A British seaside town dubbed the famous in the UK was eerily quiet when one urban explorer went to see if it lived up to its reputation.
David Burnip – known to his 140,000 YouTube followers as The Wandering Turnip – was stunned to find few tourists and many shops closed when he went to visit Whitby, North Yorkshire. Whitby was named the UK’s “Best Seaside Resort” by Which? Holiday magazine in 2006, but 20 years on, comparatively few people seem to have been lured by the town’s charms.
It is also home to “the best fish and chip shop in Britain” according to celebrity chef Rick Stein but the YouTuber was not impressed by his initial impression.
“I did expect it to be a lot busier than this,” David said. “Maybe because the weather’s not as good, but I thought more things would be open.”
Even the attractions that were open, such as the sailing ship that had been converted into a floating restaurant, were quite deserted – offering a reminder of Whitby’s other claim to fame, as the British seaport where Count Dracula’s ship made landfall in Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 horror novel.
Looking nervously at the rows of empty seats, David said: “I might have been been duped when I was told that this is the best fish and chips in Whitby, because literally no-one else is on this boat which is a restaurant and a bar.”
In fairness, the piece of battered cod that David was served was as fresh and tasty as you’d expect, in a north sea fishing port, although he found the chips to be a little substandard. He said, and he wasn’t convinced by the addition of a decorative side salad: “I’m having fish and chips, not a bloody Joe Wicks meal.
“Come on you don’t need that on there!”
On the following day, Whitby came back to life, with beach bars and more of the town’s quirky independent shops opening up.
Several of them were selling jewellery made from jet, a semi precious organic gemstone formed from fossilised tree bark, which was once mined extensively in Whitby and the surrounding area.
Alongside Whitby’s fame as the fictional setting for Dracula, it was also the home base for 18th Century explorer Captain James Cook, who was the first European known to have mapped the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands.
A museum in the town is devoted to his legacy, where one of the star revealed that after Captain Cook was killed in a fight with Hawaiian islanders, little of his body remained and he was only identified by a distinctive scar on his right hand.
These days, the town is probably at its busiest during the hugely popular Goth Weekends, where members of the UK’s longest-lasting pop subculture meet up twice a year for a music festival.which has seen numerous classic bands, such as Heaven 17, The Damned, and Altered Images perform for a largely black-clad audience.
