The Town

Saltburn-by-the-Sea is a small seaside town in the ceremonial county of North Yorkshire and the Borough of Redcar and Cleveland. It has a population of 5,912 according to the 2001 census and is noted as the home of the last remaining pleasure pier on the North East Coast.

Founded in 1861 by Henry Pease Esq. MP, scion of the first railway dynasty, it has in the past decade undergone an arts based revival, regenerating the town from a tired seaside resort to a bustling hub of artistic endeavour and entrepreneurship.

In the year of the town’s 150th anniversary SCAA, a key catalyst in this revival, hopes to build on the past decade’s achievement by securing the permanent CAT of the Old Marske Mill Lane Junior School Site to create a community focused centre of excellence for the Performing and Visual Arts.

The Site

The Old Marske Mill Lane Junior School Site is one of the most significant in the town and sits on the main coastal route to Whitby running through the town centre and past the existing home of SCAA in the spectacular Gothic Revival Arts & Crafts former Primitivist Methodist Chapel and School.

Designed by Sir Thomas Edwin Cooper, a prominent Edwardian Architect, the Old Marske Mill Lane School was opened in 1903 as the Girls High School. In the 1960s it went on to become the Saltburn Junior School and as such has played a part in the lives of almost everyone who was born and raised in Saltburn.

The Consultation

In 2009 following the completion of the new Saltburn Learning Campus, the Marske Mill Lane School was closed and abandoned; the building has stood empty for the past two years and the only use the site has seen is that of the junior football played on its playing field each year.

Almost immediately after the school was closed local groups began to discuss what might become of it and how it could be used for the benefit of the wider community. Following a concerted campaign, led by Councillor Philip Thomson, it was decided that a CAT bid would be submitted.

Multiple public meetings have been held to engage the community in finding a use for the school and in June 2011 a small working group was formed from volunteers who had attended these meetings and were charged with the responsibility to craft the bid.

The Vision

After much discussion it was decided that SCAA, which had played host to the public meetings to discuss the future of the school, would be the ideal organisation to make a bid for the school with the aim of cementing the arts focused revival that has so benefited the town.

SCAA has crafted the following bid with a view to creating a regenerative cluster of creative businesses working in partnership with ‘the Hub’ in Redcar as an enterprise centre and extending the embodied principles to the wider East Cleveland area for which Saltburn remains the gateway town.

Continue to Vision & Objectives