How Yorkshire's coast inspired literature's greats

A new programme reveals how Yorkshire's coastline has inspired our greatest writers. Its presenter John Wedgwood Clarke tells Grant Woodward what makes it so special.
John Wedgwood Clarke reveals how the Yorkshire coastline has inspired writers. Picture Lara Goodband.John Wedgwood Clarke reveals how the Yorkshire coastline has inspired writers. Picture Lara Goodband.
John Wedgwood Clarke reveals how the Yorkshire coastline has inspired writers. Picture Lara Goodband.

THE rugged beauty of Yorkshire’s coastline has always been an important place for the people of the region, whether it be for a summer break, a way to make a living or simply somewhere to call home.

But the coast has also served as inspiration to generations of writers and poets who have used it to fire their imaginations or as the backdrop to key passages in stories and poems that continue to be enjoyed and examined around the world.

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That relationship will be explored in a new BBC documentary to be screened this weekend. Presented by John Wedgwood Clarke, it delves into the works of everyone from the Brontës to Philip Larkin to reveal how the Yorkshire coastline has influenced the literature we know and love.

Clarke, who teaches literature and creative writing at Hull University, is also a poet. A resident of Scarborough and keen North Sea swimmer, the programme, to be shown this Sunday on BBC One in Yorkshire, marks his debut as a television presenter.

Having spent a decade running events such as the Beverley Literature and Bridlington Poetry festivals, he was commissioned to write poems to be carved on to benches along the Wolds Way National Trail. A BBC producer spotted them and promptly recommended him for the presenting role on the show, Books That Made Britain.

“They kind of taught me on the job about what to do and what not to do,” he says with a chuckle. “I’m quite used to living a quiet life so I’ve never had the experience of anything on this scale. I’m curious to see what’s going to happen next.”

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Clarke makes for an engaging guide, one who’s clearly deeply passionate about the subject at hand. He insists he’s not an expert on any of the works that are covered in the programme, though I suspect he’s being modest. However, specialists are on hand to shed fascinating light on them and the creative process that led to their creation.

It is Clarke’s job to give a broader sense of the role that the coast has played in the lives of writers over generations. The coast, he says, is a place where people tend to get a new sense of perspective on their lives and the world around them.

“This happens because the coast is different,” he says. “It can be wild. The tide comes in and sweeps the beach clean, every time you walk across it it’s like no one’s ever been there before. These are things that come up again in all the books we look at, the strangeness of the sea, the sea frets in Dracula, and in Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey there’s a wonderful early morning scene where Agnes Grey walks across Scarborough South Bay and then meets her lover, her husband to be.”

South Riding, the Winifred Holtby novel that explores the lives, loves and politics of a 1930s Yorkshire community is also a key text. “The sea is always associated with the freedom and rebelliousness of the lead character, Sarah Burton. She goes to swim in the sea and gets changed by it, she has a new sense of perspective on her life and on the life of the East Riding.

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“Winifred Hotlby was a wonderful writer who knew the Holderness coast really well,” says Clarke. “It’s quite a political novel and it’s about that period just before the war when there was a lot of pressure for change. That’s mapped out on the landscape. The sea is part of that force of change and renewal, the land is seen as something traditional and something that’s literally crumbling into the sea, just as the old order is crumbling. The Holderness coast becomes a metaphor for the establishment and its instability.”

Holtby even drew up a map showing where the events in the book unfold. It now resides in the Hull history archive. “It’s set around the Mappleton, Oldborough, Withernsea, Hornsea stretch of the coast,” says Clarke. “She renamed all the places, but they all still exist today.”

The programme includes an interesting little experiment conducted at the KCOM Stadium in Hull as a way of bringing non-academic voices into the discussion.

“I speak to some Hull FC fans about Philip Larkin’s poem Here which begins in Hull and then travels out towards the coast and ends up at Spurn,” Clarke explains. “We looked at the final bit of that poem, they read it to camera and then I asked them some questions about it and they’re absolutely spot on, they really got the sense of atmosphere that Larkin was trying to create through the ending of that poem.

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“It reinforced for me the sense that if you can get poetry in front of people and you tell them there is no right or wrong, just react to it they often come up with spot on reactions. So these are people that have not read the poem before and they give a really great reading of what it’s about.”

Clarke believes rediscovering these works or reading them for the first time can show familiar territory in a fresh light too. “It’s hard to go to Whitby, for instance, without feeling the influence of Dracula, he casts his shadow over the whole town in a really interesting way.

“It’s the same with Scarborough. One of the things the producer was very keen on was not necessarily going to the places with which we usually associate these writers. He didn’t want to go to Haworth, he wanted to look at the Brontës by the coast. The Brontes loved Scarborough, some of the key scenes in Agnes Grey are set there and one of their dreams was to open a school in Scarborough. They didn’t realise that because they died before they were able to make it happen

“So I think for Charlotte in particular, it’s again a place of freedom, excitement and renewal. It was always a place for which they had very happy memories.”

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Giving a more contemporary insight into the inspiration of the coast and its towns is Yorkshire author Val Wood, while Clarke meets a group of people who swim in the sea.

He says the reasons why they swim in the sea are the same reasons that attracted the Brontës, a desire to get a fresh perspective on things.

“When you dive into the North Sea it knocks the senses out of you because it’s so cold. But when your head comes back up the world is suddenly fresh again. You get the Hispaniola, the little boat that sails round Scarborough South Bay, sailing by, you get the gulls overhead. You look one way and it’s all jurassic cliffs, you look the other way and it’s the Grand Hotel and the castle.

“You just see it afresh. And I think that’s one of the things writers have gone to the coast to do. Sometimes it’s because the coast troubles them, sometimes because it delights them.”

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He hopes viewers take away with them a sense of just how special Yorkshire’s coastline is.

“That’s the real star, of the programme,” he says. “We had some glorious weather and it looks fabulous. Hopefully it will bring a few people here and also remind the rest of us just how great it is.”

Larkin’s poetic trip to the coast

Philip Larkin wrote his poem Here six years after his move to Hull, where he was chief librarian at the university’s Brynmor Jones Library.

Its ending finds him journeying out of the city into the countryside to the east of Hull, eventually reaching the Holderness coastline...

Here silence stands

Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,

Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,

Luminously-peopled air ascends;

And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:

Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

The Books That Made Britain: The Yorkshire Coast will be shown on BBC One in Yorkshire this Sunday at 3.45pm and will then be available on the BBC iPlayer for 30 days.