In May 1930 a young Hull-born woman named Amy Johnson climbed into a second-hand de Havilland Gipsy Moth biplane she had nicknamed Jason and pointed it east. Nineteen days later she landed in Darwin, Australia, the first woman to fly solo from England to the other side of the world. She was twenty-six. The Hall where her aviation legend is now kept, Sewerby Hall, looks out over the North Sea from a clifftop just outside Bridlington, in the same East Riding country where she had grown up. The connection sits exactly right. A Georgian country house, painted to look like stone, holding the maps and goggles of one of the bravest pilots of the interwar years.
John Greame inherited a fortune in 1708 when his father Robert died, and he used part of it to buy the Sewerby estate from Elizabeth Carleill, the last of the previous owners. Between 1714 and 1720 he built the present hall, replacing the older manor house that had stood on the site for generations. Brick, three storeys, a seven-window frontage, the main block was a confident Georgian statement at the eastern edge of the Wolds. John died in 1746 aged 83 and the house passed to his son John Greame II, who lived to 98 and died childless in 1798. His widow Alicia stayed on at the hall until her own death in 1812, and the estate then passed through nephew and great-nephew generations of Greames who kept improving the place.
In 1808, the third John Greame added bow-fronted two-storey wings on either side of the original block and built a semicircular Doric portico across the entrance. He then had the entire building painted to imitate ashlar stone, an act of architectural sleight of hand that turned a Yorkshire brick house into something that read, at a distance, as Bath limestone. The wings were later raised to three storeys to match the main block. The trick still works today. Stand at the foot of the lawn and look up at Sewerby Hall, and the painted brickwork gives back the cool grey of cut stone, with the portico's columns shadowing the central door.
Today, Sewerby Hall is the home of the Museum of East Yorkshire and houses a dedicated room for Amy Johnson, displaying her flying gear, awards, and personal effects. The hall also contains the Coastguard Museum, fitting for a building perched on a clifftop with a long view of the North Sea where the Bridlington lifeboat once put out under sail. During the Second World War the Royal Air Force took the house over as a hospital and convalescent home for the RAF stations around the East Riding. After the war it shifted back to civilian life. The £2.6 million restoration that finished in 2014, funded partly by a £949,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant, gave the interior a thorough overhaul.
Sewerby Hall now draws more than 150,000 visitors a year, on a 50-acre estate of landscaped gardens that runs right to the cliff edge. The grounds hold a small zoo and aviary, an 18-hole putting green, a 9-hole pitch-and-putt course, and various themed gardens. The home ground of Sewerby Cricket Club sits within the estate, near the cliff top, one of the more spectacularly placed grounds in English club cricket. From the boundary, batters look out across the North Sea while they wait their turn. In summer the place becomes the cultural lung for Bridlington two miles away, with concerts, fairs, and community events filling the lawns under the portico that John Greame painted to look like Bath stone two centuries ago.
Sewerby Hall sits at 54.10 degrees north, 0.16 degrees west, on a cliff top two nautical miles northeast of Bridlington town centre. From 2,000 to 3,500 feet the brick-painted hall with its semicircular portico is easy to pick out among the lawns, with the cricket ground on the seaward side and the cliff dropping straight to the North Sea beyond. Flamborough Head's chalk cliffs and lighthouses lie two nautical miles further north. Humberside Airport (EGNJ) is about 32 nautical miles south. Onshore breezes and summer haar are typical along this coast; check Bridlington Bay visibility before approach.