Essence of the Yorkshire Coast

By Malcolm Barker

A beautifully illustrated book that explores the life and work of the Yorkshire coast. Featuring recently discovered archive photography.

Yorkshire has one of the most fascinating stretches of coast anywhere in Europe. The one hundred miles stretching from the Tees to the Humber are often beautiful and certainly never dull.

This book goes behind the scenery to look in depth at life and work along the coast. It puts a new perspective on such subjects as fishing, smuggling, shipping and shipwrecks, and the proud story of lifeboats putting to sea in conditions of dire peril. In so doing it focuses on communities large and small, ranging from trawling out of Hull to the traditional fishing village of Staithes, and from Scarborough in its heyday to life at remote Spurn Point - once described as 'the teardrop on the face of Yorkshire'.

The visual inspiration behind this book is a remarkable collection of archive photographs recently discovered at the Yorkshire Post, which uniquely portray life and work along the coast in the 1950s and 1960s. This 'treasure chest' provides the springboard for a narrative that captures the real essence of the coast. Malcolm Barker has written on this subject for more than half a century and has now produced a worthy sequel to his earlier Great Northern book Essence of Whitby.

Editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post for seventeen years and a Yorkshire Post Saturday columnist for eleven years, he grew up in Whitby in the 1930s and 1940s at a time when his father succeeded his grandfather as editor of that most individual of weekly newspapers, the Whitby Gazette. It gave him remarkable knowledge and a fondness for the region that shines through every chapter in this book.

• Publication October 2007

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