Category Archives: holiday

this is the hand of a guy i got talking to down at johnny flintons, cayton. an interesting guy, he was digging around in the mud and clay close to the tide line, metal detector in hand, pouch at his waist. his pouch, caked in sticky clay mix, was filled with pieces of treasure; lead weights, bullet casings, silver pennies. he’d found a cap off a sea mine, 2 feet wide, a few weeks earlier. enough pennies, with a singular value of £3, to melt down and sell for £400, his jeweller wife extracting the silver.

‘i avoid live ammunition these days ‘cos it explodes in the car on the way home as it dries out. i’m yet to find any large pieces of ammunition, but they’re definitely round here.’

johnny flintons harbour is a nudist beach; the delapidated air raid bunkers feature the graffiti ‘clothing optional.’ coastal erosion is plain to see. the tree trunks in the shoreline below were once part of an ornate garden, now receding into the cliff, a swampy marshland with trunks and shrubbery unfitting with the rest of the coastal plantlife.

above johnny flintons is knipe point, an ex-holiday camp now turned residential housing estate. it’s most recent claims to fame being the slowly eroding cliffs dragging the quaint white bungalows steadily closer to the advancing beach and the resident artist kane cunningham purchasing a teetering bungalow on his credit card for £3000. the yorkshire film archive has this footage from the 1950′s, shortly after it was used as a haven for evacuated middlesborough children in world war II. during the war, pillboxes were installed on cayton bay as the first line of defence from enemy invasion. cayton was apparently used as a testing area for weapons, hence the large hauls of spent and intact ammunition that can be found on the beach. coins littering the beach are thought to be from tourists visiting the beach.

this is all stuff i found out of this one guy, from chesterfield, an ex-sponsored skateboarder in the late 90′s, summering in the holiday camp at the top of the cliff. his interest kick started by fossils, progressing to modern history, the internet aiding his fascination with the area.

so as well as photographing a surf comp last weekend, i got quite an extensive history lesson of a place i’ve been living near for 20 years, 3 weeks before i leave it.