This was perhaps the most impressive place (on first encounter) I have ever lived in. High up above Scarborough’s South Bay is an ornate Victorian five storey terrace, this was to be the location of our first home as a married couple.
The terrace
This terrace just along from the building used for the filming of the TV series ‘The Royal’, looks as grand as it sounds, but you may have realised by the way I’m writing that there is a twist. To get to our flat we would walk along the Esplanade, past the Italian Gardens in the direction of the Putting Green, we would cross the road and enter the building by the front door.
Our front door
Once inside we needed to use the lift, as it was a single person lift we could not use it together, we would enter the building on the ground floor and press button B, once in the basement we moved to the back of the basement where the door to our one bed-roomed flat was to be found. We did have another entrance which led into a dark courtyard and out of the back of the building onto a service road, our back window was in sunshine for approximately half and hour each day!
Another unique feature of this flat was the fact that people needed to go through our bedroom to find the bathroom! This proved quite an amusing arrangement because as you walked into the bedroom the opposite wall was completely covered with fitted wardrobes.
Our window can just be seen at the bottom of the building
The wardrobe door on the extreme right was actually the door into the bathroom, often people would return some time after setting off for the toilet and ask us to show them where it is!
We moved our things into the flat a couple of days before our wedding, neither of us stayed there until we returned from our honeymoon, but some of my friends slept there on the night we were married. We arrived back on the Friday, my sister-in-law had transferred our gifts, most unopened, to the flat the day after the wedding. On our return we went through the gifts, unpacked and washed our clothes, then cleaned the flat through and got an early night ready for our first Sunday together as Pastor and wife! We were up early on Sunday morning and off to church to open up and get ready a good 40 minutes before the service was due to start. However, neither of us had realised the date, it was the last weekend of March when the clocks go forward! We arrived late with the meeting already underway – not the best start but we saw the funny side and managed to overcome the embarrassment!
Tags: basement flat, Italian gardens, The Esplanade, The Royal, Victorian Terrace
