Saltburn to Scarborough Coast

There's an energy to this coast that's infectious.

A bracing sense that people here

know how to grasp opportunities and turn them to their advantage.

Nowhere embodies this more than Saltburn.

I like this place.

It feels washed clean every day by the wind and the sea.

But the fact that it's here, is literally down to one man's vision.

Like many Victorian industrialists,

Henry Pease had a strong religious sense.

After seeing an apparition of a heavenly city above the cliffs,

Pease built this coastal spa town from scratch.

His Saltburn Improvement Company had the noble aim

of restoring the jaded spirits of his work force.

As Pease was teetotal they had no public houses,

but they did have their very own stairway to heaven.

Powered by nothing more potent than water.

And to reflect the purity of his vision,

Pease had the town clad entirely in a distinctive white brick.

The bricks are certainly very striking.

They were made at a factory in Durham owned, oddly enough,

by the very same Henry Pease who set up the Saltburn Improvement Company.

Thousands of tonnes of material were required.

And the most efficient way to move it all was by railway.

A railway owned and run by the Pease family.

The whole thing was a money-spinner.

Clearly, Pease believed that God helps those who help themselves.

But on a day like this, Saltburn is so picture perfect,

that you could almost buy into his dream.

The jewel in the crown of his heavenly town

was this magnificent hotel.

But the grand guests have long since moved on.

The hotel has been sold off for flats

and it's the meek who've inherited the earth.

And the sea view.

I wasn't expecting this! It's like getting up onto the crow's nest

What do you say about a view like that?

You could talk about the coast till you're blue in the face,

but this is all you need to see.

And that is why the British coastline is a bit special.

Just eight miles south of Saltburn is the tiny fishing port of Staithes.

The beauty of this town owes nothing to man, and everything to nature.

It was the boyhood home of the great navigator, Captain Cook.

It's hard to understand, how he could bear to leave it.

Small wonder then, that 100 years ago, Staithes acquired its very own artists' colony.

They were painters who'd studied in France.

They wanted to build the sort of bohemian artists' commune they'd seen abroad.

Staithes seemed the perfect place.

'The Staithes group took their art seriously.

Like the French Impressionists, they believed in capturing

the vibrancy of real life, by painting in the open air.

But the French never had to cope with the Yorkshire coast.

That's the North Sea there, that can bring in some furious weather.

It must've made it hard for painters,

more than enough to blow the bristles out of the stoutest brush.

And yet the Staithes group not only survived, they thrived on wind, rain and salt spray.

Even today, the world they captured seems almost within reach.

But on one day of the week, painting was never tolerated.

Whatever else they did, the artists seldom made the mistake

of putting brush to canvas on a Sunday more than once.

Those that tried it, learnt in these parts, the reward for such lack of respect for the Sabbath,

was a bowl of rotting fish heads to wear for a hat.

Whitby.

The town lies at the heart of Yorkshire's Jurassic coast.

A seven-mile slice of exposed sedimentary rock,

formed when the dinosaurs around here were paddling through tropical swamps.

Alice Roberts is on the trail of a dark legacy of the Dinosaur Age,

which gave Whitby a Victorian claim to fame.

This is a bit of Whitby jet, its name embodies darkness itself.

It is jet black and it's been used to make jewellery since

at least the Bronze Age.

The Venerable Bede thought it kept serpents at bay

and it became a must-have fashion accessory, when Queen Victoria

adopted it as part of her mourning attire.

Victoria wore Whitby jet for 30 years as a sign of her grief,

after the death of Prince Albert.

For her, Albert's loss was a tragedy,

but for Whitby it signalled boom time.

Suddenly, the town's fishermen were outnumbered by people

carving the strange black substance into ever more elaborate shapes.

The Victorians loved jet. They used it to make very ornate pieces of jewellery like this,

which to the modern eye, can look a little over the top, but this was the height of fashion.

So jet was a very valuable commodity.

'It must have been a bit like a Yorkshire Klondike,

'everybody wanted to get their hands on Whitby Jet.

'So, what is it? And why do you only find it here on the coast?

'I'm joining the Whitby jet-set, with local geologist, Will Watts.'

These collapsed bits are the roofs of the Victorian jet works.

Once, there'd have been a big hole in the cliff

where they were quarrying to find jet.

And you've got pillars on either side and the collapse in the middle.

Right. Quite a major undertaking.

-And unique to this part of the coastline.

-What is jet?

It's monkey puzzle tree.

Lumps of the tree that floated out to sea and then sank,

and were buried at the bottom of the sea and come back as jet.

'Now, there are only a few monkey puzzle trees in the area.

'They're native to Chilean Argentina, where it's much warmer.

'But 180 million years ago, when this coast was much nearer the equator,

'monkey puzzle trees were in abundance.'

What sort of clues are there to help us find the jet?

We might find some nice, black material.

-We're more likely to find a hole in the cliff where somebody's already found some.

-Like this?

Yeah, here we go. Here we have a hole in the cliff,

and if we look at the bottom of it, we've got some wonderful black jet.

There is, yes, there's a layer of it.

Imagine seeing driftwood on the sea. That sinks to the seabed,

and must be found as a fossil. When someone finds a bit in the cliff, they're only working a single log.

We've got a bit here, which is similar in thickness.

It's only about a centimetre thick.

-Yes.

-It's not the biggest layer of material in the world.

It's like a thin plank of monkey puzzle.

It would have been round, it's been squashed down.

-On top, you can see the pattern of the wood.

-Yes.

-You can see the grain.

-That is actually

the side of a fossil seashell, I think it's a little fossil oyster.

At some point, that was living on this wood.

Why is jet particularly found in Whitby and nowhere else?

We only find it on a seven- or eight-mile coastline,

because of the way the rock's laid out in the UK and the world.

They're not horizontal, they dip ever so slightly.

If you go too far south, they're way beneath us and too far north -

they've been eroded.

It's probably a million-in-one chance that we find jet in Whitby,

but we do and we have a long history of it being worked.

Almost 150 years after jet took off in Whitby,

the business is still going strong.

Which is strange because jet isn't mined much here any more.

The fact is, that alongside the local jet

there's a certain amount that's been imported from abroad

from places like the Ukraine. And as anyone form Whitby will tell you, it's just not the same.

So, if you want authentic Whitby jet,

how can you be sure of getting it?

Mike Marshall knows the real thing when he sees it.

It's amazing how elaborately it can be worked, this here is amazing.

How would I know it's made out of local,

good quality Whitby Jet and not a cheap import?

-Obviously, it all looks black to me.

-There's a simple test you can do.

Whitby Jet, if you get a piece of wet and dry sandpaper,

if you mark it on there - that's a gingery brown

-which is good quality, hard jet.

-Right.

You can also get poor quality jet around Whitby.

Again, if you mark it on a piece of paper, that's almost black.

-It's softer, almost like charcoal, isn't it?

-That's probably sea coal.

What about the Ukrainian, how good is it? Is it as good as Whitby Jet?

It isn't really, no. It's probably going to be similar to the poor quality jet.

You can make the jewellery of it, but it will crack and craze over time.

It is very poor quality jet.

It's buyer beware, really. It is jet, but it's not Whitby jet.

If it's authenticity you're after, few places on this coast

offer a more authentic British seaside experience than Scarborough.

Cheap flights have changed our view of the world,

not always for the better.

Some locals would have you believe that Scarborough's a match

for Monte Carlo or the Bay of Naples.

Giorgio Alessio is well-placed to judge.

He's an Italian chef, who's lived here 25 years.

He's passionate about food and even more passionate about Yorkshire.

'Every morning I go to the fish market.

'The beauty of that is you just pick and choose what you want.

'I get quite a wonderful halibut,

'this is about one-and-a-half, two kilos valuable.

'One of the ugliest fish ever is the monkfish.

'They've got teeth like sharks.'

The best things you can find about Scarborough is the Englishness.

It's a very different part of the world here.

At 12 o'clock is in the middle of the sun. English people get very excited about it - sunbathing.

You never see anything like that in Italy,

at this time they're all outside having lunch until the fierce sun goes away.

A lot of English people got to Italy

because they say they're all wonderful, beautiful people in Italy.

Very good! That's why I'm here. I'm the only one.

No competition at all. Look how good-looking are the women here.

MUSIC: "Let There Be Love" by Nat King Cole

People think it is the Bay of Naples, people think it is the Bay of Monte Carlo,

bloomin' heck, it's Scarborough. What d'you think of that?