Filey has 3 Blue Plaques commorating famous figures. See if you can spot them as you walk around the town!
In 1852 Charlotte Bronte stayed in Filey for a month, and on 2nd June she wrote to her father Patrick:
‘On the whole I get on very well here – but I have not bathed yet as I am told it is much too cold and too early in the season.
The sea is very grand. Yesterday it was a somewhat unusually high tide and I stood about an hour on the cliffs yesterday
afternoon watching the tumbling in of great tawny turbid waves that made the whole shore white with foam and filled the
air with a sound hollower and deeper than thunder. There are so few visitors at Filey yet that I and a few sea-birds and
fishing-boats have often the whole expanse of sea, shore and cliff to ourselves. When the tide is out the sands are wide,
long and smooth and very pleasant to walk on. When the high tides are in not a vestige of sand remains. I saw a great dog
rush into the sea yesterday and swim and bear up against the waves like a seal – I wonder what Flossy would say to that?’
Charlotte never forgot Filey, and Filey hasn’t forgotten her. The house in which she stayed, Cliff House, now bears a plaque
naming it as the ‘Brontë House’.
Herbert Liddell Cortis, who was born in the seaside town, was the first cyclist to ride 20 miles in an hour,
breaking the record at Crystal Palace in July 1882. It was a remarkable achievement considering he reached
the speed, on a penny farthing! A blue plaque to celebrate Cortis is on the wall of Filey’s Evron Centre, close
to the site of his former family home on John Street.
Dame Madge Kendal who's private residence then the White Lodge has a blue plaque unveiled in 2019 on the front of
The White Lodge Hotel by the then Mayor of Filey, Jacqui Houlden-Banks, whose father was a former owner of the hotel.
The plaque commemorates the Shakespearean actress, who along with her actor-manager husband William Hunter Kendal,
lived at The White Lodge, from 1896 to 1920 then known as South Crescent Villa.
