The Full English, page 26
These days, the tourist board presents Newcastle and Gateshead as a single, throbbingly virile, identity: twin cities like Minneapolis and St Paul or Buda and Pest, a whole nexus of fun in eighteen compacted lower-case letters. ‘Why Aye! You’re welcome in newcastlegateshead! United by seven iconic bridges across a bustling quayside Newcastle and Gateshead form a single, diverse and extremely vibrant visitor destination in the North East of England.’ It’s a nice concept, but it doesn’t get much traction from folk on the actual banks of the Tyne. On message boards, locals assert time and time again that the twain shall never really meet, that Newcastle is a city and Gateshead a town with its own council, no mayor (it didn’t want one) and its own attitudes.
Escaping the primordial murk of my hotel room, I slog up the unglamorous curve of asphalt that climbs up behind the graces of this Quayside – the Sage concert hall and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art – into Gateshead itself. Priestley, feeling very sorry for himself, managed to get lost on his expedition, concluding: ‘I had to explore a large part of Gateshead, and there was nothing in this exploration to raise my spirits.’ But some new additions to Gateshead’s townscape might have given him food for thought as he meandered. Gateshead College is festooned with slogans that seem profound and empowering until you pause to think about them: ‘Women are not Pigs’; ‘You are now entering a Judgement Free Zone’; ‘We are all Human’. Each has that combination of assertiveness and vapidity, bullish yet vacant, that characterises our age. Sourpuss that I am, my spirits are low as I push on up the hill into Old Gateshead. The afternoon has clouded over and become gusty and dark and the sharp wind has rain and chip papers in it. The college and its neighbour, a huge arts complex called Northern Design, looks posh, and doubtless good stuff is going on in there. But as you leave the glitter of Newcastle far behind and climb into the hinterland of Gateshead, the buzzy modernism fades away to reveal that random tawdry mix of old and new, civic and retail that’s so common in the working-class northern town.
Trinity Square has colonised the centre of Gateshead with a squat, uncompromising retail space, a giant superstore parked like an invading space cruiser. What would JBP have made of a Tesco Extra, a shop the size of a cathedral, which in many ways it is of course: a temple to consumerism. I’m not being snooty here. We have always bought things from the shop at the bottom of the road. But at the bottom of this road is a shop where you can buy a ride-on lawnmower and an enormous television rather than, say, pop in for two ounces of boiled ham. On the walls of the Tesco Extra are a gallery of images reflecting Gateshead’s history, my favourite being Owen Luder’s long-gone but never to be forgotten Brutalist car park from whose upper tiers Michael Caine brusquely despatched Bryan Mosley (playing Cliff Brumby), also known as Coronation Street’s Alf Roberts. If you recall he was, as Caine put it, ‘a big man but he was out of shape’, and he certainly was by the time he reached the pavement of Trinity Square. I pop into the store itself and buy a bottle of scotch and a can of Febreze, the latter to mask the corked wine and seaweed smell of my room, the former to help me not care about it.
‘Attractions’ compete for my attention at each corner of the next crossroads. There is the Park Lane, a nightclub destined never to be confused with its London namesake and the 4Play Sex Shop, shrivellingly anaphrodisiac in its setting of grime-streaked concrete and fag packets. Opposite, Curley’s is hosting a comedy drag night, a contradiction in terms for me, but then I seem to be unique in modern Britain in finding drag bleakly unentertaining. One day I hope we shall see it for what it is, a kind of blackface offering crass stereotypes of women by men. On another corner is the Metropole pub; ‘card bingo 4 till 6 then Northern Soul.’ The older, tough-looking crowd look settled in for a Monday night of ‘eyes down … legs eleven’ and backflips.
I forego all these delights and continue up Bensham Road, past the Bensham Jockey pub, another defunct boozer eyeless and shuttered, headed for, yes, Bensham. Bedraggled and nursing his cold, Priestley came here to see a couple of examples of pioneering social action. Bensham Grove was home to the first nursery in the North East, a godsend for the local kiddies, although the sample menu of ‘mutton stew, minced liver and eggs’ would meet with some scepticism from the modern toddler. Close by is the Bentham Grove settlement, a large house given over to a theatre and arts facilities with the intention of providing unemployed men with new skills. JB seems to have liked Bob, the communistic organiser, but was grudging about the ‘grim concert party’ and some of the young men present; ‘undisciplined and carefree, the dingy butterflies of the backstreets. They had no sense whatever of waste and tragedy in themselves. They were not at odds with their peculiar environment, which by this time had moulded their characters and shaped their way of living. They had little or no money, but never having had any, they did not miss it.’
The Bentham Grove settlement is still active, receiving a quarter of a million pounds in 2013 to carry on the good work. But the lady I get chatting to at the bus stop is unaware of it. At least I think she is, but her accent is so strong that I am completely unable to decipher her kindly smiling chat, feeling every inch the ‘Midlander’ my Gateshead mate Stod used to accuse me of being. I give up trying to get my head around the bus timetable, and decide to walk back to the river. On the way down I come across a miraculous sight: a gang of young Jewish lads in white shirts and kippahs playing a lively twenty-a-side football match in the street outside the Borough Arms. Lively but not rowdy. There is no swearing or violence, just a great collective youthful release of steam after a hard day at the Talmud.
Later, back in my hotel room, I learn that this converted old pub in Gateshead now houses part of the Gateshead Talmudical College. This is the Oxford and Cambridge of the Jewish faith, the largest yeshiva or rabbinical school in Europe, and the largest outside New York. Not far away is the Gateshead Jewish Academy for Girls. Both these draw students from around the world, reflecting the sizeable Haredi Jewish community in Gateshead. This was established by Zachariah Bernstone in the 1890s, a hard man who, finding the Newcastle brethren too lax and lenient, crossed the water to make a community here which still thrives. During the festival of Purim, the streets are thronged with revellers intending to observe the ancient rituals and traditions and, according to community leaders, ‘to let their hair down and have a few drinks.’ I watched some footage on YouTube and it looks fantastic, with streets full of people dressed as pirates, tigers, admirals etc. According to a brilliant last line in the Newcastle Chronicle report, ‘The footage ends with a few lads ordered down from a caravan by Northumbria Police.’
I raise a glass of my scotch to them, give the room another gaseous floral salvo of Febreze and retire to my mossy bed, ready for my big day out on the Metro.
3
Gateshead Interchange confronts you on entry with a huge mosaic of a range of high, cloud-strewn peaks which I’m fairly sure aren’t in Gateshead.[3] Nice, though. The whole station is something of a treat for fans of public art, with a giant peacock, an installation of car park interiors, and a general design scheme of red and white blocky tiles which make the traveller feel like they’ve been dropped into a giant game of Tetris. Annoyingly, it is not ‘Three stops to Hebburn’ but five. But as the Metro clanks along I still have some fun inventing other songs that could commemorate my destination. Hebburn Is A Place On Earth. Knocking On Hebburn’s Door. Stairway To Hebburn. And so on.
Priestley was no more taken with Hebburn than he was with Gateshead. ‘You felt that there was nothing in the whole place worth a five-pound note’. He would have been amazed, then, that one day Hebburn would get its own eponymous TV series. You may have seen it. It’s an angry Marxist analysis of the exploitative nature of capitalism told through avant-garde animation and Japanese Kabuki theatre. Only joking, it’s a heart-warming tale of working-class Geordie life, of course, starring Vic Reeves and Gina McKee, the latter one of the brilliant ensemble cast of Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North, another great north-eastern contribution to modern TV culture, and a slightly grittier one.
Hebburn reminded me very much of its neighbour Jarrow, which I know a little. There was a Palmer’s shipyard in both and Hebburn’s fared better than Jarrow’s. When the company collapsed in 1933, the Jarrow works closed and three years later the 200 men marched to London, to great public sympathy but little avail. But the Hebburn works were purchased by Vickers-Armstrongs and then Swan Hunter in the early 1970s, and after a few dalliances with the receivers and Cammell Laird, they are now in the hands of the A&P group, still repairing ships on five acres of the Tyne. From the doorway of the Mambo 2 Italian restaurant, where I pause for a moment, I can see the swinging cranes. There were big ships down there, too. I look them up on my phone. Ulisse, it says, is a cable-laying barge getting a new mezzanine deck and some lifeboat platforms. But it is getting chilly, the restaurant won’t open for another hour and the rich fug of garlic is making my head swim. Hebburn knows I’m miserable now, I think. So, I head into town, hands stuffed in pockets and collar up against a stiffening breeze. My route takes me past the Orange Hall of the Hebburn Protestant Conservative Club, which is every bit as ugly as you’d imagine, large Union Jack fluttering limply on its dirty grey blue artex walls. On the next block stands the Iona Club, this one done out with shamrocks and green livery. It was a scene more like Belfast than Tyneside, reflecting South Tyneside’s Irish diaspora. After London, Liverpool and Glasgow, the North East had Britain’s largest influx of Irish immigrants – mainly to work the shipyards. But Hebburn had hundreds of Scottish immigrants too, to the extent that it was once known as Little Aberdeen. They say that the Sporting Arms in Denton had UVF flags as well as Union Jacks behind the bar. Happily, though, there’s been little of the sometimes poisonous sectarianism on Tyneside that you might find on the banks of the Clyde or the Mersey, perhaps because there are no football allegiances for it to fester within. Newcastle has one football club, and everyone goes to St James’ Park.
Back in town proper, I pass a cheerless hour in the grimly utilitarian Mountbatten Centre, a shopping precinct named after the IRA-assassinated great uncle of Prince Charles for the tangential reason that he commanded a destroyer built in Hebburn’s shipyards. In a crowded little café I am offered squirty cream on my latte, a delightful first this, and eat a stottie, which is what we Lancastrians would call an ‘oven bottom muffin’. For the particularly ravenous, there’s a ‘Gutbuster’ variety on the menu, but I resist. I read the Hebburn section of English Journey again, cream tickling my nose, and in particular the paragraph where Priestley ruminates on the lavish funerals he saw in Hebburn and across working-class England. Back on Station Road, I note that three adjacent shops offer some form of self-beautification: Nails and Beauty, MHA Nails and Sorento Tan and Vibro. These are the modern corollaries of those funerals. Here is where looking good and celebrating oneself matters, in the nightclub or the funeral parlour, a defiant glamour in the face of tough circumstance. And at the end, maybe, a floral tribute wreath that reads ‘Hebburn must be missing an angel.’
4
Readers of a certain vintage may remember the old Yellow Pages[4] advert which stated that it was ‘not just there for the nasty things in life.’ I feel the same about social media. It can sometimes feel like merely a toxic cesspit of bile stirred by the massive paddle that is Piers Morgan. But it can be fun, informative and genuinely social. I have made good and true friends through it. Bluff TV food baldie Gregg Wallace even married someone that he met on Twitter. It’s not all bullying, body shaming and hot takes, is it Gregg?
Throughout my research for this book, I ‘reached out’ often on Twitter and I was always heartened by the wit and generosity of the replies. When I mentioned I was headed to Tyneside, advice flowed in regarding chip shops in Tynemouth and the curry houses on Ocean Road, South Shields. Many correspondents told me to look out for the ferryman between North and South Shields who is, apparently, the spitting image of homegrown superstar Sting. Bri Hodgson tweeted ‘Great to see you’re up this way Stuart. I look forward to reading the results. I thoroughly recommend the Old Low Light Tavern, North Shields’. In a similar vein, Dan Jackson, whose book was proving invaluable, offered good advice: ‘Try some of the toffee-coloured taverns of North Shields. But remember kids, unless you’re a 10th Dan in karate I would advise against drinking anywhere west of Howard Street *taps nose*.’ We do, however, arrange to meet for a pint next day up in his neck of the woods in Monkseaton when my travels are done. And so, to the Metro again.
Jarrow, Bede, Simonside, Tyne Dock, Chichester (home of Catherine Cookson, proudly pronouncing the first syllable ‘Chai’ as if to distance itself from the pretty cathedral cloisters of the Sussex one) and eventually to South Shields. After the tight, narrow streets of Hebburn and Jarrow, South Shields immediately feels airy, light and open. Perhaps because the clouds have drifted off towards Norway and the sun’s out on Tyneside. I step down from the train with a spring in my step, bound for the ferry. Even in places where to elect a Tory would have been once unthinkable, like Blyth Valley, Redcar, Bishop Auckland, Hartlepool, Sedgefield, they did in 2019. But the Red Wall holds in South Shields, once the constituency of David Miliband (the Prince Across the Water of the Labour Party), and now represented by Emma Lewell-Buck, the daughter of shipyard workers. She once came to a show I did in the old Customs House by the Tyne and so is clearly a person of rare gifts and discernment. On that trip, I’d stayed in a brilliantly quirky hotel in Little Haven, where north-easterners once took holidays in the days before Magaluf was as accessible as Morpeth.
The art deco frontage of the prom faces a glittering expanse of blue where the Tyne meets the North Sea, two great piers arching their arms into the briny to welcome the little fishing boats home. The water buzzes from morning till night; tugs, smacks, ferries and the occasional giant car transporter the size of a destroyer. Maybe it was a destroyer. I wander down to Colman’s Seafood Temple, once a ruined bandstand and public toilet, now transformed into a paradisiacal version of a fish and chip shop where you can have elderflower gin, scallops and mushy pea fritters and watch the sun go down over the water. No time for that today, though. Before my rendezvous with Dan in Monkseaton, my itinerary needs to take in North Shields, Tynemouth and Whitley Bay heading north along the coast. To get there will involve a trip on one of the region’s best loved excursions.
People have been crossing the Tyne by boat for millennia, since an intrepid, inquisitive Iron Age resident of South or North Tyneside wondered what was going on over there. There’s actually been a commercial ferry service across the Tyne for nearly 700 years, but only one route survives: the ‘Shields Ferry’ connecting those two subtly different Geordie neighbours. People once spoke of ‘the sunny side and the money side’ though there is no consensus as to which was which. These days South feels a little more affluent but the North funkier. Each has a football club, the Robins and the Mariners, but the rivalry is nothing like as intense as that between Newcastle and Sunderland. Circa 800 years of co-dependence have seen to that.
Headed through South Shields for the ferry I fall into step with a ‘Swedish granny’ (her description) who has cycled from Stockholm bound for the Cop 28 environmental summit in Glasgow. Down at the terminal, she becomes an instant celebrity, the focus of some warm and encouraging interest, even if she clearly understood not one syllable of the accent. As The Pride of the Tyne pulls in, there’s an almost childish level excitement from at least one passenger. It isn’t the Sting lookalike at the helm today, sadly, but you can’t have everything. Getting my sea legs, I wander the deck catching stray fragments of conversation. Two nurses are talking about their daily struggles and tribulations in the beleaguered NHS. One man says to no one in particular: ‘Just think what all this was like when the shipyards were open’. An older woman is sharing nostalgia with her friends: ‘We had a twin tub. You could never get anything clean.’
The journey takes seven chilly minutes across the shimmering water and then we come ashore in North Shields. I like it immediately. Dan Jackson rightly characterises this tough, vivacious little town as ‘Tyneside profonde’ with streets packed with ‘tremendous historical depth and emotional power … the authenticity of the place is still striking.’ The Fish Quay and the adjoining Bell Street are fantastically characterful, the pubs, cafés and tapas bars all packed on a weekday mid-afternoon. The apartments for sale promise ‘incredible panoramic views of the River Tyne.’ The feel is not at all gentrified but quirky and individual with a genuine salt tang of the sea. North Shields is full to the brim with bars and pubs (reminding me of the local joke ‘North Shields is a drinking town with a fishing problem’). But there’s no doubt which is the most currently famous. The Low Lights Tavern is the oldest pub in the area and an alehouse for 400 years. It styles itself ‘a traditional pub with a real community of friends, many of them Real Ale lovers, who have joined a long list of fishermen, career sailors, travellers, merchants and ne’er do wells who have populated the cosy, low ceiling bar of the Grade II-Listed tavern in its history.’ It’s also the only one to recently get a photo shoot in the arts section of the New York Times.
Great pub though it is, the New York Times didn’t come to the Low Lights for the IPA but because of its most famous regular. As of 2022 they are calling Sam Fender the British Bruce Springsteen. That’s the kind of thing ‘they’ say all the time, but there’s some truth here. Young Fender is declaredly a fan of the Boss and his music has the same raw energy as early Springsteen, sharing its rooted sense of place in working-class communities. But there’s not much of the florid romanticism of ‘Born To Run’ here. There are no ‘highways jammed with broken heroes on last chance power drives’ in Fender’s music, but Poundshop Kardashians: ‘Newcastle on a Saturday night … all muscles and V-necks and fake tan.’ In ‘Howden Aldi Death Queue’, he views the pandemic through a crazed and hilarious punk analysis of Covid measures in his local discount supermarket. His anthem is ‘Seventeen Going Under’, a song which presents teenage life in North Shields not, as in Springsteen’s New Jersey, as a cinematic dream of neon and boardwalks and barefoot girls on car bonnets in soft summer rain, but of rucks on the cold September beaches, porn videos and ‘the boy who kicked Tom’s head in.’ This is the anonymous but haunting bully to whom the song’s most viscerally memorable line refers: ‘I was far too scared to hit him/But I would hit him in a heartbeat now.’
