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Geordie Shore is bourgeois now The Northumbrian Riviera is back from the dead

LNER posters from this era are works of art. Credit: SSPL/Getty Images

LNER posters from this era are works of art. Credit: SSPL/Getty Images


July 18, 2022   5 mins

“And girl it looks so pretty to me, like it always did; Oh like the Spanish City to me, when we were kids”, purred Mark Knopfler on the Dire Straits track “Tunnel of Love”. “So rock away, rock away; Cullercoats and Whitley Bay.” These lyrics are now carved into the prom at Whitley Bay, before the great dome of the Spanish City, an extraordinary Edwardian edifice that was once the gateway to a celebrated funfair. With its carousels and carnival arcades, it was such a summertime treat for local kids like me.

This corner of North-East England is still not much visited by out-of-towners — competing as it does with the bright lights of Newcastle, Hadrian’s Wall country, and the grandeur of the castles strung along the Northumberland coast from Warkworth to Bamburgh. But this original Geordie Shore has long been Tyneside’s playground.

Just as the Victorians invented industrial life, and the discipline of the factory hooter and dockyard clock, so too did they conceive of leisure as a commodity — best consumed at certain times and in certain demarcated zones, where the railways could whisk you away from the grime and regimentation of industrial towns to the fresh air and freedom of the seaside. In the North-East, the centre of all this was the bottom right-hand coastal corner of Northumberland, where the 12 miles of metal-bashing industry from Newcastle to the sea transformed suddenly into a sea-front dreamland for the middle and working classes. The abrupt change of mood is still palpable, as Tyneside turns to seaside, business turns to pleasure, production to consumption.

By 1911, Britain had over 100 substantial seaside resorts, from the big boys of Blackpool and Brighton to lower league Largs and Llandudno. In its size and proximity to its larger urban neighbours, the Northumbrian Riviera fits somewhere in between these poles, more akin to the maritime resort suburbs of Penarth or Southsea; but like all of them it was a place of beaches, bathing and boarding houses — with a big slug of hedonism.

The ying and yang of refinement and raffishness, primness and vulgarity, recurs both within and between British seaside towns: think of neighbouring Lytham and Blackpool, Hove and Brighton, even Portstewart and Portrush. The Geordie Riviera was like this too, where Tyneside’s wealthy coastal suburbs of stockbrokers’ Tudor villas, Masonic lodges and pristine golf clubs chafed alongside the fleshpots, arcades and rollercoasters of Whitley Bay’s South Parade and Spanish City — where Bank Holidays in my youth were always a grisly bacchanal of fighting and fornication.

Yet Whitley had once been “the Blackpool of the North East”, a major destination for holiday-makers who regularly filled up the B&Bs and caravan sites well into my Eighties childhood, and its attractions were primped and packaged by great commercial artists like Fred Taylor and Tom Purvis for LNER, whose colourful posters are all masterpieces. The most exciting buildings were born in the Riviera’s pleasure-seeking Edwardian heyday — all, tellingly, in the neo-Baroque style. Whitley Bay’s cheerful station, for instance, was built in 1910; with its swagged and garlanded clock tower and Paris Metro style canopy, it became the destination for Tyneside day-trippers and vacationing Glaswegians heading south for marginally warmer climes.

This taste for voluptuous neo-Baroque was in some ways an Edwardian reaction to the severity of Victorian Gothic. So, when the Spanish City was built in 1910, its mammarian dome was second only in size to St Paul’s Cathedral. It was influenced by and contemporaneous with the development of Atlantic City in New Jersey, where the stupendous Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel had been built in 1906. Both places specialised in the architecture of pleasure and sybaritic escapism.

Tynesiders had much to escape from. Northumbria offered the worst housing conditions in England: more Geordies lived in flats and tenements than anywhere outside Scotland. And its staple industries were known as “the hardest work under heaven” — even if the trades were relatively well-paid, providing disposable income for fun and frolics. That Geordies flocked to an Iberian building that exudes the Moorish sensuality of El Andalus, or the dazzlingly white Mediterranean sunlight of a Sorolla painting — decades before the great victory of the Spanish costas over the British seaside — speaks to a yearning romanticism in the Northumbrian soul.

On a summer’s day, it remains a wonderful spot to drink in the scenic views of the coal-streaked sands of Whitley, with the North Sea shimmering like the Bay of Naples. In the distance, perched on a tidal island, is St Mary’s Lighthouse, surrounded by a picturesque setting of cottages, rockpools and the lapping waters of Tyne, Dogger and German Bight. But in the final decade of the 20th century, Whitley suffered years of decline. The peeling paint on the Spanish City’s “Corkscrew” rollercoaster matched the corroding metalwork on the Tyne. When great coastal landmarks like the Tynemouth Plaza — a vast Second Empire-style ballroom and winter gardens — burned to the ground in 1996, it felt like a portent. It was hard to see a bright future for a place whose rise and fall had corresponded so closely to the economic fortunes of Tyneside.

And yet the Northumbrian Riviera is bustling once again. Largely gone are the boarding houses and sticky-carpet bars for hen and stag parties; instead, it’s all about surf cafés, hipster boutiques and vegan cake shops. Not long ago, the Guardian even named Whitley Bay as one of the coolest places to shop. This growing embourgeoisement has been mirrored by the changing politics of the coast. The constituency of Tynemouth — which was once one of the few Tory strongholds in the North-East, home to the very grand Conservative MPs Dame Irene Ward and then Sir Neville Trotter — has been solidly Labour since 1997. Meanwhile, neighbouring Blyth Valley, in the Northumbrian rust belt, having been rock solid Labour since the Thirties, flipped to the Tories in 2019.

The resurgence of this Geordie Shore has been in part down to an active local authority, and the boost from Covid that the British seaside received from day-trippers instead of holiday-makers. But the demographics of the coast have changed too, with growing numbers of younger professionals and their families moving close by. A spot of paddle-boarding out of Cullercoats harbour, a park run along the links, or even just a Di Meo’s ice cream and a bimble along the sea front: these have become favourite pastimes of the aspirational Geordie.

The uses of this place may have changed, but what continues to draw people here is the great beauty of the land and seascape. The American artist Winslow Homer lived in Cullercoats in 1881, and honed his watercolour technique painting the local fisher lasses and the changing moods of the North Sea. The working-class novelist Jack Common recalled sallying forth in the Twenties from industrial Newcastle to North Shields, where “the air was full of the sea glow, a salt radiance brightened all the long Tynemouth streets”.  Even Charles Dickens himself came here in 1867, walking from Newcastle to Tynemouth, and, after being knocked over by a wave on Longsands, recorded that “spanning the restless uproar of the waves was a quiet rainbow of transcendental beauty. The scene was quite wonderful.”

That scene, today, is often reminiscent of one of the most reproduced of those railway posters from this riviera’s golden age: British Rail’s depiction of an impossibly good-looking young family, optimistically dressed for the Northumbrian climate, bobbing in the waters by St Mary’s Island, above the legend “Life is Gay at Whitley Bay”. The Geordie Shore is back, if it ever went away.


Dan Jackson is the author of the best-selling book The Northumbrians: The North East of England and its People. A New History, published by Hurst (2019)

 

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JR Stoker
JR Stoker
2 years ago

Thank you for writing that. Northumbria is the finest part of Britain, and that coast – from the wilds of Lindisfarne to the excitements of Whitley Bay is sublime. Castles, abbeys, great houses, marvellous gardens, mountains and moors, and one of the rarest mammals in the world – the White Cattle at Chillingham. A whole country in a county, and the finest folks in Britain living there.
Though I am tempted not to recommend anybody goes there; Newcastle is busy enough and the emptiness of the land reaching up to the Cheviots wonderful. Yeah, go to Torremolinos instead!

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago

As a child I was an “out of towner tourist”. My father’s army pal came from the those parts and we used to visit. (A twelve hour coach ride from London).
Don’t downplay the icy cold sea, the wind and the sea mist( Can anyone see the little bugga?”), but very, very, beautiful.
Note to American visitors. See The Tower, Big Ben and the double-decker red buses, if you must, but you would do better to ignore The Great Wen (London) and venture into England, Scotland and Wales.

Linda Hutchinson
Linda Hutchinson
2 years ago
Reply to  polidori redux

I used to tell all my visiting US colleagues not to spend too long in London, but to get out into the real country or countries. Usually they didn’t have enough time to go to Scotland, Wales or Ireland, or even the north of England, but I felt it encumbant upon me to at least steer them towrds smaller provincial towns and villages, to say nothing of the country side itself. Much more often than not they appreciated my advice and said that they felt that they got a better taste of England than if they had done the usual round.

Phil Richardson
Phil Richardson
2 years ago

A lovely evocative article. One caveat – the North Sea cannot, in any possible universe, be likened to the Bay of Naples.

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago

Too bleedin’ cold up there. First time I ever saw snow falling and laying on a sandy beach – weird.

Alan Osborne
Alan Osborne
2 years ago

Great essay from Dan Jackson. Who (like me), hails from the region and speaks with real authority. Few things fill me with as much joy as seeing the once rundown seafront of Whitley Bay looking fibrant and prosperous once again. My formative years in the late 80s in the bars and clubs of Whitley certainly opened my eyes to life. But as I’ve changed, so has the coast. And I think we’re both the better for it!

Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham
2 years ago

As a schoolboy in 1958, I worked on the dodgem cars in the Spanish City. No one who worked there would go on the (modest) roller coaster, it was thought to be too dangerous. Indeed, someone fell to their death when their car jerked on a high bend. Not very recongnisable on my last visit (from Oz) in 2018.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
2 years ago

Nice reminiscence.

I spent the summer of 1991 working on some upgrades (when the dockers weren’t on strike) to a rig tied up on the Tyne in South Shields.

There was plenty fun to be had in South Shields and locals were the friendliest I’ve encountered in all These Islands.

One day we took the ferry over to North Shields and the bus up to Whitley Bay. It was a bit rundown and depressing. But that was 1991.

Robert Eagle
Robert Eagle
2 years ago

A while ago the Geordie style setters at Viz magazine proposed a slick new TV show to be called Whitley Baywatch. Its time has surely come!

Howard Ahmanson
Howard Ahmanson
2 years ago

The people on the Geordie Shore show did most of their frolicking in Spain, didn’t they? Perhaps “climate change” will bring British sun seekers to Newcastle.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
2 years ago

I think the resurgence, not just of Whitley Bay and Tynemouth (and Cullercoats in between) but of many seaside towns has been missed by the main newspapers.

Or rather it gets recorded in their 20 best beaches/chip shops/seaside holidays articles in their mags but disregarded by news features who often to slip into the *drab and shuttered* essay, often because they are doing a cuttings job from file pics.
Great to see a well thought through thinky piece. As mentioned re the shopping piece of it, these places aren’t just a few old attractions with a lick of paint..that leaves out restaurants, cafes, pop up pubs and independent retailers that you see if you wander half mile from the links and beach up to Park View.

London quality eateries and drinks places with not (quite) London prices.

Brendan Kenny
Brendan Kenny
2 years ago

Just back from holidays in Northumbria. Loved every minute of it.