Coast (2005) s02e06 Episode Script
Newcastle To Hull
1 The northeast coast of England.
This is a journey between two great rivers, starting here where the Tyne flows into the North Sea and finishing up 170 miles south at the River Humber.
I'm joined by some familiar faces.
Alice Roberts takes a trip back to the Summer of Love to discover how this coast turned us on to high speed gas.
Miranda Krestovnikoff hunts out the only seagull that's truly worthy of the name.
Mark Horton discovers a 21st century weapon in the age-old battle against coastal erosion.
And a new face.
Dick Strawbridge uses his special brand of engineering know-how to get on top of one of this coastline's strangest structures.
Is it my imagination, or are these getting steeper? They're definitely getting steeper.
I'm taking the plunge to get to grips with the secrets of lifeboat design.
Show me what you've got.
Right! ENGINE ROARS Oh, yes! Welcome to England's northeast coast.
Our journey takes us from the mouth of the Tyne, near Newcastle, to Hull, 170 miles south, on the River Humber.
This is a coast known both for hard work and hard times, but from the earliest times, there's also been a strong religious tradition.
And there's one man from these parts who's the perfect guide for a worldly pilgrim like me.
That man was Bede, the Venerable Bede.
He was a monk but he was also an all-round genius - scientist, historian, geographer.
You name it! He was born, he lived and he died close by the Tyne, but his work and his word are spread right around the world.
1,300 years ago, Bede wrote the first history of England.
This was the time some call the Dark Ages, after the Romans had abandoned Britain.
Yet the country depicted by Bede is far from desolate.
He describes an island set in a boundless ocean.
It's rich in timber, grain, cattle and even vineyards.
It has precious veins of silver, iron and coal and abundant wildlife.
Bede's genius was all the greater because, although his history covered the whole of England, his own world, like our journey, was bounded by the Tyne and the Humber.
In the 8th century, this coastline was an information superhighway, teeming with new ideas, all generated by its religious communities.
It was Bede who pulled them together at his monastery in Jarrow.
Just south was a twin monastic community, Monkwearmouth, while to the north was Holy Island, home to the monks of Lindisfarne.
What linked them all was the sea.
This glamorous little craft is a coracle.
It's your basic 7th and 8th century means of transport for a fellow like Bede.
But you can see why he might not have been inclined to stray too far from the shore.
In the 8th century, this landscape was totally different.
Forget all this industry.
In Bede's day, it was a hotbed of Christianity.
Bede's monastery would not only have overlooked the river mouth, but also have had a clear view out to the open sea.
It's only in the past hundred years that land around the river mouth has been reclaimed for industry.
Today Bede's sea view is lost behind Nissan's enormous car factory.
But this was no backwater.
The Jarrow monastery wasn't just a haven for quiet contemplation, it was an intellectual powerhouse.
This is where Bede took stock of the rag-tag mix of settlers and invaders who'd washed up in Britain after the Romans, and gave them a single identity, the English.
But how did Bede know so much about the world beyond his monastery? The coast is the great highway, isn't it? If you try and travel round in the 7th or 8th centuries, what have you got? You've got what's left of the Roman roads, in whatever state they are, but along the coast, you have the sea.
People know how to use it, and it is not surprising that there are a lot of monasteries around the coast.
What amazes me about him is he doesn't really go anywhere and yet he still manages to have a global reach.
He didn't get out much, did he? Bede was a monk, and Bede believed that a monk's job was to stay in his monastery.
But the world came to him.
He had correspondence and had people around for him who were sending him information from elsewhere.
I'm heading south as far as the Humber.
To what extent was that the end of Bede's world? We still have the word Northumbria, don't we, in England now, and the Northumbrians.
We've lost the word Southumbria, but Bede talks about the Southumbrians.
The Humber is the south end of his own kingdom and you're going to go right down to the end of Bede's kingdom, the Northumbrian kingdom.
Heading south, there seems little that Bede would recognise.
It's hard to see past the industrial revolution's own Holy Trinity.
Iron, steel and coal.
During 100 years of mining, almost 300 million tonnes of waste were dumped straight into the North Sea.
But little by little, a miracle is taking place, as the sea scrubs away the old scars of King Coal.
Nature's not alone in this coastal spring-clean.
Also lending a hand is Dennis Rooney, once a miner, now working for the National Trust.
It's a bright, lovely day.
You can see for miles.
The sun is shining and it could be a lovely day like this down on the pit and you wouldn't know about it.
I remember my father saying, "I would never have you working at the colliery.
" I said the same about my sons.
Everybody who worked at the colliery would have said that.
It was black, dank, dirty, dusty, it was noisy.
It was everything you can imagine hell would be if there is such a place.
As soon as the mines closed, I said, "Well, where's the jobs?" I'd heard the National Trust were coming down here to acquire the coast and we thought, "They must be mad.
" That's when the collieries were still working.
They were still putting colliery waste on to the beaches, the waters were still black.
They advertised for a warden in '91, when I'd been made redundant from the colliery.
Dennis was very reluctant to apply for the job.
He thought that he wouldn't stand an earthly chance of getting it.
I said, "Go on, please have a go.
" It's been the best job I've ever done in my life.
It's been the best 16 years, because we've always been outdoor people.
It's really been a revelation.
This coastline is fantastic.
It is coming back very quickly, much quicker than we all thought.
I suppose it's fairly ironic, really.
For 20 years, I suppose, I helped to put this mess on the beach.
The National Trust have now got me tidying it up.
The port of Hartlepool is also cleaning up its act.
The vast docks were once home to a ship-building industry.
Now they've been turned into a marina.
And pride of place goes to a vessel that first sailed into Hartlepool more than a century ago.
HMS Trincomalee is Britain's oldest warship still afloat.
Her connection with the Age of Empire is even stronger than you'd expect.
Trincomalee, this great British warship, wasn't actually built in Britain.
She was fashioned in Bombay from trusty Indian teak.
The Napoleonic Wars had stripped Britain of its native oaks and it takes 2,000 mature trees to build one of these babies.
Indian-built from stem to stern, Trincomalee gave 40 years of service to the British Empire, criss-crossing the world's oceans to fly the flag.
By any measure, the River Tees is a great waterway, but that poses particular problems for people living around it.
Transporting things up or downstream is straightforward.
But getting across a river like this isn't so easy.
No wonder that Teesside has developed a world-wide reputation for building bridges.
Middlesbrough has the strangest design of all, across the Tees itself, the Transporter Bridge.
It's so quirky that it's even acquired its own urban myth, that it said "Auf Wiedersehen" to Teesside, and was rebuilt across the Grand Canyon by a bunch of unlikely lads.
All fantasy.
The Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge is still at home and impossible to miss.
Engineer Dick Strawbridge checks out the nuts and bolts of its unique design.
I've been into my engineering for over 30 years.
20 of them, I was in the army.
I've seen lots of clever ways of crossing obstacles.
I've never seen a bridge that looks anything like that.
What is it all about? Why does this bridge looks so odd and why is it so big? It's over 200 feet high.
Something half that size would have saved an awful lot of work.
An awful lot of vessels that were very tall came up this river.
That tall? Yes, that tall.
One tall ship nearly took the top of its mast off at the bottom of the bridge.
That is absolutely That tall? Yes.
Bigger ships need a bigger bridge.
You have to keep the river so the ships can go up and down the tall ships, and they are significantly taller? Very tall ships.
Why did they have the population on one side, industry the other side? Lots of people in Middlesbrough want to work at Bell Brothers.
How many people were using it? Are we talking a lot of people? Every time a shift went across to Bell Brothers from Middlesbrough, 887 people were going across the bridge.
Every shift? Every shift.
Well, I never! It might look like a giant Meccano set with a few bits missing but that is to give it head room for passing ships.
As for the people, the Transporter Bridge does exactly what it says on the tin.
It's transported men and machines across this stretch since 1911.
Not in an ordinary bridge sort of way.
It is a bridge but you ride on it just like a ferry.
All this amazing structure exists just to move a small platform, the gondola, backwards and forwards.
Incredible.
It's powered from the winding house by huge motors which haven't changed much since they were built.
Real engineering.
It's Alan Murray's job to keep on top of it, and that means climbing over 200 steps.
Is it my imagination, or are these getting steeper? 'Incredibly, many of the canny folk of Teesside actually prefer taking the stairs.
' If you think this is bad, back in the 1920s, '30s, they used to come to work this way.
Instead of using the gondola, they came this way? Yes.
With their bikes, no less.
They used to bring their pushbikes up here to save half a penny.
Half an old penny.
So, you can either ride straight across or you pay ha'penny to come up here.
Whoa! And up here the way it all works is suddenly clear.
The 65-ton gondola is suspended from the track, like a railway carriage flying over the Tees.
Just the thing for the daily commute.
It's a big track up here.
We have four railway tracks and 60 wheels on the carriage.
Getting a bit open now.
We're in the middle We're in the middle.
Down below, a solitary reminder that for those crossing to work, their time was not their own.
You might notice, there's a clock face missing.
Yep.
When it was built, the local businesses paid for a clock face.
The owners of the companies on this side didn't want the men clock-watching so they wouldn't put into the kitty.
So, they didn't put a clock! They didn't! They didn't! Good call.
Yes.
It may look bizarre, but the bridge is an engineering triumph.
No wonder there was such a fuss when it opened in 1911.
What didn't rate highly was health and safety.
Watch closely.
For this man, the big day out was going to end in disaster.
The first person to fall off the bridge.
Happily, he survived.
A bit soggy but he learnt his lesson.
With this ingenious crossing of the Tees to inspire them, local bridge builders looked further afield.
Teesside company Dorman Long not only built the magnificent Tyne Bridge, but they also constructed its big brother in Sydney, Australia.
It's an engineering link that spans over 10,000 miles, connecting New South Wales to the northeast coast of England.
Now that's what I call a bridge.
Heading south, 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.
He'd have got on well with the Venerable Bede.
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 workforce.
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 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.
Sheila Davies is one of the fortunate few.
How long have you lived here, Sheila? Three years.
What attracted you? Oh, hold on! I think I can see what attracted you.
After you.
I came on a whim and I looked and I couldn't afford it, and I thought, "I'm gonna live here.
" It is a wee bit special.
It is.
I fell in love instantly.
You've got a little slice of heaven here.
It is Sheila's Shangri-La.
What's up above? There is a lovely view up there for you.
360 degrees.
Can I? You certainly can.
Fantastic.
You're not going to join me? No.
I won't bother this time.
I'll go on alone.
I wasn't expecting this.
It's like getting up on the crow's nest.
No wonder Sheila let let me go alone.
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 lies the tiny fishing port of Staithes, and 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.
And 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 out there and that can bring in some furious weather 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.
Those that tried it learned that the reward for such a lack of respect for the Sabbath was a bowl of rotting fish heads to wear for a hat.
We're approaching the halfway point of our journey, Whitby.
Our friend Bede knew the Abbey here well.
He describes it as being "in the bay of the beacon".
The remains of a Roman signal station bear out his description.
But the geological history of this place goes back much further.
180 million years.
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.
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 this 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 bit 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 are the collapsed roofs of the old Victorian jet works.
There'd have a been a big hole in the cliff here where they quarried in to find the jet.
You've got pillars either side and a collapse in the middle.
That's right.
Quite a major undertaking, and unique to this part of the coastline.
What is jet? It's monkey puzzle driftwood.
Lumps of monkey puzzle tree floated out to sea and sank to the bottom of the ocean and eventually come back as jet.
Now there are only a few monkey puzzle trees in the area.
They're native to Chile and 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 can help us find the jet? We might find some nice, hard, black material, but we're more likely to find a hole where somebody's already found some.
Like this one? Yeah, here we go.
Here we have a hole in the cliff, and if we look in the bottom of it, we've got some wonderful black jet.
There is, yes, there's a layer of it.
If you imagine a bit of driftwood, that sinks to the seabed and becomes a fossil.
So when someone finds some 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 1cm thick, so it's not the biggest layer of material in the world.
It's like a thin plank.
Yes, a thin plank that's been squashed.
You can still see the pattern of the wood on top.
Yes, you can see the grain.
That is the side of a fossil sea shell.
I think it's an oyster.
So 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 stretch of coastline, because of the way rocks lie - they look horizontal, but they're dipping ever so slightly.
If you go too far south, they're way beneath us and too far north, they're up in the air - they're gone, they've been eroded.
It's a million-in-one chance that we find jet in Whitby, but we do and there's a long history in Whitby 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 round here any more.
The fact is that alongside the local jet, there's a certain amount that's imported from abroad, from places like the Ukraine.
And as anyone from 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 is just amazing.
How would I know that it's made out of local, good quality Whitby jet and not a cheap import? Cos 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.
But you can also get poor quality jet round Whitby.
If you mark it on a piece of paper, that's almost black.
It's softer, almost like charcoal.
Yeah - that's probably sea coal, that.
What about the Ukrainian? How good is it? Is it as good as Whitby jet? It isn't, really, no.
Again, that's going to be similar to the very poor quality jet.
You can make jewellery of it, but it will crack and craze over time.
So it is a 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.
But locals would tell you that Scarborough is a match even for Monte Carlo or the Bay of Naples.
Giorgio Alessi 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, when you go down to the harbour, you pick and choose what you want.
I get quite a wonderful halibut.
This is about one and a half, two kilo of halibut.
One of the ugliest fish ever, that is the monkfish.
They got teeth like sharks.
The best things you can find about Scarborough is the Englishness.
Is very different part of the world in here.
It's 12 o'clock, it's the mid of the sun, English people are very eccentric, they're sunbathing.
You never see that in Italy.
At this time, they're all indoors having lunch until the fierce of the sun is going away.
A lot of English people go to Italy because they say there are beautiful people in Italy.
Very good, that's why I'm here.
I'm the only one, no competition whatsoever! And look how good looking are the women in here! # Let there be you # Let there be me # Let there be oysters Under the sea People think it is the Bay of Naples, people think it is the Bay of Monte Carlo, Bloomin' heck, this is Scarborough - what do you think about that? Let there be love.
In 1993, one hotel in Scarborough hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
The Holbeck Hall Hotel was a victim of coastal erosion.
The coastline here is notoriously unstable.
For a full 40 miles, the cliffs are made up of soft and shifting clay.
The stretch most at risk is eight miles down the coast from Scarborough - Filey Bay.
Round here, it seems there's nothing the sea won't swallow.
Mark Horton sizes up new technology to predict erosion before it happens.
If the beach at Filey seems broad and beautiful, that's because it's constantly replenished by sediment washed from the cliffs behind it.
The war between the sea and the land is as old as time.
Ever since King Canute, it's been clear that the sea will always have the last word.
That means that people round here could well lose their houses.
Have you tried to stop the erosion? I went over there and put this scaffolding down and knocked it all into the beach five years ago.
And I manhandled 50 to 100 tonnes of large stones into it.
And for five years, it's held the bank beautifully.
Then, just on one night, a spring tide lifted the whole lot out as though it were just ping pong balls.
The lot gone in one night.
So nature just takes its course eventually.
Of course.
The trouble is, nature is difficult to predict.
Erosion rates around Filey can vary between 25cm and 1.
5m each year.
With climate change and rising sea levels, there's an urgent need to develop more precise ways of recording our changing coastline.
It's all given rise to a new science and a new word - geomatics.
A method of accurately plotting even the most unstable landscape.
Geomatic specialists from Newcastle University have selected Filey Bay as the testbed for their new technology.
What an incredible road this is! It's incredibly active erosion along this bit of coast.
It is.
You can see how it's broken up over time.
There's a lot of erosion going on here, just like much of the east coast of England.
Terrain like this is particularly difficult to survey, but the laser scanner can capture up to 60,000 reference points a second.
From all these coordinates, they can build a three-dimensional model of anything, even me.
It scans the terrain and allows us to pick up a very detailed map of what's in front of us.
So when the laser hits something, it sends back a three-dimensional point? It sends back a signal, measures the distance and we can plot that.
Is it working now? It is.
It's scanning us, so we'd better stand quite still.
I can see the laser actually coming across the mirror.
All finished.
Do you want to go in the van and have a look? Fantastic.
You can rotate the view around and see it's not just a photograph, it's a full cloud of three-dimensional points.
I can see.
Isn't that great! If you hold the left mouse button There's the cameraman and Pauline.
There's over half a million measurement points there.
The quantity is stupendous.
You couldn't collect it any other way.
Let's go and survey a cliff, shall we? The beach at Filey is 10kms long.
In the past, it's taken months to survey the cliffs to measure erosion rates.
Now, the geomatics team are hoping to cut this to a matter of minutes.
OK, we're scanning the cliff now.
We've got a laser profiler which is selecting the measurements that we saw earlier with the static system.
If we're going along at 20-30mph, how can we capture so many points? The scanner's rotating at a very fast rate.
We're only aiming to get points every 10-20cm apart.
So we've got an awful lot of data to work with.
Millions and millions of points.
Millions and millions of points.
The laser scanner captures a three-dimensional image of the coastline in unprecedented detail.
The hope is these pinpoint surveys will be able to measure any movement in the terrain, to give early warning of catastrophic land slips.
But that will still leave the hardest of decisions.
Which homes to try and save and which to surrender to the sea.
South of Filey Bay, the cliffs rise ever higher above the waves.
We're heading to one of Britain's top spots to take a fresh look at a familiar coastal face - the seagull.
Having a snack in a seaside town is always tricky, cos you feel the seagulls have always got their eye on what you're eating.
And I know through bitter experience it's really easy to lose your lunch.
And it's not just at the seaside.
However far inland you go, there seem to be seagulls.
Mostly, they're herring gulls, always happy to leave the coast in search of easy pickings.
In my book, they're scavengers and give seagulls a bad name.
I'm on the trail of a real sea bird - the kittiwake.
They spend half their year living hundreds of miles out at sea.
It's only the breeding season that brings kittiwakes briefly back to land.
At Bempton Cliffs, I'm with RSPB expert Trevor Charlton, to find out what makes these gulls a breed apart.
Quite often, you'll see in bird books that the way to tell them apart is just that black wingtip.
It looks as though the wing has been dipped in ink.
It's a lovely description and the one I always remember.
The bill is very yellow-green, it doesn't have that orangey-red spot that you'll see on a great black-backed gull or a herring gull.
If you want to see them, you have to come right on to the coastline.
You have.
After the breeding season, it'll move out into the open sea, North Sea, North Atlantic.
It might travel 2,000 to 3,000 miles during the course of the winter time.
The kittiwakes are absolutely jam-packed onto every single spare nook and cranny on that rock face.
For them, this is the perfect spot.
There's the open sea and any predator's gonna think twice before raiding those nests on that sheer cliff.
Life on the edge is precarious though.
To see how kittiwakes survive between land and sea, you need a bird's-eye view.
How close are we gonna get? We're going to get really close, but safe at the same time.
Oh, my word! Fantastic! 100,000 nesting kittiwakes.
What a sight! Most other birds nesting here just lay their eggs on the bare rock, but once ashore, these kittiwakes are real homebuilders.
They're a bit unusual with their nests, cos most seabirds just pick a ledge and lay an egg, but the kittiwake nest is quite substantial? It is.
They will attach a nest to even the narrowest of ledges, only two or three inches, and they'll put down a base, a platform of mud and grasses that they'll take from the cliff top, and just build on that.
And yet the number of chicks on the nests has been decreasing.
Numbers here have halved since 1990.
Kittiwakes are in danger.
Since 1980, the average temperature of the North Sea has risen by one degree Celsius.
The fish on which the kittiwakes depend are in decline.
And with their food supply threatened, there are signs that these most coastal of sea-birds may be on the move.
Like the first arrivals in a column of refugees, kittiwakes have begun to nest on the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle.
These narrow ledges seem as close as the birds can get to the craggy cliffs that were once home.
Jutting out into the North Sea, Flamborough Head has witnessed countless shipwrecks on its perilous rocks.
But there's reassurance to be found down the coast in Bridlington.
The harbour here is tightly packed with fishing boats and pleasure craft of all kinds.
And that means that one very special boat will always be on hand.
The blue and orange colours of the RNLI are as familiar as buckets and spades.
But running a high-tech rescue service doesn't come cheap.
As a nation of island-dwellers, we happily contribute more than ã100 million a year.
But the crews put their lives on the line for next to nothing.
SIREN BLARES The safety of seafarers on this coast has been the responsibility of volunteer crews for over 200 years.
Show me what you've got! Right.
Oh, yes! Over a long history, lifeboats have acquired not just distinctive colours but also a distinctive shape.
Bridlington crews have been involved with the design of their boats right from the start.
This was one of Bridlington's first lifeboats, The Seagull, paid for by a local clergyman in 1871.
The design was based on the heavy wooden fishing boats so familiar to its volunteer crew.
In stormy seas, the constant fear was of capsizing.
Once turned over, these unwieldy boats were very difficult to right.
To find out how hard it is to get an old-fashioned boat upright, we're going to capsize one.
It's about a quarter of the size of the original Bridlington lifeboat, which should give me a fighting chance.
We could have more modern gear, but what's on my mind is a problem that's 200 years old.
How will I manage to get that rowing boat upright? If my life depended on this, I'd be rubbish! I'd have drowned already! I'm going in now.
I shouldn't even be swimming - I've got a verucca, you know! I hate it already! Now to find out what it's like beneath a capsized boat.
I'm making for the air pocket underneath.
Here we are, in La-La Land.
I can tell you this is already an unpleasant experience.
I'm wearing every conceivable bit of life-preserving gear and I can still feel the cold, real bone-chilling cold, so the thought of being in these circumstances just wearing regular clothes doesn't bear thinking about.
Andrew Ashton is an expert in lifeboat design.
My God! Neil, you're gonna have to climb up and grab hold of the keel.
I love experts(!) OK, let's try that.
And you're gonna have to be quick, because your life depends on it.
HE LAUGHS In the end, it's down to a scrabble of fingernails and a bit of luck.
You're gonna have to climb in now and bail it out.
Right.
Righting a boat isn't easy, even in ideal conditions.
For the volunteer crews, it could mean life or death.
It's something that people like Andrew have been wrestling with since the RNLI was founded.
If you had an ordinary boat, if water were allowed to get into the hull, if the integrity of the hull was broken, and it lost buoyancy I'll be weather.
I'll be a perfect storm.
As we can see, the boat will sink.
Very rapidly.
Here we have a state-of-the-art lifeboat.
And all done with masking tape and bubble-wrap.
In the same conditions, because we can maintain buoyancy, Oh, not half.
.
.
the boat will float.
Fair enough.
That bubble-wrap gives Andrew's self-righting boat an airtight compartment at each end.
Even swamped with water, it still floats.
That's why lifeboats are designed with a large watertight wheelhouse, weather-tight windows, very secure doors.
If this were to be even inverted by a wave, capsized by a huge wave, she'll come up again.
So that's how the traditional self-righting lifeboat got its classic shape, with the distinctive sealed pod at either end for buoyancy.
In recent years, the principle has developed even further so that the entire vessel is now tightly sealed.
And the Tamar is the latest design.
It's a 30 tonne lifeboat that thinks it's a space capsule.
Even tested to the extreme, the Tamar quickly finds its sea-legs.
It self-rights faster than you can say bubble-wrap.
The Bridlington crew hope to get their own Tamar one day.
But there's one thing the designers can't build into any new vessel - the emotional bond between the men and their boat.
It's stronger with every rescue.
Everybody likes their own boats.
We have relief boats from time to time, but they're not your own.
This looks all very well on a fine day like this, but in heavy weather at night, this is all you've got, isn't it? That's right.
This is all that's between you and oblivion.
That's right.
Very, very strong little craft, though.
Sometimes the beauty of the craft is they are small.
They're very nimble, easy to get into awkward places.
Beyond Bridlington now and the sea still seems to have an appetite.
The cliff tops are just for starters.
There'll be caravans for the main course.
But we're heading for the illuminating story of a landlocked lighthouse in Withernsea.
You could never accuse Yorkshire folk of being reckless.
Caution could be their middle name.
But, even so, the position of Withernsea lighthouse comes as a surprise.
It's tucked away in the middle of the town.
With the seas ever-advancing, the Victorians who built it wanted to be safe, not sorry.
And who's to say they were wrong? Especially when you see what's happening down the coast.
But down here, the appetite of the sea is more than matched by our hunger to exploit what lies beneath it.
Britain has been transformed by a revolution that started on the coast at Easington.
A sandy beach and North Sea air.
It's a great place for a walk - as long as you don't mind a view of the gasworks.
But we should cherish the tangled pipes of Easington, because it's here that Britain first fell in love with North Sea gas.
1967 was the summer of free love - and free gas! Come on, baby, light my fire North Sea gas had been discovered two years before in 1965.
Giant rigs had sprung up off the east coast and from Easington, undersea pipes ran out to bring the new fuel back to shore.
# Come on, baby, light my fire Come on, baby, light my fire Michael Welton worked here when Britain was turned on by the gasmen.
It's the birth of a big industry, so what did it mean for Easington, and what does it mean for you? Quite a bit.
This area was basically all agriculture, really.
When it came ashore When it first mentioned There's a mention here - quite appropriate, actually, funnily enough, April 1, April Fools' Day.
"A Gas Station for Easington?" That was the first mention.
What was it like working offshore? It was good, pioneering days.
I was here when they first brought the gas ashore.
The pipeline - they just dug it up, and then they had two bulldozers just dragging the thing ashore.
When the first platform was brought to this oilfield, it came from the Gulf of Mexico, and it had mosquito nets, which isn't really needed in the North Sea! Not really! They brought out a record about one trillion cubic feet of gas.
Yeah.
By the North Sea Gas Folk Trio.
Track one, Black, Black Gold and track two, North Sea Gas.
# .
.
and the riches from the sea From the fish, the oil and the gas The folksy sound seemed to capture the pioneering spirit of the times.
An army of troubleshooting engineers set out to visit 30 million homes.
Their mission? To convert the entire nation to this new energy.
NEWSREADER: "Nerve centre of the operation was the command vehicle, "specially fitted with UHF radio equipment "to enable immediate communication with all conversion teams and troubleshooters.
" This natural gas was sold as "clean" and "pure".
Previously every built-up area had its own gasworks, producing something called "town gas".
This foul-smelling concoction had brought heat and light to Britain since Victorian times.
It was produced by burning coal to release coal gas, leaving coke.
A less desirable by-product was the pollution in every city.
Open University chemist Mike Bullivant is cooking up some crushed coal to show me how the nation managed before we tapped into North Sea gas.
I'm heating some coal to make some coal gas.
So literally just the act of heating that up produces gas? Yeah.
Coal is not just carbon.
It's a really complex chemical structure.
By heating it, you break that chemical structure down.
Coal gas has got 35% methane in it, whereas natural gas is almost completely methane.
It's 95%, 98% methane.
A little bit of hydrogen in it as well.
So is it cleaner fuel? A much cleaner fuel, yeah.
Mike, what d'you reckon? Let's light it.
Let's see if we've got some coal gas.
Here we go.
Certainly smells like we have.
Hooray! There it is.
Fantastic! Coal gas.
We did it.
We did it - we made coal gas.
Filthy fuel! Was it a fairly simple transition? Was it fairly easy to swap over from using coal gas to starting to use natural gas in the '60s? No, there were many complications.
Because it's a more efficient fuel, it burns differently, so all the burner nozzles on domestic ovens and cookers had to be changed.
It was a fantastic operation.
Every burner on every cooker in the country had to be converted to the new wonder fuel.
34 million appliances! But not everyone loved it.
When you turn it very low, it just goes out.
It's either on, boiling quite hard, or out.
Bit of a shambles at first! Cos the boiler tended to explode when it came on! I think it's hotter than the gas we were using before, the town gas, so I'm just burning everything.
The funny thing is, it was never meant to last.
In the long-lost summer of love, no-one expected our flirtation with gas to go beyond 12 years.
That, it was thought, was when the North Sea reserves would run dry.
But 40 years on, the flame IS finally about to die for Britain's North Sea gas.
By 2020, we'll be buying almost all our gas from abroad.
Spurn Head, the southernmost point of the Venerable Bede's kingdom.
It looks, at first, like a long, tapering tail, as if the story of this coast has dribbled away to nothing.
Then you realise it's a finger, beckoning visitors into the broad mouth of the mighty River Humber.
Three and a half miles of shingle, much of it washed down here from the coast we've been following.
So, just as we near journey's end, there's a reminder of our beginnings.
We started on the Tyne at Jarrow, cradle of Bede's religious faith.
In Saltburn, we found an entire town that wouldn't exist but for one man's hopes and dreams.
In Bridlington, we discovered how the lifeboatmen of the RNLI still risk their own lives simply for the sake of others.
So there you are - faith, hope and a charity! There's a lot that Bede might not recognise nowadays, but he'd certainly appreciate these on his coast.
And there's one final legacy that he'd surely be proud of.
More than 1,000 years after Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 18th-century England was a much less godly place.
The moral life of the nation had a stain upon it.
And it stank with the corruption of slavery.
One man from Bede's kingdom set out to change all that - a native of Kingston-upon-Hull, William Wilberforce.
As a young man, Wilberforce showed little promise, but he grew up to become MP for his home town, a devout Christian and Britain's greatest-ever social reformer.
The slave trade in his day was big business.
Up to 50,000 Africans a year were shipped across the Atlantic for cash.
Wilberforce believed that every human being is made in the image of God.
He led a great movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.
It took him 30 years of perseverance but, finally, he succeeded.
And his epitaph is interesting.
"No Englishman has ever done more to evoke the conscience of the British people and to elevate and ennoble British life.
" I like that.
Not English, but British people and British life.
At last, just 1,000 years on from the Venerable Bede, it was finally dawning that all the people of these islands might have more in common than they thought.
And that's a fine sentiment.
For Bede, this was where he defined the North/South divide - the Humber.
In the 8th century, this was the Watford Gap.
How do you get to Scotland from here? That way maybe?
This is a journey between two great rivers, starting here where the Tyne flows into the North Sea and finishing up 170 miles south at the River Humber.
I'm joined by some familiar faces.
Alice Roberts takes a trip back to the Summer of Love to discover how this coast turned us on to high speed gas.
Miranda Krestovnikoff hunts out the only seagull that's truly worthy of the name.
Mark Horton discovers a 21st century weapon in the age-old battle against coastal erosion.
And a new face.
Dick Strawbridge uses his special brand of engineering know-how to get on top of one of this coastline's strangest structures.
Is it my imagination, or are these getting steeper? They're definitely getting steeper.
I'm taking the plunge to get to grips with the secrets of lifeboat design.
Show me what you've got.
Right! ENGINE ROARS Oh, yes! Welcome to England's northeast coast.
Our journey takes us from the mouth of the Tyne, near Newcastle, to Hull, 170 miles south, on the River Humber.
This is a coast known both for hard work and hard times, but from the earliest times, there's also been a strong religious tradition.
And there's one man from these parts who's the perfect guide for a worldly pilgrim like me.
That man was Bede, the Venerable Bede.
He was a monk but he was also an all-round genius - scientist, historian, geographer.
You name it! He was born, he lived and he died close by the Tyne, but his work and his word are spread right around the world.
1,300 years ago, Bede wrote the first history of England.
This was the time some call the Dark Ages, after the Romans had abandoned Britain.
Yet the country depicted by Bede is far from desolate.
He describes an island set in a boundless ocean.
It's rich in timber, grain, cattle and even vineyards.
It has precious veins of silver, iron and coal and abundant wildlife.
Bede's genius was all the greater because, although his history covered the whole of England, his own world, like our journey, was bounded by the Tyne and the Humber.
In the 8th century, this coastline was an information superhighway, teeming with new ideas, all generated by its religious communities.
It was Bede who pulled them together at his monastery in Jarrow.
Just south was a twin monastic community, Monkwearmouth, while to the north was Holy Island, home to the monks of Lindisfarne.
What linked them all was the sea.
This glamorous little craft is a coracle.
It's your basic 7th and 8th century means of transport for a fellow like Bede.
But you can see why he might not have been inclined to stray too far from the shore.
In the 8th century, this landscape was totally different.
Forget all this industry.
In Bede's day, it was a hotbed of Christianity.
Bede's monastery would not only have overlooked the river mouth, but also have had a clear view out to the open sea.
It's only in the past hundred years that land around the river mouth has been reclaimed for industry.
Today Bede's sea view is lost behind Nissan's enormous car factory.
But this was no backwater.
The Jarrow monastery wasn't just a haven for quiet contemplation, it was an intellectual powerhouse.
This is where Bede took stock of the rag-tag mix of settlers and invaders who'd washed up in Britain after the Romans, and gave them a single identity, the English.
But how did Bede know so much about the world beyond his monastery? The coast is the great highway, isn't it? If you try and travel round in the 7th or 8th centuries, what have you got? You've got what's left of the Roman roads, in whatever state they are, but along the coast, you have the sea.
People know how to use it, and it is not surprising that there are a lot of monasteries around the coast.
What amazes me about him is he doesn't really go anywhere and yet he still manages to have a global reach.
He didn't get out much, did he? Bede was a monk, and Bede believed that a monk's job was to stay in his monastery.
But the world came to him.
He had correspondence and had people around for him who were sending him information from elsewhere.
I'm heading south as far as the Humber.
To what extent was that the end of Bede's world? We still have the word Northumbria, don't we, in England now, and the Northumbrians.
We've lost the word Southumbria, but Bede talks about the Southumbrians.
The Humber is the south end of his own kingdom and you're going to go right down to the end of Bede's kingdom, the Northumbrian kingdom.
Heading south, there seems little that Bede would recognise.
It's hard to see past the industrial revolution's own Holy Trinity.
Iron, steel and coal.
During 100 years of mining, almost 300 million tonnes of waste were dumped straight into the North Sea.
But little by little, a miracle is taking place, as the sea scrubs away the old scars of King Coal.
Nature's not alone in this coastal spring-clean.
Also lending a hand is Dennis Rooney, once a miner, now working for the National Trust.
It's a bright, lovely day.
You can see for miles.
The sun is shining and it could be a lovely day like this down on the pit and you wouldn't know about it.
I remember my father saying, "I would never have you working at the colliery.
" I said the same about my sons.
Everybody who worked at the colliery would have said that.
It was black, dank, dirty, dusty, it was noisy.
It was everything you can imagine hell would be if there is such a place.
As soon as the mines closed, I said, "Well, where's the jobs?" I'd heard the National Trust were coming down here to acquire the coast and we thought, "They must be mad.
" That's when the collieries were still working.
They were still putting colliery waste on to the beaches, the waters were still black.
They advertised for a warden in '91, when I'd been made redundant from the colliery.
Dennis was very reluctant to apply for the job.
He thought that he wouldn't stand an earthly chance of getting it.
I said, "Go on, please have a go.
" It's been the best job I've ever done in my life.
It's been the best 16 years, because we've always been outdoor people.
It's really been a revelation.
This coastline is fantastic.
It is coming back very quickly, much quicker than we all thought.
I suppose it's fairly ironic, really.
For 20 years, I suppose, I helped to put this mess on the beach.
The National Trust have now got me tidying it up.
The port of Hartlepool is also cleaning up its act.
The vast docks were once home to a ship-building industry.
Now they've been turned into a marina.
And pride of place goes to a vessel that first sailed into Hartlepool more than a century ago.
HMS Trincomalee is Britain's oldest warship still afloat.
Her connection with the Age of Empire is even stronger than you'd expect.
Trincomalee, this great British warship, wasn't actually built in Britain.
She was fashioned in Bombay from trusty Indian teak.
The Napoleonic Wars had stripped Britain of its native oaks and it takes 2,000 mature trees to build one of these babies.
Indian-built from stem to stern, Trincomalee gave 40 years of service to the British Empire, criss-crossing the world's oceans to fly the flag.
By any measure, the River Tees is a great waterway, but that poses particular problems for people living around it.
Transporting things up or downstream is straightforward.
But getting across a river like this isn't so easy.
No wonder that Teesside has developed a world-wide reputation for building bridges.
Middlesbrough has the strangest design of all, across the Tees itself, the Transporter Bridge.
It's so quirky that it's even acquired its own urban myth, that it said "Auf Wiedersehen" to Teesside, and was rebuilt across the Grand Canyon by a bunch of unlikely lads.
All fantasy.
The Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge is still at home and impossible to miss.
Engineer Dick Strawbridge checks out the nuts and bolts of its unique design.
I've been into my engineering for over 30 years.
20 of them, I was in the army.
I've seen lots of clever ways of crossing obstacles.
I've never seen a bridge that looks anything like that.
What is it all about? Why does this bridge looks so odd and why is it so big? It's over 200 feet high.
Something half that size would have saved an awful lot of work.
An awful lot of vessels that were very tall came up this river.
That tall? Yes, that tall.
One tall ship nearly took the top of its mast off at the bottom of the bridge.
That is absolutely That tall? Yes.
Bigger ships need a bigger bridge.
You have to keep the river so the ships can go up and down the tall ships, and they are significantly taller? Very tall ships.
Why did they have the population on one side, industry the other side? Lots of people in Middlesbrough want to work at Bell Brothers.
How many people were using it? Are we talking a lot of people? Every time a shift went across to Bell Brothers from Middlesbrough, 887 people were going across the bridge.
Every shift? Every shift.
Well, I never! It might look like a giant Meccano set with a few bits missing but that is to give it head room for passing ships.
As for the people, the Transporter Bridge does exactly what it says on the tin.
It's transported men and machines across this stretch since 1911.
Not in an ordinary bridge sort of way.
It is a bridge but you ride on it just like a ferry.
All this amazing structure exists just to move a small platform, the gondola, backwards and forwards.
Incredible.
It's powered from the winding house by huge motors which haven't changed much since they were built.
Real engineering.
It's Alan Murray's job to keep on top of it, and that means climbing over 200 steps.
Is it my imagination, or are these getting steeper? 'Incredibly, many of the canny folk of Teesside actually prefer taking the stairs.
' If you think this is bad, back in the 1920s, '30s, they used to come to work this way.
Instead of using the gondola, they came this way? Yes.
With their bikes, no less.
They used to bring their pushbikes up here to save half a penny.
Half an old penny.
So, you can either ride straight across or you pay ha'penny to come up here.
Whoa! And up here the way it all works is suddenly clear.
The 65-ton gondola is suspended from the track, like a railway carriage flying over the Tees.
Just the thing for the daily commute.
It's a big track up here.
We have four railway tracks and 60 wheels on the carriage.
Getting a bit open now.
We're in the middle We're in the middle.
Down below, a solitary reminder that for those crossing to work, their time was not their own.
You might notice, there's a clock face missing.
Yep.
When it was built, the local businesses paid for a clock face.
The owners of the companies on this side didn't want the men clock-watching so they wouldn't put into the kitty.
So, they didn't put a clock! They didn't! They didn't! Good call.
Yes.
It may look bizarre, but the bridge is an engineering triumph.
No wonder there was such a fuss when it opened in 1911.
What didn't rate highly was health and safety.
Watch closely.
For this man, the big day out was going to end in disaster.
The first person to fall off the bridge.
Happily, he survived.
A bit soggy but he learnt his lesson.
With this ingenious crossing of the Tees to inspire them, local bridge builders looked further afield.
Teesside company Dorman Long not only built the magnificent Tyne Bridge, but they also constructed its big brother in Sydney, Australia.
It's an engineering link that spans over 10,000 miles, connecting New South Wales to the northeast coast of England.
Now that's what I call a bridge.
Heading south, 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.
He'd have got on well with the Venerable Bede.
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 workforce.
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 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.
Sheila Davies is one of the fortunate few.
How long have you lived here, Sheila? Three years.
What attracted you? Oh, hold on! I think I can see what attracted you.
After you.
I came on a whim and I looked and I couldn't afford it, and I thought, "I'm gonna live here.
" It is a wee bit special.
It is.
I fell in love instantly.
You've got a little slice of heaven here.
It is Sheila's Shangri-La.
What's up above? There is a lovely view up there for you.
360 degrees.
Can I? You certainly can.
Fantastic.
You're not going to join me? No.
I won't bother this time.
I'll go on alone.
I wasn't expecting this.
It's like getting up on the crow's nest.
No wonder Sheila let let me go alone.
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 lies the tiny fishing port of Staithes, and 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.
And 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 out there and that can bring in some furious weather 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.
Those that tried it learned that the reward for such a lack of respect for the Sabbath was a bowl of rotting fish heads to wear for a hat.
We're approaching the halfway point of our journey, Whitby.
Our friend Bede knew the Abbey here well.
He describes it as being "in the bay of the beacon".
The remains of a Roman signal station bear out his description.
But the geological history of this place goes back much further.
180 million years.
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.
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 this 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 bit 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 are the collapsed roofs of the old Victorian jet works.
There'd have a been a big hole in the cliff here where they quarried in to find the jet.
You've got pillars either side and a collapse in the middle.
That's right.
Quite a major undertaking, and unique to this part of the coastline.
What is jet? It's monkey puzzle driftwood.
Lumps of monkey puzzle tree floated out to sea and sank to the bottom of the ocean and eventually come back as jet.
Now there are only a few monkey puzzle trees in the area.
They're native to Chile and 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 can help us find the jet? We might find some nice, hard, black material, but we're more likely to find a hole where somebody's already found some.
Like this one? Yeah, here we go.
Here we have a hole in the cliff, and if we look in the bottom of it, we've got some wonderful black jet.
There is, yes, there's a layer of it.
If you imagine a bit of driftwood, that sinks to the seabed and becomes a fossil.
So when someone finds some 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 1cm thick, so it's not the biggest layer of material in the world.
It's like a thin plank.
Yes, a thin plank that's been squashed.
You can still see the pattern of the wood on top.
Yes, you can see the grain.
That is the side of a fossil sea shell.
I think it's an oyster.
So 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 stretch of coastline, because of the way rocks lie - they look horizontal, but they're dipping ever so slightly.
If you go too far south, they're way beneath us and too far north, they're up in the air - they're gone, they've been eroded.
It's a million-in-one chance that we find jet in Whitby, but we do and there's a long history in Whitby 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 round here any more.
The fact is that alongside the local jet, there's a certain amount that's imported from abroad, from places like the Ukraine.
And as anyone from 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 is just amazing.
How would I know that it's made out of local, good quality Whitby jet and not a cheap import? Cos 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.
But you can also get poor quality jet round Whitby.
If you mark it on a piece of paper, that's almost black.
It's softer, almost like charcoal.
Yeah - that's probably sea coal, that.
What about the Ukrainian? How good is it? Is it as good as Whitby jet? It isn't, really, no.
Again, that's going to be similar to the very poor quality jet.
You can make jewellery of it, but it will crack and craze over time.
So it is a 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.
But locals would tell you that Scarborough is a match even for Monte Carlo or the Bay of Naples.
Giorgio Alessi 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, when you go down to the harbour, you pick and choose what you want.
I get quite a wonderful halibut.
This is about one and a half, two kilo of halibut.
One of the ugliest fish ever, that is the monkfish.
They got teeth like sharks.
The best things you can find about Scarborough is the Englishness.
Is very different part of the world in here.
It's 12 o'clock, it's the mid of the sun, English people are very eccentric, they're sunbathing.
You never see that in Italy.
At this time, they're all indoors having lunch until the fierce of the sun is going away.
A lot of English people go to Italy because they say there are beautiful people in Italy.
Very good, that's why I'm here.
I'm the only one, no competition whatsoever! And look how good looking are the women in here! # Let there be you # Let there be me # Let there be oysters Under the sea People think it is the Bay of Naples, people think it is the Bay of Monte Carlo, Bloomin' heck, this is Scarborough - what do you think about that? Let there be love.
In 1993, one hotel in Scarborough hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
The Holbeck Hall Hotel was a victim of coastal erosion.
The coastline here is notoriously unstable.
For a full 40 miles, the cliffs are made up of soft and shifting clay.
The stretch most at risk is eight miles down the coast from Scarborough - Filey Bay.
Round here, it seems there's nothing the sea won't swallow.
Mark Horton sizes up new technology to predict erosion before it happens.
If the beach at Filey seems broad and beautiful, that's because it's constantly replenished by sediment washed from the cliffs behind it.
The war between the sea and the land is as old as time.
Ever since King Canute, it's been clear that the sea will always have the last word.
That means that people round here could well lose their houses.
Have you tried to stop the erosion? I went over there and put this scaffolding down and knocked it all into the beach five years ago.
And I manhandled 50 to 100 tonnes of large stones into it.
And for five years, it's held the bank beautifully.
Then, just on one night, a spring tide lifted the whole lot out as though it were just ping pong balls.
The lot gone in one night.
So nature just takes its course eventually.
Of course.
The trouble is, nature is difficult to predict.
Erosion rates around Filey can vary between 25cm and 1.
5m each year.
With climate change and rising sea levels, there's an urgent need to develop more precise ways of recording our changing coastline.
It's all given rise to a new science and a new word - geomatics.
A method of accurately plotting even the most unstable landscape.
Geomatic specialists from Newcastle University have selected Filey Bay as the testbed for their new technology.
What an incredible road this is! It's incredibly active erosion along this bit of coast.
It is.
You can see how it's broken up over time.
There's a lot of erosion going on here, just like much of the east coast of England.
Terrain like this is particularly difficult to survey, but the laser scanner can capture up to 60,000 reference points a second.
From all these coordinates, they can build a three-dimensional model of anything, even me.
It scans the terrain and allows us to pick up a very detailed map of what's in front of us.
So when the laser hits something, it sends back a three-dimensional point? It sends back a signal, measures the distance and we can plot that.
Is it working now? It is.
It's scanning us, so we'd better stand quite still.
I can see the laser actually coming across the mirror.
All finished.
Do you want to go in the van and have a look? Fantastic.
You can rotate the view around and see it's not just a photograph, it's a full cloud of three-dimensional points.
I can see.
Isn't that great! If you hold the left mouse button There's the cameraman and Pauline.
There's over half a million measurement points there.
The quantity is stupendous.
You couldn't collect it any other way.
Let's go and survey a cliff, shall we? The beach at Filey is 10kms long.
In the past, it's taken months to survey the cliffs to measure erosion rates.
Now, the geomatics team are hoping to cut this to a matter of minutes.
OK, we're scanning the cliff now.
We've got a laser profiler which is selecting the measurements that we saw earlier with the static system.
If we're going along at 20-30mph, how can we capture so many points? The scanner's rotating at a very fast rate.
We're only aiming to get points every 10-20cm apart.
So we've got an awful lot of data to work with.
Millions and millions of points.
Millions and millions of points.
The laser scanner captures a three-dimensional image of the coastline in unprecedented detail.
The hope is these pinpoint surveys will be able to measure any movement in the terrain, to give early warning of catastrophic land slips.
But that will still leave the hardest of decisions.
Which homes to try and save and which to surrender to the sea.
South of Filey Bay, the cliffs rise ever higher above the waves.
We're heading to one of Britain's top spots to take a fresh look at a familiar coastal face - the seagull.
Having a snack in a seaside town is always tricky, cos you feel the seagulls have always got their eye on what you're eating.
And I know through bitter experience it's really easy to lose your lunch.
And it's not just at the seaside.
However far inland you go, there seem to be seagulls.
Mostly, they're herring gulls, always happy to leave the coast in search of easy pickings.
In my book, they're scavengers and give seagulls a bad name.
I'm on the trail of a real sea bird - the kittiwake.
They spend half their year living hundreds of miles out at sea.
It's only the breeding season that brings kittiwakes briefly back to land.
At Bempton Cliffs, I'm with RSPB expert Trevor Charlton, to find out what makes these gulls a breed apart.
Quite often, you'll see in bird books that the way to tell them apart is just that black wingtip.
It looks as though the wing has been dipped in ink.
It's a lovely description and the one I always remember.
The bill is very yellow-green, it doesn't have that orangey-red spot that you'll see on a great black-backed gull or a herring gull.
If you want to see them, you have to come right on to the coastline.
You have.
After the breeding season, it'll move out into the open sea, North Sea, North Atlantic.
It might travel 2,000 to 3,000 miles during the course of the winter time.
The kittiwakes are absolutely jam-packed onto every single spare nook and cranny on that rock face.
For them, this is the perfect spot.
There's the open sea and any predator's gonna think twice before raiding those nests on that sheer cliff.
Life on the edge is precarious though.
To see how kittiwakes survive between land and sea, you need a bird's-eye view.
How close are we gonna get? We're going to get really close, but safe at the same time.
Oh, my word! Fantastic! 100,000 nesting kittiwakes.
What a sight! Most other birds nesting here just lay their eggs on the bare rock, but once ashore, these kittiwakes are real homebuilders.
They're a bit unusual with their nests, cos most seabirds just pick a ledge and lay an egg, but the kittiwake nest is quite substantial? It is.
They will attach a nest to even the narrowest of ledges, only two or three inches, and they'll put down a base, a platform of mud and grasses that they'll take from the cliff top, and just build on that.
And yet the number of chicks on the nests has been decreasing.
Numbers here have halved since 1990.
Kittiwakes are in danger.
Since 1980, the average temperature of the North Sea has risen by one degree Celsius.
The fish on which the kittiwakes depend are in decline.
And with their food supply threatened, there are signs that these most coastal of sea-birds may be on the move.
Like the first arrivals in a column of refugees, kittiwakes have begun to nest on the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle.
These narrow ledges seem as close as the birds can get to the craggy cliffs that were once home.
Jutting out into the North Sea, Flamborough Head has witnessed countless shipwrecks on its perilous rocks.
But there's reassurance to be found down the coast in Bridlington.
The harbour here is tightly packed with fishing boats and pleasure craft of all kinds.
And that means that one very special boat will always be on hand.
The blue and orange colours of the RNLI are as familiar as buckets and spades.
But running a high-tech rescue service doesn't come cheap.
As a nation of island-dwellers, we happily contribute more than ã100 million a year.
But the crews put their lives on the line for next to nothing.
SIREN BLARES The safety of seafarers on this coast has been the responsibility of volunteer crews for over 200 years.
Show me what you've got! Right.
Oh, yes! Over a long history, lifeboats have acquired not just distinctive colours but also a distinctive shape.
Bridlington crews have been involved with the design of their boats right from the start.
This was one of Bridlington's first lifeboats, The Seagull, paid for by a local clergyman in 1871.
The design was based on the heavy wooden fishing boats so familiar to its volunteer crew.
In stormy seas, the constant fear was of capsizing.
Once turned over, these unwieldy boats were very difficult to right.
To find out how hard it is to get an old-fashioned boat upright, we're going to capsize one.
It's about a quarter of the size of the original Bridlington lifeboat, which should give me a fighting chance.
We could have more modern gear, but what's on my mind is a problem that's 200 years old.
How will I manage to get that rowing boat upright? If my life depended on this, I'd be rubbish! I'd have drowned already! I'm going in now.
I shouldn't even be swimming - I've got a verucca, you know! I hate it already! Now to find out what it's like beneath a capsized boat.
I'm making for the air pocket underneath.
Here we are, in La-La Land.
I can tell you this is already an unpleasant experience.
I'm wearing every conceivable bit of life-preserving gear and I can still feel the cold, real bone-chilling cold, so the thought of being in these circumstances just wearing regular clothes doesn't bear thinking about.
Andrew Ashton is an expert in lifeboat design.
My God! Neil, you're gonna have to climb up and grab hold of the keel.
I love experts(!) OK, let's try that.
And you're gonna have to be quick, because your life depends on it.
HE LAUGHS In the end, it's down to a scrabble of fingernails and a bit of luck.
You're gonna have to climb in now and bail it out.
Right.
Righting a boat isn't easy, even in ideal conditions.
For the volunteer crews, it could mean life or death.
It's something that people like Andrew have been wrestling with since the RNLI was founded.
If you had an ordinary boat, if water were allowed to get into the hull, if the integrity of the hull was broken, and it lost buoyancy I'll be weather.
I'll be a perfect storm.
As we can see, the boat will sink.
Very rapidly.
Here we have a state-of-the-art lifeboat.
And all done with masking tape and bubble-wrap.
In the same conditions, because we can maintain buoyancy, Oh, not half.
.
.
the boat will float.
Fair enough.
That bubble-wrap gives Andrew's self-righting boat an airtight compartment at each end.
Even swamped with water, it still floats.
That's why lifeboats are designed with a large watertight wheelhouse, weather-tight windows, very secure doors.
If this were to be even inverted by a wave, capsized by a huge wave, she'll come up again.
So that's how the traditional self-righting lifeboat got its classic shape, with the distinctive sealed pod at either end for buoyancy.
In recent years, the principle has developed even further so that the entire vessel is now tightly sealed.
And the Tamar is the latest design.
It's a 30 tonne lifeboat that thinks it's a space capsule.
Even tested to the extreme, the Tamar quickly finds its sea-legs.
It self-rights faster than you can say bubble-wrap.
The Bridlington crew hope to get their own Tamar one day.
But there's one thing the designers can't build into any new vessel - the emotional bond between the men and their boat.
It's stronger with every rescue.
Everybody likes their own boats.
We have relief boats from time to time, but they're not your own.
This looks all very well on a fine day like this, but in heavy weather at night, this is all you've got, isn't it? That's right.
This is all that's between you and oblivion.
That's right.
Very, very strong little craft, though.
Sometimes the beauty of the craft is they are small.
They're very nimble, easy to get into awkward places.
Beyond Bridlington now and the sea still seems to have an appetite.
The cliff tops are just for starters.
There'll be caravans for the main course.
But we're heading for the illuminating story of a landlocked lighthouse in Withernsea.
You could never accuse Yorkshire folk of being reckless.
Caution could be their middle name.
But, even so, the position of Withernsea lighthouse comes as a surprise.
It's tucked away in the middle of the town.
With the seas ever-advancing, the Victorians who built it wanted to be safe, not sorry.
And who's to say they were wrong? Especially when you see what's happening down the coast.
But down here, the appetite of the sea is more than matched by our hunger to exploit what lies beneath it.
Britain has been transformed by a revolution that started on the coast at Easington.
A sandy beach and North Sea air.
It's a great place for a walk - as long as you don't mind a view of the gasworks.
But we should cherish the tangled pipes of Easington, because it's here that Britain first fell in love with North Sea gas.
1967 was the summer of free love - and free gas! Come on, baby, light my fire North Sea gas had been discovered two years before in 1965.
Giant rigs had sprung up off the east coast and from Easington, undersea pipes ran out to bring the new fuel back to shore.
# Come on, baby, light my fire Come on, baby, light my fire Michael Welton worked here when Britain was turned on by the gasmen.
It's the birth of a big industry, so what did it mean for Easington, and what does it mean for you? Quite a bit.
This area was basically all agriculture, really.
When it came ashore When it first mentioned There's a mention here - quite appropriate, actually, funnily enough, April 1, April Fools' Day.
"A Gas Station for Easington?" That was the first mention.
What was it like working offshore? It was good, pioneering days.
I was here when they first brought the gas ashore.
The pipeline - they just dug it up, and then they had two bulldozers just dragging the thing ashore.
When the first platform was brought to this oilfield, it came from the Gulf of Mexico, and it had mosquito nets, which isn't really needed in the North Sea! Not really! They brought out a record about one trillion cubic feet of gas.
Yeah.
By the North Sea Gas Folk Trio.
Track one, Black, Black Gold and track two, North Sea Gas.
# .
.
and the riches from the sea From the fish, the oil and the gas The folksy sound seemed to capture the pioneering spirit of the times.
An army of troubleshooting engineers set out to visit 30 million homes.
Their mission? To convert the entire nation to this new energy.
NEWSREADER: "Nerve centre of the operation was the command vehicle, "specially fitted with UHF radio equipment "to enable immediate communication with all conversion teams and troubleshooters.
" This natural gas was sold as "clean" and "pure".
Previously every built-up area had its own gasworks, producing something called "town gas".
This foul-smelling concoction had brought heat and light to Britain since Victorian times.
It was produced by burning coal to release coal gas, leaving coke.
A less desirable by-product was the pollution in every city.
Open University chemist Mike Bullivant is cooking up some crushed coal to show me how the nation managed before we tapped into North Sea gas.
I'm heating some coal to make some coal gas.
So literally just the act of heating that up produces gas? Yeah.
Coal is not just carbon.
It's a really complex chemical structure.
By heating it, you break that chemical structure down.
Coal gas has got 35% methane in it, whereas natural gas is almost completely methane.
It's 95%, 98% methane.
A little bit of hydrogen in it as well.
So is it cleaner fuel? A much cleaner fuel, yeah.
Mike, what d'you reckon? Let's light it.
Let's see if we've got some coal gas.
Here we go.
Certainly smells like we have.
Hooray! There it is.
Fantastic! Coal gas.
We did it.
We did it - we made coal gas.
Filthy fuel! Was it a fairly simple transition? Was it fairly easy to swap over from using coal gas to starting to use natural gas in the '60s? No, there were many complications.
Because it's a more efficient fuel, it burns differently, so all the burner nozzles on domestic ovens and cookers had to be changed.
It was a fantastic operation.
Every burner on every cooker in the country had to be converted to the new wonder fuel.
34 million appliances! But not everyone loved it.
When you turn it very low, it just goes out.
It's either on, boiling quite hard, or out.
Bit of a shambles at first! Cos the boiler tended to explode when it came on! I think it's hotter than the gas we were using before, the town gas, so I'm just burning everything.
The funny thing is, it was never meant to last.
In the long-lost summer of love, no-one expected our flirtation with gas to go beyond 12 years.
That, it was thought, was when the North Sea reserves would run dry.
But 40 years on, the flame IS finally about to die for Britain's North Sea gas.
By 2020, we'll be buying almost all our gas from abroad.
Spurn Head, the southernmost point of the Venerable Bede's kingdom.
It looks, at first, like a long, tapering tail, as if the story of this coast has dribbled away to nothing.
Then you realise it's a finger, beckoning visitors into the broad mouth of the mighty River Humber.
Three and a half miles of shingle, much of it washed down here from the coast we've been following.
So, just as we near journey's end, there's a reminder of our beginnings.
We started on the Tyne at Jarrow, cradle of Bede's religious faith.
In Saltburn, we found an entire town that wouldn't exist but for one man's hopes and dreams.
In Bridlington, we discovered how the lifeboatmen of the RNLI still risk their own lives simply for the sake of others.
So there you are - faith, hope and a charity! There's a lot that Bede might not recognise nowadays, but he'd certainly appreciate these on his coast.
And there's one final legacy that he'd surely be proud of.
More than 1,000 years after Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 18th-century England was a much less godly place.
The moral life of the nation had a stain upon it.
And it stank with the corruption of slavery.
One man from Bede's kingdom set out to change all that - a native of Kingston-upon-Hull, William Wilberforce.
As a young man, Wilberforce showed little promise, but he grew up to become MP for his home town, a devout Christian and Britain's greatest-ever social reformer.
The slave trade in his day was big business.
Up to 50,000 Africans a year were shipped across the Atlantic for cash.
Wilberforce believed that every human being is made in the image of God.
He led a great movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.
It took him 30 years of perseverance but, finally, he succeeded.
And his epitaph is interesting.
"No Englishman has ever done more to evoke the conscience of the British people and to elevate and ennoble British life.
" I like that.
Not English, but British people and British life.
At last, just 1,000 years on from the Venerable Bede, it was finally dawning that all the people of these islands might have more in common than they thought.
And that's a fine sentiment.
For Bede, this was where he defined the North/South divide - the Humber.
In the 8th century, this was the Watford Gap.
How do you get to Scotland from here? That way maybe?