The neat houses are only marked out as exceptional by the front gardens where childrens' toys lie about, an open invitation to the light-fingered. Ditto the bicycles apparently abandoned on verges by the roadside.

But the residents have good reasons to be trusting about possessions left outdoors. It's a community that never sleeps and potential thieves have no escape.

This is the edge of nowhere, there are no passers-by in the ordinary sense and the only way forward is into the waves.

One other thing makes this neighbourhood unique. It's the men who are the stay-at-homes. We are at a lifeboat station which like no other - the only one out of the 232 situated around our coasts that has a full crew of paid employees who live on the base. It is the only way the Humber boat can operate effectively.

Spurn is the wisp of land that arches out improbably into the sea and here at its remote tip seven men and their families have opted for isolation so as to be on the spot when danger arises.

One of them is Dave Steenvoorden, a Grimsby fisherman with a Dutch name known to everyone as Spanish. He used to work on fishing boats from Spain in the days when they required a British crew if fishing in our waters.

Dave is second generation Dutch - his father was a chief engineer who came over from Holland to fish out of Grimsby. When the industry took a dive, Dave worked on oil rigs and stand-by vessels then became a lifeboatman 17 years ago.

He is now superintendent coxwain and the front door of his home offers the start of a sprint challenge of about a third of a mile. That's the distance he must run or ride (the reason for all the bikes lying around) on a call-out. It's a race against time whiuch will bring him to the end of a steel jetty beyond which the lifeboat rides at anchor.

The jetty also accommodates the launches of the Humber pilots. The lifeboat crew will either jump into one of these to transfer, or swing over the rails of the jetty an inflatable dinghy ready-poised on davits. From the moment the alarm goes off, to the lifeboat getting under way, they reckon the time elapsed should be about six minutes.
No-one is going to miss an alarm. There's a fire bell in each lifeboatman's house, plus a siren and everyone is equipped with a pager. Dave presses of the the buttons simultaneously. "We don't use maroons, it's chucking a quarter of an ounce of TNT into the sky," says Dave.

In this location it can be so windy, the house roofs had to be made from copper. Tiles would simply blow away. This is the third station built at a site where, in the old days, the coxwain used to run the nearest pub on the mainland, then called the Lifeboat Inn. The men tended their potato fields, grew vegetables to sell to passing ships and made a bit of extra money as crab fishermen.

That was when time was more measured and speed of reaction depended on the strength of a rower. Today, the technology is almost omniscient, the computer data is instantly available and the men must be on hand to react instantly. It means that when on duty - five days on, one day off and one weekend in seven - they can't go anywhere much beyond their own backyards.

It's their women who head off for the half hour's drive (assuming weather conditions allow) to civilisation and the wider world of work. "It's role reversal," says Dave. "We need to get them from under our feet."

Getting off Spurn is not always easy. Their homes are clustered near the water's edge where the land is a relatively expansive 400 metres wide. From here to the mainland, it narrows to what is essentially a shifting sand dune that has spun out into the sea and which today is stretched to breaking-point and beyond.

A yard of land is lost to the sea every year and so slender has Spurn become in places that the waves can break right across it. On those days, there's no nipping to the one shop at the nearest village of Easington, a 16-mile round trip, for a bag of sugar.

Weather permitting, school buses make the round trip daily. The mini bus for older ones picks them up at 7.45am and from Easington they must board another coach to Withernsea High School. The smaller children's minibus comes by at 8.45am. The routine sustains the lifeboat community in a feeling that theirs is a normal life. They are reminded that it's not when a heavy tidal surge cuts the peninsula in two and for a time turns the lifeboat base into an island.

Man has strived to bring permanence. A railway track was laid in 1947 and Italian prisoners of war at Kilnsea constructed a concrete road. But nothing lasts here for long. The power of natural forces is unstoppable and there are only parts of the road and remnants of the track to be seen on the slow and twisty journey of the school run.
Why must the lifeboat remain here? "Where we are is a very exposed position," says Dave. "It's a trade-off for lives and we want to save lives. I'm very proud of that."

The only times when they are not well-situated to be in harm's way is when a westerly gale is blowing. Then the Humber boat is moved west across the estuary to Grimsby dock basin where the crew sleep in a Portakabin until the winds ease. They had done three nights there the week before we met.

Locating at Grimsby permanently and becoming a 'normal' lifeboat is not an option. It would add perhaps an extra 45 minutes in the dash to a stricken ship out at sea. "I don't think we could survive 24/7 from Grimsby," says Dave.

Like him, the men who started the first lifeboat here in 1810 saw that geography dictates location. To be the most use, they had to be alongside the deep water channels at the entrance to the Humber Estuary. Nothing has changed in nearly two centuries, although Dave feels obliged to volunteer a defence of their position.

"The RNLI is always portrayed as a voluntary organisation - so having a full-time salaried staff goes against the ethos," he says. "We are as dedicated because we give our whole lives to the service. We are paid for 34 hours a week, but call-outs don't count as work. We do them free - the same as everyone else."

Dave was a crew member for eleven-and-a-half years, the second coxwain for two and became superintendent coxswain four years ago. It's a unique position. Elsewhere in the RNLI an honorary secretary does the job of ordering a lifeboat launch and runs the station.

To the the north, the next all-weather lifeboat is at Bridlington and to the south it's at Skegness. Last year the Humber boat was launched for one emergency 63 miles east of Flamborough Head. All told, that's a big patch of sea to keep an eye on.The crew comprises seven full-time men, twelve all told to cover for weekends, sickness and going on courses.

"Every Monday morning we sit as a team and plan the week," says Dave. "We have routines of paperwork, practising, maintenance, cleaning. The rest of the time we're twiddling our thumbs and watching the forecasts. We don't exercise as formally as other lifeboat stations because the guy are here all the time. There's very little that's hard and fast. We play it by ear."

This has got trickier as weather patterns have altered. The first thing Dave does each morning is get the forecast from the weather station in his house. "Now we get westerly gales in quick succession. It's far more unpredictable, a quicker cycle of peaks and troughs." Climate change has also caused them to be much more heavily involved in flood relief.

The volume of commercial traffic in the Humber is prodigious - 120 movements a day - and Spurn is the fourth busiest RNLI station, answering 51 calls last year. Some are 'dash-and-grabs' and others take six to 18 hours.

"I came in when the technology had just changed the job big-time," adds Dave. "Computers make the job easier - they can plot two or three different situations - but we still practise blind navigation when we out up curtains up at the windows. So with a throw of the switch we can go back to basics. Where we have the edge is with local knowledge."

Heading seawards fairly settled day he points out a patch of water where small waves are rippling the surface. This is known as the Binks and only men with their experience understand the navigation of channels through them. It can offer a life-saving short-cut, but here, four miles offshore, the sands are always shifting.

"It's a real pig-hole of a place. We whipped between the Binks to rescue one misguided sailor who had no chart for the area. This was a chap who races yachts and he found himself off a bank where the waves were breaking like crazy even though it was a calm day because of the swell. Three were taken off."

Below decks is the realm of Colin Fisk, the mechanic who tends the vessel's twin Caterpillar engines. Down here, the loss of the visual horizon, combined with the fumes from diesel fuel (sufficient for 240 miles at full speed) in such a confined space are sufficient to induce to a visitor unused to the lifeboat set-up, an instant feeling of queasiness.

Colin is a local man. His wife Stefanie has lived here for six years and the sea is not exactly in her blood. She comes from Barnsley."I used to come with my mum and dad and sister to go caravanning at Kilnsea," she says. "They liked it so much, they bought a house there 15 years ago. I wouldn't go back to Barnsley - or any town - now.
She works at the post office in Easington two day's a week. "Fortunately I had a car when I came here and could drive. It is isolated when you get down here. It's not eveyone's cup of tea, but it is mine.

"There are seven families here. Nine times out of ten we get on. Everyone has their own interest. We go over to Grimsby for the Lord mayor's civic lunch every year as a crew with wives. We have the occasional barbeque as a gang.

"There are disadvantages. It's 30 miles to the nearest Asda and when we have a nasty winter it's absolutely freezing. The big plus is that we can open and doors for the children and they go and play."
The Severn class lifeboat, Pride of the Humber, was funded by the people of Humberside and the northeast who raised the largest single sum in any one appeal, £1.4m.

Its crew are observers in peninsula politics played by the RNLI, Associated British Ports, Heritage England Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (owners of Spurn) who all have different ideas of what needs to happen to it in the future.

Dave Steenvoorden recalls being unipressed by what he saw of the natural world as a young seaman. It was there in his face every day and he shrugged his shoulders. "I was a cynical devil when I came here. But I've gone from a passing interest to finding everything about Spurn Point fascinating. There are 200-odd bird species recorded here a year and when we get a rare species arriving, we get 2,000 twitchers.

"It happens a dozen times a year. These aren't the regulars - these are the ones who travel the country to tick boxes. You open your curtains in the morning and there are bird-watchers in your garden. They come down the road like it's a race track and they block the passing places. They are the most inconsiderate people."

There used to be compulsory retirement for lifeboatmen at 55. Now they can stop on until 60 if they can continue to pass the medical. "I wouldn't want to be swanning around at 60," says Dave. "I've got a spot at Easington. When I retire, I wouldn't want to be watching the station."