Scarborough Hosts National Celebration Of Seaside Heritage And Coastal Culture

Seaside enthusiasts and heritage professionals will gather in Scarborough this Friday to celebrate coastal history and crown the nation's favourite seaside spots.

Seaside enthusiasts and heritage professionals will gather in Scarborough this Friday to celebrate coastal history and crown the nation's favourite seaside experiences.

The annual Big Day Out will bring walking tours, talks, and a celebration of coastal culture to the town, alongside the highly anticipated announcement of the 2026 Bucket and Spade List awards.

Scarborough's very own Harbour Bar could take home a top prize this year. The beloved local institution, famous for its Knickerbocker Glories and fruit sundaes, still features its original hand-painted signs and 1950s decor. Owner Guilian Alonzi is the third generation of his family to sell ice cream in the town, using a basic recipe his grandfather brought from Italy to make fresh batches every day in a one-man factory behind the parlour.

The business famously opened on the first August Bank Holiday weekend after World War Two in 1945, selling out of ice cream within just two hours. Now, it stands as a prime example of the enduring appeal of the British coast.

Kathryn Ferry, Chair of the Seaside Heritage Network and a leading expert on beach huts, explained what attendees can expect from the event:

"This is our annual big day out. The key part of that is to announce our winners in our bucket and spade list awards.

Over the summer, we've had an online vote open to everybody to vote for their favourite seaside places, experiences, flavours, and so we will be announcing our winners of that on Friday.

It's really an opportunity to talk about the good things at our seaside places and highlight some of those places that perhaps don't get the publicity in the press that they should, but people are in the background working really hard to make these places amazing and to to celebrate the unique things about"

The gathering at The Grand Hotel will unite a wide variety of people who share a passion for coastal communities. Dr Ferry said:

"We've got people who work in the sector. We've got planners, heritage professionals, but we've also just got members of the public who love the seaside. We've got people who are looking after heritage attractions elsewhere around the coast. But it is a genuine mix, and that's really the good thing about it, because you can hear lots of different voices and meet lots of different people.

The coast is so amazing, but the sort of infrastructure to connect people can be quite tricky, because you're at the end of the road, aren't you, when you're on the coast? So, we try and just get everybody who loves the seaside in a room together. It's a recipe for success."

Bringing the event to Scarborough holds special significance for the network, which has deep roots in the local area. Kethryn added:

"The Seaside Heritage Network is an educational charity. We came out of an organization that was created in Scarborough actually back in 2016, Scarborough Museums Trust created the Seaside Heritage Network, and that was really to link museums around the coast.

For the past four years, we have been trying to expand what we do, and that means sort of in-person visits, online seminars, just really trying to celebrate and big up our amazing seaside places."

Visitors and locals alike will have the chance to explore Scarborough's rich history through various guided activities. Ms Ferry detailed the local partnerships involved in the schedule:

"There's quite a lot of local people attending as well as an opportunity for them to meet people who love the seaside and to to share their place.

So we've got walking tours in the morning and we have got a tour of the Central tramway, tour of the Rotunda Museum. So we've got brilliant partnerships set up with these local places and we've got another walking tour around the area around the Grand Hotel which is where the event will take place.

We are partnering with Big Ideas by the Sea. We've got some talks. Excitingly, we've got best-selling author Andrew Martin whose recent book is called To the Train by Sea and he's going to do a Q&A session and tell us about why he loves trains and why he loves the seaside, so it's a perfect fit."

The town's historical significance extends to the very origins of the British seaside holiday. Dr Ferry is a leading expert on Beach Huts and highlighted Scarborough's pioneering role in coastal architecture:

"Beach huts are pretty important actually, because when I was doing my research for my books on beach huts, it was quite clear that as in many other things dedicated to the seaside, Scarborough has been a pioneer, and so the North Bay bungalows that were built in about 1910-1911, I don't think there's any of those ones left, but a couple of years later some were built in South Bay, the ones near the Clock Café. Those Edwardian bungalows were the first kind of beach huts that were built in a block like that, pretty much anywhere that I could find.

In terms of kind of creating a new type of beach hut, in the world of beach hut minutiae trivia, shall we call it, the Scarborough beach huts are pretty important. And of course, the beach huts came from the wheeled bathing machines, that's the sort of ancestor of the beach hut, and Scarborough can claim to have the first known illustration of a bathing machine anywhere in 1735 in that John Setterington engraving of the South Bay. You tick a lot of boxes for me."

There are more details about the Big Day Out event at https://seasideheritage.org.uk/events/upcoming-events/bdo-scarborough