David Neave, Yorkshire: York and the East Riding (Yale University Press, 2005, 715), concludes the section on Sunk Island by stating that the Crown Colony was ‘a short-lived venture but some of the brick and tile cottages remain’. I have not researched the inter-war years for Sunk Island but the final source reproduced in Meadley, J. […]

The above primary source is taken from p.234 of Housing for the Rural Working Classes of East Yorkshire in the late 19th century and the Development of Early Rural Council Housing to 1939 (see Articles and Publications) and shows the layout plan for the earliest rural council houses in Driffield Rural District at Nafferton, 1921 (surviving).

The above photo (taken from Wikipedia) shows Canadian troops advancing behind the cover of Mark 2 ‘tanks’ (see Article in this website on my father’s Great War service in the Tank Corps, 1917-1921) at the battle of Vimy, 1917. An interesting episode in the history of the Sunk Island community was the ‘Crown Colony’. It has

The above early photo shows the interior of the second church on Sunk Island consecrated in 1877, the apsidal east end shown as viewed from the nave. Like much of the information conveyed recently this image comes from Meadley, J. A Sunk Island Miscellany (Malet Lambert Local History Original, Vol. 40, p. 22). The lancet

The picture above is an early photo of the second church on Sunk Island with the elementary school building just showing on the left, this now a private house. The church is a very distinctive building built to a plan drawn by the appropriately named Ewan Christian ‘architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners’ (Hull Times, August, 1877).

‘Reclaimed land’ (a peculiar phrase seeing as shallow embanked mudflats were not previously claimed) such as Sunk Island was/is, by common law owned by the ‘Crown’, and the farmers that work the land were/are lessees. Under an agreement made in the early 19th century, between the Crown and the lessees it was agreed that the upkeep