Exploring the classic railway posters collection at the National Railway Museum (From York Press)

Exploring the classic railway posters collection at the National Railway Museum

1:08pm Saturday 21st August 2010 in

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The classic British seaside holiday has been enjoying a bit of a revival. We probably have post-recession spending cuts to thank for that – coupled with air strikes, volcanic ash and the like.

Suddenly, cash-strapped holidaymakers are finding that air travel to exotic destinations does not seem quite so cheap and easy as it used to, and Yorkshire resorts are reaping the benefit.

The great heyday of the seaside holiday still has to be the 1930s, however.

The seaside resort as we know it today was born in the late 19th century, when the expanding railway network reached the small fishing villages which peppered our coastlines.

“With carriage loads of workers from the city looking for fresh air and recreation, these sleepy coastal towns soon transformed into thriving and busy resorts,” says Tim Procter, curator of archives at the National Railway Museum.

In the Twenties and Thirties, bank holiday weekend trains would be packed with people pouring out of the cities into seaside towns. “By the end of the 1930s around 15 million people were going on holiday to the coast,” Mr Proctor says. Butlin’s holiday camps, founded at Skegness in 1936, proved massively popular – the Disney parks of their day.

But Skegness was not the only east coast resort pulling in holidaymakers by the trainload. London and North Eastern Railways were quick to capitalise on the success of the coastal resorts, and from the late 19th century right through to the mid twentieth century produced a series of posters advertising the delights of seaside towns.

All of Yorkshire’s major resorts – Filey, Whitby, Scarborough and Bridlington – had posters devoted to them. The artwork was bright, clean and sometimes surprisingly sophisticated; and as the posters reproduced on these pages reveal, the emphasis was generally on good, clean family fun.

A 1930s poster of Filey has the legend “for the family”, and shows children clambering on rocks at the water’s edge. A poster of Bridlington produced in 1935 has crowds strolling and looking at boats. A generic East Coast poster, meanwhile, shows a group of small children playing in rock pools by the sea.

A poster produced to promote rail travel to Scarborough strikes a slightly more sophisticated note. It depicts a smart couple leaning in romantic pose against railings overlooking Scarborough’s South Bay. They could almost be Cary Grant and Doris Day on the steps of an expensive hotel on the Riviera. Just what you’d expect of a resort with a hotel of the quality of the Grand.

• All the posters reproduced here, and many more, are kept in the Search Engine archive centre at the NRM. You can see copies, but appointments are essential if you want to view the originals. To find out more, phone 01904 686235, or email search.engine@nrm.org.uk ahead of your visit.