Roofers in Withernsea

The roofs of Withernsea

Withernsea only became a town because of the railway. The Hull and Holderness Railway, built in the mid-nineteenth century via Keyingham and Patrington, made "cheap and convenient holidays for Victorian workers and their families" possible for the first time, and the resort that grew up around the new station stayed a working line until 1964. A 35-acre Admiralty flying field operated at Owthorne, on what is now the town's high school site, from 1916 to 1919, and the actress Kay Kendall, born in Withernsea in 1927, is the other name the town is best known for.

The pier itself barely survived its own first decade. Engineer Thomas Cargill's 1,196-foot structure opened in 1877 at a cost of £14,000, and after repeated ship strikes a vessel called the Henry Parr cut it down to fifty feet of wreckage in a storm in March 1893; what was left was cleared away during a seafront remodelling in 1903. Only the landward entrance survives, a pair of yellow-brick castellated towers modelled on Conwy Castle, still standing on the seafront with no pier behind them. The white inland lighthouse nearby, built in brick between 1892 and 1894 and decommissioned in 1976, is a similar case, a working structure turned into a museum, this one dedicated to Kay Kendall rather than the sea.

No dedicated architectural survey names Withernsea's ordinary streets the way it names the pier, so we treat most of the resort's brick terraces and inter-war housing as general East Riding character rather than citing individual buildings. The sea that took the pier down in a single night has not stopped since, and a resort laid out to face the water head-on, rather than tucked into a bay, needs its flashings, fixings and rainwater goods holding up to salt-laden wind as much as it needs sound tiles.