The North Yorkshire town of Scarborough is right up there on the list of the UK's best seaside resorts. This photo shows one reason why.
The town sits peripherally on the east coast, 200 miles north of London and just south of the Yorkshire Moors. It has broad sweeping bays, plural, being divided in two by a high limestone headland. Its harbour provides refuge from the North Sea, its castle has seen better days, it successfully balances culture and candy floss, its cliff lifts provide a valuable service and it has more than enough places to dine on fish and chips. If only it had a proper pier it'd be the quintessential seaside resort. I very much liked Scarborough and would like to summarise it via a series of mini postcards. [map]
✉ For all your usual seaside experiences the harbourfront suffices. Here are the cafes, bars and gift shops, the penny arcades and the seagulls eagerly hoping you'll spill a chip. The harbour is used less for fishing and more for pleasurecraft these days, although I did watch one trawler returning to port and the lobster pots looked well used. If catching mackerel is your thing several boats offer lengthy sea-angling sessions. The obligatory walk is out to the tip of Vincent Pier - a stone mooring arm within the breakwaters rather than a boardwalk of pleasure. Dodge round the rebuilt lighthouse and you can sit on a bench to take in the full panorama round the bay, or just walk straight back again depending.
✉ Time the tide right and South Bay beach is a good one with acres of sloping sand. At present it feels like the exclusive province of Scarborough's dog owners, what with most of the tourists having gone home and seasonal canine restrictions having been lifted until May. Walk too far and it gets a lot rockpoolier.
✉ Fish and chips is served in a multiplicity of sit down restaurants, invariably with bread and butter. At Caravel the advertised alternative is burger with peas and garnish. At Wackers the formica tables stretch back almost as far as a windowshopper can squint. Punters choosing to dine at Winking Willy's are perhaps prioritising branding over reputation. Takeaway fish and chips is alas less common, perhaps because the seafront is underblessed with outdoor seating.
✉ The building which dominates the town, unexpectedly, is a hotel. TheGrand attaches precipitously to St Nicholas Cliff and at time of completion in 1867 was the largest brick building in the world. It was designed to accommodate sophisticated spa-goers and boasted 365 bedrooms, 52 chimneys, 12 floors and 4 towers - you can probably see what the architects did there. The exterior looks spectacular from everyangle but the interior hasn't fared so well, indeed the hotel's former chic reputation has declined through multiple changes of ownership. BestMate's parents checked in last weekend for a special anniversary getaway and within hours were checking out, having confronted mucky floors, smashed sockets and dubiously grimy porcelain, not to mention a discarded receipt showing the previous occupants had booked the room for just one hour. Rarely was a hotel so badly named.
✉ The heart of Scarborough is the Old Town on the lumpy limestone ridge that sticks out into the sea. It's where the Normans built their castle although there's not much left, chiefly a curtain wall and half a keep. Reviews suggest the best thing about the castle is the view from the headland, but when I clambered up to the gatehouse everything was misty grey so I gave it a miss. Neighbouring St Mary's church was founded soon after and flaunts that most Yorkshire of attractions, the grave of a Brontë Sister. Here lies Anne, author of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, along with an engraved apology from The Brontë Society that someone got her age wrong on the tombstone.
✉ Scarborough's first attraction was a spa based around springs discovered at the foot of South Cliff. The spa's initial Gothic Saloon has been considerably augmented over the years to include a Grand Hall, a Theatre and a Promenade Lounge - a combination of facilities deemed worthy of the occasional Party Conference. Its most iconic bauble, the outdoor Sun Court, is blessed with chequerboard tiling arrayed with tables if tea is served or deckchairs if genteel orchestral entertainment is underway in the bandstand. After the summer season's over, alas, peering in through the windows is the best you'll manage.
✉ Scarborough is very much a town on two levels - clifftop and beach - so not necessarily an ideal retirement spot. Only in the Old Town is getting from up to down relatively straightforward. Elsewhere it's long steep stairs or that veritable seaside staple, the cliff lift. Only one of these is currently in operation, namely the Victorian Tramway which connects the gardens alongside the Grand down to Foreshore Road. Its fare is £1.20 single, whereas the cliff lift at Scarborough Spa is cannier and charges £1.50 up and £1 down. This is closed at present, however, while the South Cliff Gardens get a makeover, which makes this the first time I have ever seen the timetable for a cliff lift replacement bus service.
✉ The southern seafront is separated from the main town by a deep valley. This sharp dip threatened to diminish footfall to the Spa so in 1827 the cast iron Cliff Bridge was built to provide level access across the divide. It's pedestrians only. It originally had a toll booth (scrapped by the council in 1951). It's both practical and elegant. And yet another cliff lift descends at the northern end, this time disused and repurposed as a cafe where punters can sit and eat cake inside the two original cars.
✉ The best value tourist offer in town is the £3 annual pass to the two municipal museums. The Rotunda Museum is a cylindrical repository of fossils and geological treats purpose-built in 1829 to house the relics of the Scarborough Philosophical Society. Its first floor is a fairly standard display of rocks and dinosaur skeletons, but the second is a stunning domedgallery surrounded by wooden display cabinets stuffed with eclectic exhibits. Think pots, ammonites, busts and cellos to get some idea of the mix. A hand-drawn geological cross section of the Yorkshire coast encircles the upper balcony, alas now inaccessible because have you seen how narrow the staircase is? For the rest of your threequidsworth you need to climb the cliff to the Art Gallery on The Crescent to enjoy a selection of seascapes, portraits and much more modern temporary exhibitions. The big name displayed in pride of place up the staircase is Scarborough-born Lord Leighton, easily one of the most successful painters of the Victorian era but judged to have been overrated ever since. His former birthplace is now lost beneath the Brunswick Shopping Centre, specifically Poundland, so that's him told.
✉ A completely separate Scarborough exists on the other side of the headland, focused around a second sweeping bay of similar size. It boasts better surf when the wind's up and a Blue Flag so can get busy with boarders. North Bay is generally much less developed and is overlooked by a sloping linear park and an arc of big houses including hotels like The Kimberley, The Kenton, The Ramleh and The Paragon. It would have been harder to reach before 1908 when the Marine Parade was opened around the sea-lashed foot of the headland, but now you can hitch a ride on an open-topped bus or join the kagouled retirees stoically trooping round from the harbour for a change of scene.
✉ Keep going to the point where the cliffs eventually fade to nothing and you'll find a cluster of refreshment opportunities and rows of brightly-coloured beach huts. Behind them is Scarborough's famous Open Air Theatre, restored in 2010 after a lengthy mothballing. It's more a bank of seating opposite a removable stage and probably looked more impressive before they covered the lake, but you could have seen Snow Patrol here last month and Lionel Richie is due next summer. October options are limited, but the miniature North Bay Railway will happily whisk you a mile to Scalby Mills until the end of half term.
I've at least another half dozen postcards to write which I'll deliver tomorrow. In the meantime you might spot a few of the extras in my album of 20 Scarborough photos on Flickr.
