If, like me, you grew up in a certain part of north-east England, the North Yorkshire coast felt like the nearest “exotic” destination for a summer holiday. The idea is not so fanciful as it sounds. In fact, in recent years comparisons between this part of the country and foreign expat hotspots like the Costa del Sol have begun to look more and more apt, not least due to the warming climate.
But all is not well in this picturesque corner of England. Last month, residents of the seaside town of Whitby – in effect the capital of the Yorkshire tourist trade – voted overwhelmingly in favour of making all new-build homes in the town full-time primary residences. The parish-level vote was, as the Scarborough borough council website drily notes, “no more and no less than an expression of the views of the electorate”. But while the result is not binding, it shows that Whitby locals are increasingly feeling the burn of the “frenzy” for second homes in British coastal areas.
On the surface, Whitby has done well out of tourism – but look closer and you’ll see that its story embodies a wider sense that Britain’s social fabric is fraying at the seams. Asa Jones, a 21-year-old charity worker and founder of the Facebook group Whitby Homes for Whitby People, said the second homes problem had developed into a full-blown civic crisis. “If you go back to the 1990s, there were a lot of holiday lets in the centre of town,” Jones said, “[and] even in the early 2010s, there were still local residents in those areas.” But more recently, he said, “the last remnants of local housing in the centre of town have disappeared.”
Jones’s comments conjure images of a town centre turned into a virtual theme park for Whitby’s tourist offering of jewellery shops, seaside kitsch and Dracula souvenirs. But he is most concerned about the spread of holiday lets into the outskirts of the town, leading many residents to seek cheaper housing as far away as Teesside. For Jones, a tipping point was reached in the last five years: “The big change since maybe 2016 has been in the suburban areas, where I currently live. Opposite me there used to be a big family home. They moved away, and now it’s a holiday let that’s only occupied for half the year.”
In some ways, the fact that Whitby has managed to attract such a high level of outside interest and investment makes it seem like a rare example of a flourishing northern seaside resort. Between 2009 and 2018, 50% of British coastal towns saw a decline in employment (a figure some 13% higher than in non-coastal towns). Population has declined in almost one in three smaller seaside towns over the same period. Indeed, much ink has been spilt by researchers and commentators over the last decade in trying to work out why British coastal areas in general are on the wrong end of such socioeconomic statistics.
As manufacturing industries such as shipbuilding have mostly faded into memory, and as the fishing industry has undergone several major downgrades since its early-20th-century heyday, there has been a widespread sense in government and business that tourism is the only game in town when it comes to regenerating Britain’s once-thriving ports and fishing villages. Cue endless initiatives to promote the holiday trade all around the coast, some of which have produced success stories.
From large swaths of Devon and Cornwall (where the fight against second homeownership is well under way) to the “honeypot” stretch of the Yorkshire coastline that includes Whitby, the post-austerity rise of the “staycation” has enormously boosted the profit margins of holiday-home landlords and some small business owners. Over the last few years, the combined effects of Brexit and Covid have further stimulated demand for domestic holidays, now undergoing yet another surge in a chaotic summer for foreign travel.
And yet, in a local narrative that highlights a deeper malaise in the economy, even apparently elite tourist resorts such as Whitby are not working very well for their citizens. In the view of Neil Swannick, a Labour councillor for the Whitby Streonshalh ward, the rise of the staycation economy has done little to tackle the sorts of inequalities that have blighted small towns all over the country in recent decades.
“There are certainly people that have done well out of tourism in Whitby,” said Swannick, “but that benefit hasn’t been evenly spread across the residents of the town.” He highlighted the fact that in his ward, there are two areas that are among the 20% most deprived in England (male life expectancy, he tells me, is about 10 years lower there than in the rest of North Yorkshire). “When the heating crisis and food prices start to bite in the autumn,” he said, “the situation in those pockets of poverty will only get worse.”
Whitby’s superficial resurgence in the 21st century shows that the post-Thatcher consensus that saw finance, property and leisure as viable replacements for the vanished industries of the past may have achieved a partial kind of success for a time. But, as in so many other walks of modern British life, these forces are also producing ever more fragmented communities, with an increasingly stark divide between owners and workers. For the former, rental and commercial profits have guaranteed standards of living ranging from mere comfort to exorbitant wealth. For the latter, even the high employment rate in a “honeypot” seaside town can do nothing to mitigate the combined effects of rising costs, low pay and a broken housing system.
The irony for Whitby itself is that although it appears to have avoided the fate of other seaside “ghost towns”, where social deprivation is even more widespread, the fact that both the owners and the workers in its economy increasingly live elsewhere means that its civic environment is, in one sense, just as hollowed-out as somewhere like Hartlepool, a few miles up the coast.
In both cases – and indeed in many seaside towns throughout Britain – what is glaringly absent is a viable social infrastructure and system of rights for local residents. In the rush to do everything possible to encourage the private sector to lead the charge for coastal regeneration over the last few decades, there has been a widespread feeling that local and national government must simply get out of the way and let the market work its magic.
As a tawdry Conservative leadership contest raises the prospect of yet more deregulation and slavish devotion to the market’s invisible hand, the opposing idea that firm government intervention is needed to support the empowerment of local communities is only faintly audible in public outbursts like the vote to regulate Whitby’s second homes. It is these voices from below – far more than the multimillionaires and career politicians of the latest Westminster talent contest – who must be listened to as we head towards a social cliff edge on all sides of the country.
Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of New Model Island
