The Golden Age of Yorkshire Resorts 1800-1914

The Yorkshire coast has been attracting holidaymakers for centuries. This book is the first to delve into the world of moneyed visitors to the county’s seaside resorts showing what attracted such people, and why places like Scarborough, Filey and others remained select resorts until the beginning of the twentieth century. Many visitors of before 1900 came from the upper reaches of British society, whether aristocracy, or commercial and industrial magnates. But some Yorkshire resorts also catered for an international clientele - the French royal family had visited Scarborough, the Grand Duke and Duchess of Hesse stayed at Filey, while the Maharajah of Cooch Behar took a suit at the Hotel Metropole in Whitby.Using original research based on letters, wills, diaries and journals, together with newspaper reports, this book takes an in-depth look at the wealth and lifestyles of high-class visitors to the Yorkshire coast and includes chapters on their houses, luxury hotels, leisure activities and the ways in which both men and women of means shaped the resorts they visited or to which they retired.Generously illustrated with photographs and plans Select Resorts: Social and Architectural History of Yorkshire Coastal Resorts 1800-1914 provides a long-overdue survey of how the wealthy of the past spent their time at the coast.

Dr George Sheeran is Honorary Visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow in the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford. He is also a trustee of the People, Landscapes and Cultural Environments Research Centre (PLACE) which is supported by York St John University. His areas of interest and expertise are in urban and architectural history on which he has published widely. His books include Medieval Yorkshire Towns (1999), Brass Castles: the West Yorkshire New Rich and their Houses 1800-1914 (2006) and The Mosque in the City: Bradford and its Islamic Architecture (2015), the first publication to discuss the British mosque. With Amberley he has previously published Bradford in 50 Buildings (2015).