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Whitby is a seaside town, port and civil parish in North Yorkshire, England. It is on the Yorkshire Coast at the mouth of the River Esk and has a maritime, mineral and tourist economy.
From the Middle Ages, Whitby had significant Herring fleet and whaling fleets, and was where Captain Cook learned seamanship. He first explored the southern ocean in HMS Endeavour, built in Whitby.Hough 1994, p. 55
Alum was mined locally, and Whitby jet jewellery was fashionable during the 19th century.
Tourism started in Whitby during the Georgian period and developed with the arrival of the railway in 1839. The abbey ruin at the top of the East Cliff is the town's oldest and most prominent landmark. Other significant features include the swing bridge, which crosses the River Esk and the harbour sheltered by grade II listed east and west piers. There are statues of Captain Cook and William Scoresby, and a whalebone arch on the West Cliff. Whitby featured in literary works including Bram Stoker's novel Dracula.
Whitby is from York and from Middlesbrough.
A Whitby Abbey was founded at Streoneshalh in 657 AD by King Oswiu or Oswy of Northumbria, as an act of thanksgiving, after defeating Penda, the Paganism king of Mercia. At its foundation, the abbey was an Anglo-Saxon "double monastery" for men and women. Its first abbess, the royal princess Hild, was later venerated as a saint. The abbey became a centre of learning, and here Cædmon the cowherd was "miraculously" transformed into an inspired poet whose poetry is an example of Anglo-Saxon literature. The abbey became the leading royal nunnery of the kingdom of Deira, and the burial-place of its royal family. The Synod of Whitby, in 664, established the Roman date of Easter in Northumbria at the expense of the Celtic Church one.
The monastery was destroyed between 867 and 870 in a series of raids by from Denmark under their leaders Ingwar and Ubba. Its site remained desolate for more than 200 years until after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. After the Conquest, the area was granted to William de Percy who, in 1078 donated land to found a Benedictine monastery dedicated to St Peter and St Hilda. William de Percy's gift included land for the monastery, the town and port of Whitby and St Mary's Church and dependent chapels at Fylingdales, Hawsker, Sneaton, Ugglebarnby, Dunsley, and Aislaby, five mills including Ruswarp, Hackness with two mills and two churches.
When the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, Whitby was recorded being partially waste and a small settlement lying within the Langbaurgh Wapentake of Yorkshire. Further details reveal the state of Whitby's economic and agricultural decline (when compared with its pre-Conquest state under Earl Siward) which were due to the depredations of William the Conqueror's army during the Harrying of the North in 1069–70.
In about 1128 Henry I granted the abbey burgage in Whitby and permission to hold a fair at the feast of St Hilda on 25 August. A second fair was held close to St Hilda's winter feast at Martinmas. Market rights were granted to the abbey and descended with the liberty.
At the end of the 16th century Thomas Chaloner visited alum works in the Papal States, where he observed that the rock being processed was similar to that under his Guisborough estate. At that time alum was important for medicinal uses, in curing leather and for fixing dyed cloths and the Papal States and Spain maintained monopolies on its production and sale. Chaloner secretly brought workmen to develop the industry in Yorkshire, and alum was produced near Sandsend Ness from Whitby in the reign of James I. Once the industry was established, imports were banned and although the methods in its production were laborious, England became self-sufficient. Whitby grew significantly as a port as a result of the alum trade and by importing coal from the Durham coalfield to process it.
Whitby grew in size and wealth, extending its activities to include shipbuilding using local oak timber. In 1790–91 Whitby built 11,754 tons of shipping, making it the third largest shipbuilder in England, after London and Newcastle.
Taxes on imports entering the port raised money to improve and extend the town's twin piers, improving the harbour and permitting further increases in trade. In 1753 the first whaling ship set sail to Greenland and by 1795 Whitby had become a major whaling port. The most successful year was 1814 when eight ships caught 172 whales, and the whaler, the Resolution's catch produced 230 tons of oil. The carcases yielded 42 tons of whale bone used for 'stays' which were used in the corsetry trade until changes in fashion made them redundant. Blubber was boiled to produce oil for use in lamps in four oil houses on the harbourside. Oil was used for street lighting until the spread of gas lighting reduced demand and the Whitby Whale Oil and Gas Company changed into the Whitby Coal and Gas Company. As the market for whale products fell, catches became too small to be economic and by 1831 only one whaling ship, the Phoenix, remained. Whitby benefited from trade between the Newcastle coalfield and London, both by shipbuilding and supplying transport. In his youth the explorer James Cook learned his trade on colliers, shipping coal from the port. HMS Endeavour, the ship commanded by Cook on his voyage to Australia and New Zealand, was built in Whitby in 1764 by Tomas Fishburn as a coal carrier named Earl of Pembroke. She was bought by the Royal Navy 1768, refitted and renamed.Whitby developed as a spa town in Georgian era when three chalybeate springs were in demand for their medicinal and tonic qualities. Visitors were attracted to the town leading to the building of "lodging-houses" and hotels, particularly on the West Cliff.
In a raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby in December 1914, the town was shelled by the German Von der Tann and SMS Derfflinger. In the final assault on the Yorkshire coast, the ships aimed their guns at the signal post on the end of the headland. Whitby Abbey sustained considerable damage in the attack, which lasted ten minutes. The German squadron responsible for the strike escaped despite attempts made by the Royal Navy. During the early 20th century the fishing fleet kept the harbour busy, and few cargo boats used the port. It was revitalised as a result of a strike at Hull docks in 1955, when six ships were diverted and unloaded their cargoes on the fish quay. Endeavour Wharf, near the railway station, was opened in 1964 by the local council. The number of vessels using the port in 1972 was 291, increased from 64 in 1964. Timber, paper and chemicals are imported, while exports include steel, furnace-bricks and doors. The port is owned and managed by Scarborough Borough Council since the Harbour Commissioners relinquished responsibility in 1905.
A marina was started in 1979 by dredging the upper harbour and laying pontoons. Light industry and car parks occupy the adjacent land. More pontoons were completed in 1991 and 1995. The Whitby Marina Facilities Centre was opened in June 2010.
From 1974 to 2023 Whitby was administered as part of a two tier council system by Scarborough Borough Council, one of the seven district councils in North Yorkshire. For borough council purposes the town comprised three wards: Mayfield, Streonshalh and Whitby West Cliff. The borough council was a non-metropolitan district, responsible for housing, planning, leisure and recreation, waste collection, environmental health and revenue collection. Above the Borough council was North Yorkshire County Council, which was a non-metropolitan county providing education, transport, highways, fire, waste disposal, social and library services.
In April 2023 both councils were replaced by North Yorkshire Council along with all district councils in North Yorkshire. The unitary authority now provides all the services previously provided separately by the two councils.
At the lowest level of governance Whitby has a town council which, for election and administrative purposes, is divided into six electoral wards represented by 19 councillors responsible for burial grounds, allotments, play areas and street lighting. Elections to the town council are held every four years.
In the UK Parliament, the town is represented by Alison Hume of the Labour Party, who was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Scarborough and Whitby constituency in 2024.
St Mary's Church is an ancient foundation, St Ninian's opened in Baxtergate in 1778 and St John's, also on Baxtergate, was consecrated in 1850. St Michael's was opened in 1856 and St Hilda's on the West Cliff was built in 1885. The Roman Catholic church dedicated to St Hilda was built in 1867 on Baxtergate. There are places of worship for nonconformists including a United Reformed Church; two Methodist chapels are no longer used. The Mission to Seafarers maintains a Christian ministry and has a chapel, reading room and recreational facilities.
The Bishop of Whitby is a suffragan bishop of the Church of England Diocese of York, in the Province of York.
The town is surrounded on its landward sides by the moorland of the North York Moors National Park and the North Sea abuts it on the seaward side. The coastal areas are designated part of the North Yorkshire and Cleveland Heritage Coast. The harbour and the mouth of the River Esk are on a geological fault. On the east side the cliff is tall, , and consists of alternating layers of shale, sandstone and clay. On the west side the cliff is much lower and has a deep capping of boulder clay over a sandstone base making it less stable and liable to slippage. Both cliffs are being eroded quite rapidly.
Smaller fossils include numerous species of , or "snake stones", from the Whitby Mudstone Formation (Alum Shale Member) and at Whitby Scar nautiloids in the lower beds of the Lias Group strata. The town's folklore (similar to Keynsham's in Somerset) has it that fossils were once living serpents that were common in the area. This was until the 7th century AD when Anglo-Saxon Abbess St Hilda of Whitby (614–680), first had to rid the region of snakes. She did so by casting a spell that turned them to stone and then threw them from the cliff tops.
Local collectors and dealers in fossils often carved heads on ammonites to increase curiosity value and improve sales. Since 1935, the Whitby Coat of Arms incorporates three snakestones due to this folklore. The Hildoceras genus of ammonite is named in St Hilda's honour.
The town has a variety of self-catering accommodation, holiday cottages, caravans and campsites, and guest houses, inns, bed & breakfast establishments and hotels. The jet industry declined at the end of the 19th century, but eight shops sell jet jewellery, mainly as souvenirs to tourists. In 1996, Whitby West Cliff qualified for a 'Tidy Britain Group Seaside Award'. The town was awarded "Best Seaside Resort 2006", by Which? Holiday magazine.
The harbour has a total area of about and is used by commercial, fishing and pleasure craft. Inshore fishing, particularly for crustaceans and line fish, takes place along the coast. Lobsters, brown and velvet crabs are important to the local fishery. From May to August, salmon is found in the Esk, and small open boats are licensed to net these off the harbour entrance. There are around 40 licensed angling party boats. The commercial catch is no longer herring but has been replaced by cod, haddock, and other fish caught within of the coast. A fish market on the quayside operates as need arises. The ready supply of fresh fish has resulted in an abundance of "chippies" in the town, including the Magpie Cafe which Rick Stein has described as the best fish and chip shop in Britain. The Whitby Marina project, jointly funded by Scarborough Borough Council, Yorkshire Forward and the European Regional Development Fund, was developed to diversify the local economy. The remaining shipbuilding firm, Parkol Marine, is a family-run business on the east side of the river. Founded in 1988, the boatyard has two berths for new build and a dry dock for repairs. St Hilda's Business Centre provides office space for a range of businesses. Whitby Business Park is a site located by the A171 road, from the harbour on the southern outskirts of the town. Companies on the park include Supreme Plastics, Whitby Seafoods Ltd and Botham's of Whitby alongside major retailers, Homebase and Sainsbury's.
The east coast has limited conventional energy generation capacity, but Whitby is the closest port to a proposed development on Dogger Bank, ideally placed to provide the offshore wind power industry with support vessel operations and logistics. The Dogger Bank wind farm could include up to 2,600 giant turbines covering more than .
It was formerly the northern terminus of the Whitby, Pickering and York Line. In 2007, the North Yorkshire Moors Railway began a summer service on that line between Pickering and Whitby operated by steam locomotives, as an extension of their long-standing Pickering-Grosmont service.
The Scarborough and Whitby Railway followed a coastal route and was built in 1885. It required construction of the red brick Larpool Viaduct across the Esk Valley into Whitby. The line closed as a result of the Beeching cuts in 1965; the trackbed is now used as a footpath, bridleway and by cyclists.
The Whitby, Redcar and Middlesbrough Union Railway had a station at Whitby West Cliff and ran close to the cliffs to the north of the town. It opened in 1883 and closed in 1958.
Whitby is on the Yorkshire Coastliner bus route to Leeds, Tadcaster, York, Scarborough, Bridlington, Pickering and Malton.
Arriva North East runs bus services connecting Whitby to Scarborough and Middlesbrough.
Five general practitioners and five dentists serve the Whitby area.
Yorkshire Ambulance Service provides transport throughout Yorkshire.
Whitby fire station is manned by North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service between 8 am and 6 pm.
The town's two police stations are provided by North Yorkshire Police Authority.
lifeboat station built in 2007, on the east bank, is operated by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Crew members are unpaid volunteers and the station has two lifeboats, an inshore D class lifeboat the Warter Priory which was donated to the station in 2017, and an all-weather Shannon-class lifeboat, the Lois Ivan, launched in 2023.
North Yorkshire County Council waste management services operate a household waste recycling centre at Whitby Industrial Estate, and a weekly collection alternating between recyclables and landfill waste.
Mains water supply, predominantly from the River Esk, is treated at Ruswarp Water Treatment Works by Yorkshire Water who also deal with the town's sewerage.
CE Electric UK is responsible for delivering electricity and Northern Gas Networks supply piped gas.
The primary schools are St Hilda's Roman Catholic Primary School, Stakesby Community Primary School, West Cliff Primary School, Airy Hill Community Primary School and East Whitby Community Primary School. North Yorkshire County Council provides education services.
The Whitby and District Fishing Industry Training School offers training for new entrants to the fishing industry, and experienced fishermen.
The bridge allowed the town to spread onto the west bank, whilst the east bank, the Haggerlythe, is dominated by St Mary's Church and the ruins of Whitby Abbey which is owned by English Heritage. St Mary's Church is a grade I listed building on the site of a Saxon church. The church's ancient foundation dates from the 12th century. Over time it has been extensively altered and enlarged but retains several features including box pews. The East Cliff is quite a distance by road from the church, the alternative is to climb the 199 steps of the "Church Stairs" or use the footpath called "Caedmon's Trod". The stone stairs, which replaced the original wooden steps, were built about 200 years ago and renovated between 2005 and 2006. There are landings originally assisting coffin bearers on their journey to the graveyard on the cliff top.
The harbour is sheltered by the grade II listed east and west each with a lighthouse and beacon. The west lighthouse, of 1831, is the taller at and the east lighthouse, built in 1855, is high. On the west pier extension is a foghorn that sounds a blast every 30 seconds during fog. New lights were fitted to both the lighthouse towers and the beacons in 2011. Whitby Lighthouse, operated by Trinity House, is south-east of the town on Ling Hill.
On the West Cliff is a statue of Captain James Cook who served his apprenticeship in the town, and a whalebone arch, commemorates the whaling industry. It is the second such arch, the original is preserved in Whitby Archives Heritage Centre. By the inner harbour is a statue commemorating William Scoresby Sr. (father of William Scoresby), designer of the crow's nest.
On the outskirts of town to the west is the 19th-century Sneaton Castle built by James Wilson who sold his sugar plantation where he had over 200 slaves and moved to Whitby. Alongside it is St Hilda's Priory, the mother house of the Order of the Holy Paraclete. The castle was used as a school and is now a conference centre and hotel in association with the priory.
There has been a lifeboat in Whitby since 1802 and the old boathouse, built in 1895 and used until 1957, is a museum displaying the Robert and Ellen Robson lifeboat, built in 1919.
The ancient Penny Hedge ceremony is performed on the eve of Ascension Day commemorating a penance imposed by the abbot on miscreant hunters in the Middle Ages. The hunters using a knife costing a penny had to cut wood in Eskdaleside and take it to Whitby harbour where it was made into a hedge that would survive three tides. This tradition is carried out annually on the east side of the upper harbour.
The Whitby Gazette was founded in 1854 by Ralph Horne, a local printer. The first issues were records of visitors and lodgings rather than a newspaper. The publication became a weekly newspaper in 1858, with a short spell of being published twice weekly between 2000 and 2012. The local radio stations are BBC Radio Tees, This is The Coast and Coast & County Radio
The Pavilion Theatre built in the 1870s in West Cliff hosts a range of events during the summer months. For over four decades the town has hosted the Whitby Folk Week, and since 1993 the bi-annual Whitby Goth Weekend for members of the Goth subculture. "Whitby Now" is an annual live music event featuring local bands in the Pavilion which has taken place since 1991. Since 2008, the Bram Stoker Film Festival has taken place in October.
Charles Dickens is known to have visited Whitby, and in a letter of 1861 to his friend Wilkie Collins, who was at the time in Whitby, Dickens says:
In my time that curious railroad by the Whitby Moor was so much the more curious, that you were balanced against a counter-weight of water, and that you did it like Blondin. But in these remote days the one inn of Whitby was up a back-yard, and oyster-shell grottoes were the only view from the best private room.
Wilkie Collins stayed in Whitby to work on his novel, No Name. He was accompanied by Caroline Graves, the inspiration for The Woman in White. Mary Linskill was born in a small house at Blackburn's Yard in 1840. She reached a wide readership when her second novel, Between the Heather and the Northern Sea, was published in 1884. Her last novel For Pity's Sake, was published posthumously in 1891. James Russell Lowell, the American writer, visited Whitby while ambassador in London 1880–85, staying at 3 Wellington Terrace, West Cliff. On his last visit in 1889, he wrote:
This is my ninth year at Whitby and the place loses none of its charm for me.
G. P. Taylor, a former Church of England curate in Whitby, is now a celebrated author. His best-selling book Shadowmancer was set in Whitby. Theresa Tomlinson, a writer of historical and other fiction for children and young adults, lives in the town.
The novel by A. S. Byatt, set in the town, was adapted into a 2002 feature film called Possession starring Gwyneth Paltrow.
In the British Television drama series Heartbeat (1992–2010), set in the 1960s Yorkshire, the plot frequently takes place in Whitby over the seasons.
A crime novel series by James Whitworth is set in Whitby. The first two novels are Death's Disciple and The Eve of Murder. These were followed by Bidding to Die, Better the Devil You Know and Murder on the Record.
A trilogy of young adult novels, The Whitby Witches, makes much of the town's setting and history, embellishing local traditions whilst incorporating them into the narrative. The author, Robin Jarvis, recalls "The first time I visited Whitby, I stepped off the train and knew I was somewhere very special. It was a grey, drizzling day but that only added to the haunting beauty and lonely atmosphere of the place. Listening to Carmina Burana on my headphones, I explored the ruined abbey on the clifftop. The place was a fantastic inspiration. In The Whitby Witches I have interwoven many of the existing local legends, such as the frightening Barguest, whilst inventing a few of my own, most notably the aufwaders." Jarvis returned to Whitby for his 2016 novel, The Power of Dark, the first in The Witching Legacy series.
Other literary works making reference to Whitby include:
Whitby Regatta takes place annually over three days in August. The highlight is a rowing competition between Whitby Friendship, Whitby Fishermen's, and Scarborough amateur rowing clubs.
Whitby Golf Club formed in 1891 and has been at its 18-hole course on cliff tops to the northwest of the town since 1895.
Whitby Town F.C., formed in 1892, is a semi-professional football club which plays in the Northern Premier League at its 3,200 capacity Turnbull Ground on Upgang Lane.
Whitby Cricket Club has been in existence since the 1920s and plays from the Turnbull Ground on West Cliff. Two senior Saturday teams compete in the North Yorkshire & South Durham Cricket League, and a junior section in the Derwent Valley Junior Cricket League.
On 5 January 2016 the town was seriously affected by flash floods. North Yorkshire Police cautioned motorists to drive with "extreme caution" and advised that the area be avoided "unless absolutely necessary".
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