered the hotel without discomfort whatever the weather.

The stable block, incorporating coach-houses and accommodation for livery servants, was designed with an imposing blind arcade facing Milton Street.

The hotel eventually closed in 1989 and was later converted into an apartment block. The Milton Street stables building is now adapted as housing also.

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.