Exploring Post-Industrial Britain: A South Shields Odyssey
“Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen
This is the coastal town
That they forgot to close down
Armageddon, come Armageddon
Come, Armageddon, come” - ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’, Morrissey
After touching down in Newcastle Airport, I am faced with a five and a half hour gap to take a train out of the city. With the best of half a day to spare, I decide that out of whimsical wanderlust that I make the best use I can of the city’s well connected Metro system, which I have already caught from the airport into the city’s central train station, having invested in an all-day saver at a ticket machine which connects the airports exit to the metro’s green line.
As I disembark, I walk around and ponder the high aesthetics of the train station, rich with pillars, arches and stone portraits that echo the might and ambition of the Victorian age. Deprived of sleep, it does not feel in any way distasteful or contrary that I might placate a lingering hunger with a corned beef pasty from Greggs. I do this very deed, as there is indeed a Greggs located adjacent to the station's entrance.
My stomach settled, I regroup and take the escalator down into the subway where I initially got off. I decide that I will take the yellow line, which circulates the city centre, with a northern section of the line running out to Whitley Bay, and the southern section terminating at South Shields. I decide to take the latter, with two minutes to spare on the notice board.
The journey to my destination takes some 25 minutes. It offers me interesting sights and intrigues, most notably passing through at Jarrow, famous for being home to the Anglo-Saxon saint, monk and theologian The Venerable Bede, and more recently the Jarrow Crusade of 1936. Regarded as a high watermark in the history of labour dispute and employment activism, a monument to the event is visible at the station.
Closer to more recent pop culture, the Newcastle area was immortalized in cinema with the 1971 crime film Get Carter starring Michael Caine. Though shooting locations do not include South Shields, the movie prominently features the Trinity Square Car Park in Gateshead, as well as a climatic ending scene at Blackhall Colliery in Co. Durham, and their aesthetic contrasts compliment the views you take in whilst in South Shields.
A gloomy autumnal day forecasts my arrival on the South Tyneside coast, and I raise my hood over my Regatta jacket to anticipate the rain dropping from an ethereally grey northern English sky. Descending the escalator and exiting the station, I take a walk down a sparsely populated Ocean Road, which leads towards the seafront. Further testament to an extensive maritime heritage is alluded to with street names like Salmon Street.
What is now South Shields was a prominent northern outpost of Roman Britain known as Arbaeia, and boasts an impressive reconstruction of a fort. Further emphasizing this is the presence of a Roman Road, which is linked respectively to Julian Street, Trajan Street and Vespasian Street. Owing to time constraints, I sadly didn’t make set my eyes on it, but got to glimpse the echoes of an impressive maritime heritage that is poignantly and sadly juxtaposed with an aura of Britain’s industrial decline.
My gradual walk through the town centre takes me past the obvious outlets one would associate with the “death of the high street”, on exiting this Ocean Road takes a more suburban tone, with some of the Victorian or perhaps Georgian terraced houses on the lane acting as B&B’s. Sadly, it appears that the vast majority of them have “No Vacancies” on the signs at the front doors. Whether this is is due to the outlets ceasing to be operational, or it being the off-season, or being fully booked is unsure to me, and any certainty of this is obscured by the miserable rain and coal grey sky.
South Shields demographically is a very white and English large town, which a very strong Geordie identity, though people who appear to be of Bengali extraction can be seen outside various off licenses, fast food takeaways and small merchant businesses that operate on the main street, which today is hardly the exception in any English settlement with a substantial population. Pubs appear to be the exception to this, none of which are open as it is still mid morning.
As the road continues, I glimpse the opening into North Marine Park, to my left hand side, just ahead are representational symbols of South Shields maritime heritage in the form of the Woodhaven Monument, erected in 1889 to commemorate the centenary of the pioneering of the first self-righting lifeboat by William Wouldhave in 1789. Just behind that is a leisure center, a typically postmodern and brutally minimal concoction of glass and steel. Daytime swim exercise classes are taking place, visible through the gigantic panes. From beyond this the view opens dramatically, immediately enveloped by the seafront.
I am facing Littlehaven Beach, which is just a few hundred metres in length, but which brings gothic majesty in its panoramic view. To my left are the ruins of Tynemouth Priory and Castle, visible at a distance from across the Tyne estuary. Further inland from this is the Sir James Knott Memorial Flats, which were built in 1939 as social housing. You would be mistaken for believing that this blunt, stark and rectangular outpost is a work of postmodern, brutalist town planning, but it’s brickwork indicates a more classical, aesthetically pleasant sense of design within a much more jagged form.
The promenade at Littlehaven Beach is awash with layers of sand. The late morning tide is quiet and whispery, contrary to the strong winds. The rain has now ceased, although the grey sky is still omnipresent. Written as a display on the promenade wall, though mildly faded and weathered, are lyrical excerpts from a traditional song Blow The Wind Southerly, a song of seafaring, love, and longing;
“Oh, is it not sweet to hear the breeze singing,
As lightly it comes o'er the deep rolling sea?
But sweeter and dearer by far when 'tis bringing,
The barque of my true love in safety to me.”
Coupled with the site of the bay, the panorama of the seafront and the bleak grandeur of the horizon, this enriches and further animates the area with a romantic, poetic elegance that uniquely roots it much like an anchor to coast of England’s north east. As I pass and ponder the Little Haven Hotel, I begin to walk back towards the North Marine Park. Stopping at the entrance, I briefly ponder entering a pub opposite it called The Marine, though I pass, assuming it not yet open.
I continue back down Ocean Road, from which I came. Opposite an Italian Restaurant, amusingly named Pacino’s, I stumble on the battered shell of an old British Telecom phone booth, which must have been in this place since the 1990’s at the least. Noting the receiver on the phone box itself, I pick it up and place it to my ear out of bizarre curiosity. Strangely enough, a dial tone rings from it. The glass on the panes is long since broken, and there is no door on the hinges, and heaven only knows how long it was since any maintenance was done on it. Yet in the age of the Metaverse and the high-tech smartphone, this old bashed up analogue relic of the pre-internet age still remains operational.
The shadow of the town’s neglect looms large as I further embark my journey back to the metro station. As I look back to the sights I have seen, Morrissey’s ode to the decline of the British seaside town, Everyday Is Like Sunday plays like a heartfelt, melancholy tape loop in my head. To paraphrase the lyrics, South Shields comes across as silent and grey. It also comes across as forlorn and downtrodden, yet its pride and erstwhile majesties echo and resound through its streets. This reminds me that in 2014, former Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg did a Channel 4 documentary short in which he did vox pops with natives of South Shields, eliciting some rather amusing and bemused reactions. South Shields is the only ward to have never elected a Tory MP in it’s history. True to present form, the town remains a generation Labour heartland.
Returning to the town centre, the footfall is more substantial, but hardly bustling. I see an elderly man and woman exchange polite conversation. I see a swaggering pair of charvers, aristocratic warriors of the dole class talking loudly as they emerge from a corner located near the local JobCentre Plus, all in tones unmistakably Geordie. As I walk towards the station entrance, I get sight of at least two homeless people, possibly spiceheads taking shelter near the bridge where the train line terminates. As I ascend the stairs, I flash my day saver at the metro staff. With a minute to go I depart back to Newcastle Central. I wave South Shields a poignant and bittersweet goodbye. For such a brief visit, South Shields has taken me through times, creations and memories that I myself never experienced in person, the essence of which lingers on.
