This film is part of Free

Yorkshire Riviera

A nostalgic dip and drive around the North Yorkshire coast in the sun-kissed 50s.

Amateur film 1958 19 mins Silent

From the collection of:

Logo for North East Film Archive

Overview

Trains, boats, cars and funiculars are a recurring motif as Middlesbrough filmmaker Raymond Kitching takes us down to the salty, seafaring North Yorkshire coast. This scenic travelogue heads from South Gare to Scarborough sampling the seaside rituals and rides on the way. There’s foying in Redcar, the Coney Island of Cleveland, a stylish descent to Saltburn beach to stroll on the elegant pier, and a higgledy-piggledy, quaint confusion of red roofs at Robin Hood’s Bay.

The film concludes in the Queen of Yorkshire seaside resorts, historic Scarborough, with shots of the old cliff funicular beside the Grand Hotel, pleasure steamers, boating in Peasholm Park, and a ride on the Miniature North Bay Railway, opened in 1931. There is no sign on film of Redcar’s boisterous reputation. A 1930 Cleveland Standard ‘gossip’ feature was sniffy about the behaviour of female day-trippers to the resort, suggesting ‘some of the women from the pit country merely visit the seaside to indulge in a ‘wet’ afternoon and make themselves a nuisance and an eyesore’.