How the railways changed the fate of Scarborough

Only in use for about 20 years, the excursion station later became the parcels office, before eventually falling into dereliction.

Work to turn this abandoned building at the station into a venue, exhibition space and artists’ hub began in 2013. Money difficulties and the pandemic slowed progress, but salvation came with funding from the EU, the Arts Council, and the Railway Heritage Trust.

Almost entirely run by volunteers, the Grade II-listed Old Parcels Office has been open for a year and has welcomed more than 5,000 visitors. The large and quirky building celebrates its past rather than hiding it, says Sally Gorham, chair of the venue.

“You can still see the old fireplaces, you can still see the old tiling halfway up the walls, what’s now the toilets, there’s a big slab of concrete which is where the wet fish were laid out. We’ve tried as far as possible to retain those features. It’s got this industrial feel so you can see the guts of the building.”

When she was looking for an exhibition as part of the Heritage Open Days scheme, hoping for a railway theme, Sally spotted a Facebook post by a Leeds architect who turned out to be a bit of a railway map geek.

Adrian Spawforth was a lucky find as his maps and old postcards lie at the heart of When The Railways Came To Town.

With long-standing family connections to Scarborough, and a professional interest in town planning urban renewal, Adrian had much to offer, although he didn’t know what he was getting into.

“It’s taking significantly longer than I thought it would but that’s fine,” he says. “It’s a great thing to be supporting and an interesting exercise to have done. But it’s amazing how much time you can spend scanning old maps.”

Adrian is interested in coastal towns and his architectural planning company is working on the £300 million Blackpool Central scheme, said to be the largest single investment in the town for more than a century.

“It wasn’t just railway maps,” he says. “The day job is leisure-based work and I’ve also had a place in Scarborough for 20 years, and the family is from Scarborough.”

Adrian says Scarborough has seen periods of decline, but now has a renewed sense of confidence.

“In a way what Covid did, plus climate change and the great challenges of flying anywhere now, is we’re starting to see people saying, actually it’s not a bad thing to be holidaying in the UK, and we can’t even get abroad, and it’s really convenient,” he says.

When The Railways Came To Town tells how Scarborough began to grow.

“The railways arrived in Scarborough in 1845, prior to that it was a moated town, a lot of people don’t know it was a town with a moat,” says Adrian.

“Towards the end of the 18th century people started to come to Scarborough by horse and coach, or they’d come by boat, and they’d travel up by sea, and dock in the harbour and they would spend summer or the season in town.”

After the railways arrived, the masses had access to the coast, allowing for what Adrian sees as “the democratisation of the seaside”.

A building boom followed as a huge number of hotels were built, thousands of hotel bedrooms constructed.

Adrian points to a quote from a London literary critic in the 1930s who said the geography of Scarborough allowed it to cater for three groups of people; the well-to-do were entertained on the South Cliff, the emerging middle classes were catered for in the North Bay, and then everybody else fitted in where they could.

“Scarborough is good at riding out the bucks. It’s got an architectural offer, it’s got a quality heritage offer, it’s got something we all enjoy, lovely entertainment going on, whether it’s rowing a boat on a lake or going to a fun-fair, and then you’ve got something for the day trippers and fish and chips before you go home.”

Blackpool is different.

“You look at the Blackpool offer, and it’s very much geared to one of those three groups. It’s not really geared in a way to heritage, arts and culture. It’s more niche, Blackpool – it does a niche activity for the masses, whereas Scarborough has a diverse offer.”

In the exhibition, Adrian’s annotated maps trace the town’s chronology, showing buildings that came and went, and features that have long disappeared, including that moat.

“There are still lines in the ground today if you know what you are looking for that show where the moat was,” says Adrian.

“In 1845 the railway has just arrived and 40 odd years later Scarborough has just gone boom, it’s expanded. That lasts until the outbreak of the Second World War, and then what we find is everything stops.”

Rationing and austerity hurt holidays on the coast, and in the 1950s companies such as Horizon introduced the package holiday abroad, inflicting further damage.

As well as that lost moat, another disappeared feature was a two-and-a half-acre subterranean aquarium in the valley on the South Cliff.

Although the underground aquarium is long gone, it lingers in local folk memory.

“It’s where the underground car park is now at the bottom of Valley Road,” says Sally, who grew up in the town, left to go to college, and returned during the pandemic. “And people still call that the aquarium top, the aquarium hasn’t been there for years, but locally it’s known as the aquarium top.”

Where Blackpool is still famous for its trams, those in Scarborough are sadly no more.

“Scarborough had trams every bit as good as Blackpool’s trams, and they were there until the 1930s, and then coach travel kicked off,” says Adrian.

Lost buildings picked out on the maps include Christ Church, demolished in 1979, and Rowntree’s department store that came down in 1988.

For Adrian, all this mixes work and pleasure.

“The day job is trying to see what’s necessary for the next ten to 20 years, whereas this is nice as you are learning lessons from the past. And there are genuine lessons to be learned about how people planned towns and infrastructure 100 years ago. What we got wrong, what we got right. Because we are replicating those very same mistakes today.”

As for the town today, Adrian says: “If Yorkshire is God’s Own County, then Scarborough has got to be God’s Own Seaside Resort.”

When The Railways Came To Town runs from September 8-18.