'Nature can recover' Quiet optimism at return of wildlife to North Sea coast

From the outside, the Tunny Club looks like any other seaside fish and chip shop. A short walk from Scarborough harbour, only the photos of John Wayne and Errol Flynn on the wall betray the shop's fleeting history as a global centre for big-game fishing.

- Patrick Greenfield

In the 1930s, film stars and the ultra-wealthy flocked to the Yorkshire seaside resort for their chance to catch enormous bluefin tuna - known as "tunny" - lurking off the North Sea coast. In 1933, an aristocrat, Lorenzo Mitchell-Henry, reeled in what remains the largest fish ever caught in British waters: a 386kg bluefin tuna.

Steam-powered yachts filled the bay on the hunt for even larger fish. "The bluefin tuna were coming into the North Sea to feast on the enormous shoals of herring and mackerel that were there. They would be followed by whales and dolphins," says Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England. By the 1950s, however, the warm-blooded aquatic torpedoes had mostly disappeared, exposing a greater decline in the health of the North Sea ecosystem.

The North Sea's chalk reefs, seagrass meadows and shallow waters are home to a huge array of life, including internationally important seabird colonies. But centuries of overfishing, pollution, oil and gas exploration and the climate crisis have degraded the seas between Britain, Scandinavia and western Europe, driving declines in wildlife.