Alex, 17, writing as part of the Headliners Young Journalist programme.

Last week, I wrote of the influence that William George Armstrong, later Lord Armstrong of Whitley, had on the creation of Newcastle University. This week, I write about another landmark in Newcastle that also benefited from his philanthropy, Jesmond Dene. It’s a distinctive green space that’s more than a park; for generations of city dwellers, it’s been a quiet retreat from urban life. A place to walk, encounter wildlife, meet friends and family or simply chill. But it's also an area that, before its creation through Victorian philanthropy, was a centre of religion and then home to industry.

The word ‘dene’ is a northern England term for a steep-sided wooded valley through which a burn, or small river, runs. It crops up frequently in northeast England, such as in Castle Eden Dene, Crimdon Dene, and indeed Dean Street in Newcastle, which runs between Grey Street and the area known as Side. Before the street existed, the route was occupied by the dene of the Lort Burn, a stream that flowed through medieval Newcastle down to the River Tyne. As Newcastle expanded, the dene was gradually filled in, and the burn was culverted underground, creating what became known as Dean Street.

One of the clues to this hidden landscape survives in nearby street names, for example, High Bridge recalls a bridge that once crossed the Lort Burn valley, and although the stream is now buried beneath the city, its course still shapes the topography of Newcastle’s historic centre, serving as a reminder of the natural landscape upon which Newcastle was built.

But back to Jesmond Dene, a wooded valley covering some 33 acres formed by the Ouseburn (Jesmond means 'mouth of the Ouseburn’), a small river that flows south toward the Tyne and the lower reaches of which I wrote of in Ouseburn. The dene’s waterfalls, rock formations, bridges, and dense vegetation create a rare environment within a major city, underscoring Jesmond Dene’s ongoing significance as a preserved natural space amid Newcastle’s growth.

During the nineteenth century, Armstrong acquired land in the dene and, in line with Victorian ideas about landscape design, reshaped it into an elaborate private park associated with his nearby residence. The result combined natural scenery with elements crafted for a picturesque effect. Curving paths, ornamental structures, planted woodland, and dramatic viewpoints encouraged visitors to experience the landscape emotionally and visually, reflecting nineteenth-century beliefs that nature promoted well-being.

Armstrong then made the significant decision in 1883 to gift Jesmond Dene to the people of Newcastle, an act of philanthropy that transformed a private ‘playground’ into a public amenity, consistent with a wider Victorian tradition in which wealthy industrialists funded libraries, parks, galleries, and educational institutions for civic benefit. Such gifts reflected the ideas of the time on social responsibility and urban improvement, with the growing view that, in rapidly industrialising cities, access to green space was essential; therefore, nineteenth-century public parks in the UK carried important social significance.

Pollution and overcrowded dwellings plagued industrial Newcastle during its rapid growth in coal mining and shipbuilding, and places like Jesmond Dene offered recreation, exercise, and respite from that. Jesmond Dene also developed a distinctive identity by retaining a more irregular, absorbing atmosphere compared to formal Victorian parks. Even today, the contrast between the park’s busy urban surroundings and the secluded valley heightens its function as a place of escape and reflection within Newcastle.

A notable feature of the park is the Old Mill, an evocative remnant of the Ouseburn Valley’s industrial past. Hidden among trees beside the Ouseburn, the picturesque ruin appears almost like a medieval relic, yet its history tells the story of the valley’s transformation from a rural setting of water-powered industry into the Victorian parkland enjoyed today.

Documented evidence shows that Watermills were in use in the dene since at least the 1300s, and it's known that a watermill stood on the site of the present one from at least 1739, when it was known as Mabel’s Mill, the name later changing to Heaton Mill. At about the time the current mill was built, the Freeman family took ownership, and several generations of that family operated the mill, with their name surviving nearby in Paddy Freeman’s Park and the Freeman Hospital.

As more industry developed along the Ouseburn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the mill adapted to changing economic needs. After its use as a flour mill, it was used to grind pig meal and later to crush flint destined for the pottery industry further down the valley.

The mill’s purpose changed again when Armstrong purchased the dene in 1862. By then, it was no longer commercially viable and had ceased industrial operations, and was instead used as a domestic dwelling until the 1920s.

The building visible today dates mainly from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, although it’s believed to incorporate earlier structures. Now a romantic ruin, it retains traces of its machinery and mill workings, with rocky walls, a riverside setting, and a nearby waterfall, making it a popular spot in Jesmond Dene.

And so to that waterfall, perhaps the park’s most famous feature. Many visitors assume it is natural, but it is a remarkable piece of Victorian engineering by Armstrong, who redesigned the course of the Ouseburn to dramatic effect, with the waterfall his largest intervention. Explosives were used to blast out a gorge, and the excavated stone was then used to build up the sides of the cascade, with the aim of creating something that looked wild and natural, when in truth all was by careful design.

Nearby, Armstrong also created a grotto from an old quarry, allowing Victorian visitors to explore this artificial cave and experience a sense of mystery before emerging to views of the waterfall and the valley beyond. Such features reflected the nineteenth-century taste for romantic landscapes that combined nature, engineering and theatrical effects.

Hidden among the trees above Jesmond Dene are the atmospheric ruins of St Mary’s Chapel, which, in many ways, is the hidden heart of the dene, as the oldest surviving church building in Newcastle. Although only fragments remain today, the chapel was once one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in medieval northern England.

It’s believed that the chapel dates from the early twelfth century and was founded by the Grenville family, Lords of Jesmond. The oldest surviving feature is a Norman chancel arch dating from this period, while additions were made during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the chapel’s importance grew.

And that importance stemmed from the belief that it was a place of miracles. Medieval tradition held that the Virgin Mary had appeared in the valley, and a sacred relic associated with her was kept at the chapel. Pilgrims travelled from across England to visit the shrine and the nearby holy well, seeking healing and spiritual aid. By the fifteenth century, people regarded St Mary’s as a significant pilgrimage site, with one contemporary benefactor even ranking it alongside the great shrines of Canterbury and the old St Paul’s in London.

St Mary’s was more than a chapel, as historical records indicate that it formed part of a larger religious complex that included a hospice/hospital where pilgrims could receive care. The chapel frequently appears in medieval legal disputes involving both the Crown and the Papacy, underscoring its wealth and significance, but its fortunes changed dramatically during the Reformation after its dissolution in 1548, and the buildings gradually fell into ruin, with parts of the site reused for agricultural purposes, while other buildings disappeared altogether. By the nineteenth century, what remained had become a romantic relic overlooking the dene.

The ruins survived, in part, thanks to Armstrong's efforts after he acquired Jesmond Dene and today, the chapel is protected under Grade II as both a listed structure and a scheduled monument. More than that, its once importance still influences Newcastle’s geography, as it’s believed that Pilgrim Street takes its name from the route used by travellers journeying to the shrine connecting medieval Newcastle to wider religious networks across England.

Finally, let’s take a look at Armstrong Bridge, one of Newcastle’s most distinctive Victorian landmarks, which spans the wooded valley of the Ouseburn at the southern end of Jesmond Dene. It’s an indication of Newcastle's notable transformation in the late nineteenth century, with the bridge’s elegant appearance complementing the dene’s natural beauty. As the bridge sits on land mined for coal, Armstrong designed it to adjust itself if the ground below moved, making it the first bridge in the world to do so. It took two years to build, cost £30,000 (close to £4m today), and opened in 1878.

There is a story that Lady Armstrong wanted the bridge built to make life easier for the horses that otherwise pulled heavy loads up the sides of the valley. When it first opened, it was for pedestrians and horse-drawn wagons; later, it carried motorised traffic until 1963, when that was discontinued because the bridge could not support the additional weight. Amazingly, there were threats to demolish the bridge in the 1970s (then again, that threat seemed to hang over the whole of Newcastle at the time) due to the high cost of its repair, but fortunately, a strong public campaign involving local residents, historians and conservationists argued that the bridge was not merely a road crossing but an important piece of Newcastle’s heritage.

Following its rescue, substantial restoration work was carried out on the bridge in the 1980s and 90s, with some structural elements replaced or replicated, ensuring that it could continue to stand while preserving its historic appearance. It is now a Grade II listed structure and one of the finest surviving examples of Victorian bridge engineering in Britain.

Today, the Old Mill, together with the waterfall, Armstrong Bridge, and St Mary’s Chapel, helps make Jesmond Dene a place where natural charm and local history blend in a uniquely Newcastle landscape, but the dene also holds environmental importance with its woodland habitats supporting bird, mammal, insect, and plant species that are uncommon in heavily urbanised settings. As awareness of biodiversity loss and environmental protection has grown, municipal green spaces such as Jesmond Dene have taken on greater importance, serving not only as recreational landscapes but also as ecological corridors and refuges for wildlife.

Culturally, Jesmond Dene occupies a powerful place within Newcastle’s identity, appearing frequently in local memory, literature and photography, with the dene’s importance perhaps increasing as Newcastle evolved from industrial powerhouse to post-industrial city. As heavy industry declined, landscapes associated with wellbeing, heritage, and environmental quality gained renewed value, and Jesmond Dene now contributes to perceptions of Newcastle as a liveable, culturally rich city rather than merely a former centre of coal mining and shipbuilding. Unlike iconic monuments associated with tourism, its significance is often intimate and personal. For many local residents, Jesmond Dene is simply part of their daily routines, such as strolling for gentle exercise, walking with their dogs and running, as well as social gatherings like picnicking with friends and family, attending seasonal events, or simply seeking quiet after work.

Such everyday relationships make Jesmond Dene culturally important in ways that are difficult to quantify, but ultimately its significance lies in more than scenery. The same wooded valley has served different purposes over the centuries: as a natural environment, a productive landscape, a private estate, a public park, an ecological habitat, and a community space. Each layer of use adds to its meaning and serves as a physical record of changing relationships between nature and the people of Newcastle. In a city once defined by heavy industry, Jesmond Dene offers something increasingly valuable: an indication that civic identity comes not only from buildings and commerce, but also from landscapes where communities rest, reflect, and connect with the natural world.

From the acceptance speech of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. on receiving his Honorary Doctor of Civil Law from Newcastle University

While I am back from my train travels on the continent, it's going to take me a while to write up a Meander on that, so in the meantime, he’s one more local to home.

One of the things I’ve noticed since moving back to northeast England to live, having spent close to 50 years living and working in the south of England, is how much more of a ‘university town’ the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne is than the one I left in 1974. Indeed, arguably, few institutions have shaped modern Newcastle as profoundly as the university. Although often discussed primarily as a centre of education and research, the university’s significance extends far beyond academia, with the relationship between the city and its university unusually close, probably because the institution did not develop in isolation from the city, but emerged directly from the needs, ambitions, and industries of northeast England.

And before I go any further, I should add that Newcastle University rejected my student application to read biochemistry there some 52 years ago. A disappointment at the time, but I hold no grudges, as that rejection turned out to be a blessing for me. In truth, I am no academic and would have no doubt ended my time at the university with a poor degree and a severely damaged liver. The rejection encouraged me to spread my wings and move to London, and after a few years in forensic science, I then made my little intellect go a long way as I climbed the slippery corporate ladder in Aerospace and Defence. I may not have achieved everything I might have aspired to in my career, but I achieved everything of which I was capable, and I'm comfortable with that. Anyway, this is not about me but about the university.

It may come as a surprise that the university we see today, with some 28,000 students from 130 countries, came into being as recently as 1963, when King’s, a college of Durham University, separated from that establishment to become Newcastle University, although the story reaches much further back in time and is deeply rooted in Victorian industrial society.

As any regular readers of my pieces will know, northeast England in the nineteenth century was one of Britain’s great industrial regions, with rapid growth driven by coal mining, engineering and shipbuilding. It was the resulting population growth that, in 1834, led to the establishment of the Newcastle School of Medicine and Surgery by a group of local doctors, specifically to meet a pressing need for trained medical professionals to serve local communities and treat frequent workplace injuries.

While the medical school was initially independent, it soon developed links with the University of Durham, established a couple of years earlier, and within 20 years Newcastle’s Medical School had formally become part of that University as the Newcastle-upon-Tyne College of Medicine. Thus began a long relationship in which Newcastle’s College of Medicine served as Durham University’s major scientific and medical campus, while Durham University retained stronger traditions in theology and the humanities.

A crucial turning point in the creation of what would become Newcastle University came with the philanthropy of George Armstrong, one of Victorian Britain’s most important industrial figures, especially in weapons manufacturing, and the founder of vast engineering works on Tyneside. Armstrong believed scientific education should serve society and industry, and in 1871, he funded the creation of the College of Physical Science in Newcastle to provide scientific education for the industries driving the northeast English economy.

That college later became known as Armstrong College, and by the late 19th century, it had become a major part of northeast England’s intellectual infrastructure, supplying engineers, scientists, and architects who helped shape both the region and the wider world. In cultural terms, this created an enduring identity for Newcastle as a city of innovation and practical intelligence rather than merely as an industrial labour city. On graduation, students often went on to work in the region’s coalfields, shipyards, railways and steelworks, while some travelled to undertake engineering projects overseas.

In 1937, the Medical College and Armstrong College merged to form King’s College, Newcastle, although remaining part of Durham University. Over the years, Kings became one of Britain’s strongest centres for medicine, engineering and agriculture, earning an international reputation for major contributions to public health and industrial research.

An example of recent pioneering research through the university’s Centre for Life and links with the NHS created one of Britain’s strongest regional genetics programmes, including work on ageing and mitochondrial diseases ( inherited disorders that affect how cells produce energy), with the university becoming a world leader in translational ageing research through its Institute for Ageing and the NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre. One of the most significant outcomes was research underpinning the development of ‘three-parent IVF’ (mitochondrial donation treatment), designed to prevent mothers from passing severe mitochondrial disease to children. Newcastle scientists were central to the science that led the UK to become the first country to legalise the technique, identifying genes associated with muscular dystrophy, neurodegenerative disorders, inherited blindness, and rare childhood diseases. Their work in human genetics and genomic medicine helped improve diagnosis rates for rare conditions across the NHS.

Newcastle researchers have also developed new cancer diagnostic tools, including work on skin cancer detection and precision medicine approaches, and have contributed to brain cancer research and experimental therapies.

As you might expect from a university so close to the sea, the university’s marine scientists, working partly from the historic Dove Marine Laboratory at Cullercoats, have contributed major research into ocean circulation, climate change impacts, marine biodiversity and fisheries sustainability.

As well as a growing intellectual presence in science and technology, King’s College’s teaching of arts and social sciences expanded significantly, functioning as a catalyst for artistic and intellectual life in Newcastle, with the Fine Art department, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, becoming internationally influential through figures such as Richard Hamilton, often regarded as a founder of Pop Art. Hamilton’s teaching helped shape artists and musicians, including Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, whose sophisticated visual and musical style reflected Newcastle’s surprisingly avant-garde artistic environment.

The 1960s were also a period of major expansion in British higher education, and it’s therefore no surprise that Newcastle emerged from under Durham University’s wing as one of the UK’s major “red brick” civic universities, reflecting the institution’s growing size, academic ambition and distinct identity as part of Newcastle.

Like many British universities, and especially given Newcastle’s radical past, the university became a centre of student activism, political debate, and cultural experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s. An example of this came in 1967, when the university awarded Dr Martin Luther King, the inspirational civil rights campaigner, an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law, the only UK university to do so during his lifetime, an act that remains recognised as an important moment in Newcastle University’s history.

Over the years, I have met many people across the country who once studied at Newcastle University and still speak fondly of their time as students and of the city and its people. Newcastle’s identity as a vibrant cultural city would be far weaker without the intellectual energy generated by the university population, while the city’s thriving theatre scene, galleries, museums, and festivals benefit enormously from the presence of thousands of students and academics, who create audiences for cultural events and contribute to public debate.

What’s also striking about Newcastle University alumni is how often they reflect the university’s blend of science and engineering, creative arts, and civic engagement. I’ve already mentioned Bryan Ferry, and another example is Britain’s most respected war correspondent and broadcaster, Kate Adie, who studied at Newcastle in the 1960s. Then there’s the comic actor Rowan Atkinson, who completed a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Newcastle after studying at Oxford. In literature, there’s Neil Astley, founder of Bloodaxe Books, one of Britain’s most important independent poetry publishers, who is strongly associated with the literary scene in northeast England, helping to publish major contemporary poets. Given the university’s track record in science and medicine, it’s no surprise that Sir Liam Donaldson, former Chief Medical Officer for England, who became one of Britain’s most influential public health figures, was a Newcastle graduate. And before him came John Snow, who was among the first cohort of students to the School of Medicine in 1832 and became famous for his pioneering work linking contaminated water to cholera transmission, which helped found modern epidemiology. His act of removing the handle from a pump in London’s Soho district, from which infected water came, is still commemorated by a duplicate Victorian-style pump (without a handle) located approximately where the original stood. Moving from medicine to Architecture and Design, Terry Farrell, one of Britain’s leading architects and urban planners, reflects the capabilities of Newcastle’s architecture school, which has a long and strong national reputation.

It’s not only in economic terms that a university exerts influence; it can also shape how cities envision themselves. As you walk around campus, you can see how the university has also transformed Newcastle’s architecture, with its buildings forming a major part of the city centre landscape, blending Victorian Gothic, Edwardian civic design, postwar modernism, and contemporary architecture. Structures such as the Armstrong building embody the confidence of the Victorian civic culture, while the university’s libraries, lecture halls and public spaces create an intellectual district within the city, linking education to everyday urban life. Unlike more isolated campuses, Newcastle University stays interwoven with the fabric of the city, encouraging interaction among students, residents, businesses and cultural institutions

Perhaps it’s the practical and civic origins that also distinguish Newcastle University from older English universities associated with aristocratic tradition or ecclesiastical foundations. The university was born from urban modernity and industrial ambition as a practical institution serving an industrial region, and that heritage still shapes its culture today with a focus on practical application rather than purely theoretical science. In its early days as King's College, it provided generations of northeast England-born students from humble backgrounds with higher education and access to professions and opportunities previously unavailable to them, and the college became part of a broader postwar ideal that higher education should serve the public good rather than an elite minority.

It has since evolved into a globally recognised university while retaining a strong civic and regional identity, and has become central to northeast England’s economic and post-industrial transformation. As heavy industry declined, higher education and research emerged as important sources of employment, innovation and regeneration, with the university attracting international students, supporting technological and medical research and making a significant contribution to the city’s economy.

Over the decades, the university also helped shape the city of Newcastle’s reputation as relatively open, socially mixed, and less dominated by inherited privilege than some southern university cities, and there doesn’t seem to be the same ’Town v Gown’ tension you find elsewhere. The close ties between the university and the city, through links to civic institutions such as the Great North Museum: Hancock, remain, reinforcing a deep connection between the university and the cultural life of northeast England, as well as the region’s regeneration. These close collaborations with galleries, archives and theatres strengthen the university’s function as a guardian and interpreter of regional heritage. Archaeological projects connected to Hadrian’s Wall, industrial history and Northumbrian culture help preserve northeast England’s distinctive historical identity while presenting it to international audiences.

Overall, Newcastle University helps Newcastle present itself not simply as a former industrial centre, but as a modern, creative, and globally connected city with a keen sense of civic identity. The university has educated generations of citizens from the region, the rest of the UK, and the world, transformed the city’s urban landscape and nurtured its artistic and scientific culture, mirroring Newcastle’s own transformation from an industrial powerhouse to a contemporary cultural and intellectual centre. Long may it continue so to do.

We are delighted to unite these incredible archaeological finds from across the North for our latest exhibition. From Roman silver discovered along Hadrian’s Wall to 9th-century gold found by a Newcastle University student, this is a rare opportunity to see these scattered treasures displayed alongside one another. We can’t wait for people to experience the thrill of these finds and the fascinating stories they reveal about our shared past.

Malavika Anderson, Museum Manager at the Great North Museum: Hancock

This week’s Meander is of my recent visit to the ‘Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found’ exhibition that’s running at Newcastle’s Great North Museum: Hancock, but before looking at the exhibition, let’s take a look at what at first glance seems the museum’s strange name.

When I was young, the museum was known simply as the Hancock Museum, named after the Victorian naturalist brothers John and Albany Hancock, who were among the most important scientific figures in 19th-century Newcastle, helping turn Tyneside into a serious centre for natural history, zoology, and scientific collecting.

Most regard John, a naturalist, ornithologist, taxidermist, collector and illustrator as the principal ‘Hancock’, who became famous for transforming taxidermy from stiff specimen display into something far more lifelike and artistic. Before John, the arrangement of stuffed animals was very ‘mechanical’ while he pioneered displays that showed birds and animals in natural poses and within realistic habitats. An ideal central to John’s work was that museums should educate, inspire curiosity, and make science accessible to everyone. Many see those ideals as having a huge influence on Victorian museum design and wildlife presentation, and indeed helped shape how museums work today, with some holding John up as “the father of modern taxidermy.”

Of course, taxidermy today occupies a complicated space, neither universally condemned nor universally accepted, with attitudes depending heavily on how the animals were obtained, why the taxidermy was created, and where it is displayed.

Public reactions to taxidermy vary widely, with some visitors finding it valuable for education, conservation and scientific study, while others view it as eerie and exploitative, prompting strong ethical criticism centred on animal welfare. That tension has become part of modern museum interpretation, with many museums, such as the Great Northern, now actively encouraging visitors to think critically about humanity’s relationship with animals and nature rather than presenting specimens in a neutral manner.

Victorian museums often reflected an attitude towards animals as specimens or curiosities, grounded in the idea that humans had dominion over nature, whereas today many people instead emphasise ecological responsibility and respect for animal life. As a result, rows of mounted animals can feel unsettling or sad to some visitors, rather than educational or inspiring.

However, museums still use historic specimens for zoological research, DNA analysis, extinction studies, and environmental history. A 19th-century bird specimen, for example, can help scientists study species decline, the effects of pollution and climate change, and genetic variation. Also, many museums argue that taxidermy helps visitors connect emotionally with wildlife in ways photographs sometimes cannot. Seeing a life-sized animal up close can inspire interest in conservation and preserve knowledge of extinct or endangered species.

Museums today are usually much more careful about ethical sourcing and conservation messaging, and modern institutions do not kill animals for display; specimens come from animals that died naturally in wildlife parks or conservation programmes.

Overall, the debate around taxidermy highlights a cultural shift from collecting nature to possessing and classifying it, to conserving nature with a focus on biodiversity loss, extinction, and environmental responsibility.

Albany, John’s older brother, was a distinguished scientist in a different, less controversial field, specialising in marine biology, microscopic organisms, molluscs, and other sea creatures. He became internationally respected for detailed scientific studies of nudibranchs (sea slugs) and other marine invertebrates. Where John was more public-facing and artistic, Albany was known for his painstaking observation, scientific illustration and anatomical precision. Together, the brothers represented two sides of Victorian science. Public education and spectacle with rigorous research and classification.

There was a deep tie between the Hancock brothers and Newcastle’s scientific community, especially the Natural History Society of Northumbria and the New Museum of Natural History, as it was first called, which opened in 1884 after John Hancock donated his collections and funds toward a purpose-built museum for the city. The museum soon became a symbol of Victorian civic pride, a major centre for natural history, and an educational institution. It was renamed The Hancock Museum in 1890, following John’s death that same year.

The museum maintained its focus on natural history until the end of the 20th century, but in 2003, a redesign and restoration of the Hancock building began, bringing together the collections of the Hancock Museum, Newcastle’s Museum of Antiquities, and Newcastle University’s Shefton Museum. This transition would turn the Hancock Museum from a natural history collection into one that offered natural history, archaeology, an understanding of ancient civilisations, geology, and, importantly, the regional history of northeast England. In 2009, the Great North Museum: Hancock opened its doors.

So, to the exhibition ‘Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found,’ one of the museum’s major archaeology exhibitions for 2026, which brings together spectacular objects from across Northern Britain to explore not just what treasure is, but why people value and hide or dispose of objects over time. The exhibition also taps into larger debates in archaeology and museums about how objects are classified as ‘treasure’ under the law. Who has the right to own or display historical finds, and the relationships among detectorists, archaeologists, and museums.

At one level, the exhibition is full of visually striking artefacts such as Bronze Age objects, Roman jewellery, Anglo-Saxon gold and Tudor coin hoards, but goes beyond simply displaying precious items by asking questions such as why bury these things and who did so? What turns an old object into ‘treasure’, and who owns the past once something is rediscovered?

That broader approach makes the exhibition feel less like a conventional ‘treasures room’ and more like an exploration of how archaeology connects emotion, history, and identity. The exhibition is also designed to be immersive and family-friendly rather than purely academic, with interactive displays, themes of discovery and excavation, and family trails and activities.

The strongest aspect of Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found is that it treats treasure not merely as wealth but as evidence of human fear and survival, including ritual or protective acts and the changing cultural meaning of objects. People often temporarily buried things in the ground to keep them safe (think Samuel Pepys and his cheese during the Great Fire of London), but in some cases, items were deposited in the earth or even in water with no intention of ever retrieving them. Of course, sometimes valuables might just have been lost.

A buried coin hoard might once have represented emergency savings during war, a religious offering after grief or loss, or even stolen booty hidden for later retrieval. A number of Bronze Age swords have been found in watery places, like the River Tyne. Many of these were deliberately thrown into the waters as offerings to the gods, with, at the time, rivers, lakes and boggy ground probably seen as places where you might enter the god’s realm. The Amble Rapier, for example, was found on the beach at Amble in Northumberland after a storm.

One of the exhibition’s standout objects for me is the Tribley Shield, a Bronze Age shield discovered near Chester-le-Street. Its story is almost as fascinating as the object itself and it is a perfect symbol for the exhibition’s central themes. Having survived being buried underground for thousands of years, it was rediscovered in the 18th century and broken into pieces so the bronze could be shared among friends; however, two surviving sections have now been reunited. It reminds us of how ‘discoverers’ perceived the value of what they discovered and how recognition of value, from pure financial to historical, has evolved.

Many treasures have a strong connection to their original owners; for example, the Aemilia Ring and the Ord Cross bear names of individuals, while the finds from a burial at Kirkhaugh, a village in Northumberland, also tell someone’s story. The finds, including a ‘cushion stone’ used to work metals, gold lock rings, and flint tools, are understood to be the personal effects of a craftsperson prospecting for metals in the North Pennines.

Given its proximity to Hadrian’s Wall, it’s also no surprise that the exhibition includes finds from Roman Britain and the frontier world around the wall. These include Roman jewellery hoards, coins, and objects associated with military life in the North. One notable find is the Birnie coin hoard, discovered in Scotland, which helps illuminate relationships between Rome and peoples living north of Hadrian’s Wall.

One particularly compelling inclusion is the West Woodburn Hoard, a set of rare early medieval gold artefacts discovered during an excavation in 2025.

In 2021, metal detectorist Alan Grey discovered two gold objects in Redesdale, Northumberland: a socketed mount (probably the head of a decorative pin) and a brooch. These highly decorative objects dated from the 9th century CE, and this discovery prompted archaeologists from the Northeast Museums and Newcastle University to organise an excavation in the same location.

On the first day, Yara Souza, a Newcastle University archaeology student from Orlando, Florida, uncovered a gold socketed mount, similar to the one already found. Alan, who was supporting the excavators, had used his metal detector to initially identify the location of the object, leaving it to Yara to carefully remove it from the earth, who later offered, “I couldn’t believe I’d found something so quickly in my first ever excavation, it was amazing to discover something that hasn’t been seen for more than a thousand years.”

The site where these objects were found lies near Dere Street, an important Roman road that remained in use long after the Roman Empire’s demise and eventually became part of the modern-day A68. Gold was high-status and used only by the elite. As Dere Street connected two major religious centres at Jedburgh and Hexham, experts think the two objects could have had a religious or ceremonial use.

Another treasure on display illustrates different attitudes towards ownership. Elements of the Capheaton Hoard were melted down so that the precious metals could be reused, while the rest became the property of the antiquarian Richard Payne Knight, who bequeathed it to the British Museum. Similarly, the Corbridge Lanx was part of a larger hoard, most of which was melted down and sold to a local goldsmith. However, it was declared a treasure trove and passed into the hands of the Dukes of Northumberland, who eventually sold it to the British Museum in the 1990s.

Some of the finds are from a later period, such as the Tudor period, ‘Mason’ and ‘Short’ Hoards found by individuals going about their daily lives, which show how treasure can be found by chance.

Richard Mason found a jug while renovating a house on the island of Lindisfarne in 2003, but it was not until 2011, when he was cleaning it, that he realised it contained 17 gold and silver coins, including a rare gold scudo of Pope Clement VII. The latest coin in the hoard is a silver penny of Elizabeth I from 1562, indicating that the hoard was hidden after that time. Coincidentally, in 1963, Alan Short found a hoard of 50 silver coins in almost the same spot on Lindisfarne and these coins also date from the reign of Elizabeth I, a time when Lindisfarne was a garrison on the frontier with Scotland, and both hoards might represent valuables buried for safekeeping by soldiers.

The ‘Birnie’ and ‘Dairsie’ Hoards of Roman silver from Scotland illuminate the complicated politics of Rome’s relationship with people living north of Hadrian’s Wall.

Excavations at Birnie, following an initial discovery in 1996 of some coins by Hamish Stuart, a metal detectorist, revealed two separate hoards buried close together in local pots, each containing 310 and 315 coins, respectively. All the coins are silver denarii, with the latest dated to 196 CE, during the reign of the Emperor Septimius Severus, who was campaigning against the Caledonians at that time. A teenage metal detectorist, David Hall, found the Dairsie Hoard at a detectorists’ rally. The hoard consists of over 300 pieces of hack-silver (cut-up silver used as currency by weight) that date to the end of the 3rd century CE. Both are likely to represent Roman payments to local tribes; part of Roman diplomatic efforts to exert control over communities beyond the Empire’s northern frontier, but the reason for the silver’s burial remains a mystery.

Not all ‘Treasure’ is silver, gold, or precious jewels. The display also includes wooden writing tablets from the Roman fort at Vindolanda, often considered treasures, especially given that wooden objects are prone to rot. The tablets give us an unparalleled insight into the everyday lives of people on Rome’s northern frontier.

There’s also ‘Frank’s Casket’, appreciated today for the evidence it provides about Anglo-Saxon art and the blending of different traditions to create something unique. It would have been a prized object not only because of its fine relief carving but also because the material, whale bone, was comparatively rare. Fine-grained whale bone was easy to carve and became a material associated with the elite and, by Medieval times, with royalty. The elaborate carvings on the casket draw on Christian, Germanic, and Classical traditions, and include inscriptions in runes and Latin, suggesting that the intended recipient was educated and/or highborn, and that the casket was probably made for a king or a leading clergyman.

I will close this not with some high-value trinket, but with the largest find in the exhibition, a sandstone coffin, which shows that some dramatic archaeological discoveries do not always result from deliberate excavation. Sometimes they happen by accident.

In 1903, workmen digging the foundations for a new warehouse in Newcastle came across two sandstone coffins. These were relatively small and likely to be child burials, with one coffin containing human remains and an elaborate Roman pot. Over a hundred years later, in 2008, archaeologists from Durham University, excavating at Clavering Place in Newcastle in advance of building work, discovered two sandstone adult coffins. The presumption is that these were the burials of high-status individuals.

I hope I’ve given you a taste of the Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found exhibition, and for those with an interest in archaeological and historical sites, and who live in or plan to visit northeast England, a visit to this exhibition and, indeed, a perusal of the Great North Museum: Hancock itself will not disappoint.

There’s now going to be a short gap in these weekly meanderings while I go off on my ‘In search of Caravaggio’ European tour (no, I’m not aiming to find his last remains, but to look at as many of his artworks as possible). There will no doubt be a future write-up (or two) of my adventure. ‘See’ you again in a couple of weeks.

Vincent van Gogh, who painted more than a few portraits in his time.

It was to the ‘Exploring Identity’ exhibition at Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery a week or two back. It’s a thoughtful, thought-provoking portrait-focused show that runs alongside an exhibition of the 48 shortlisted paintings from last year’s ‘Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award’. Together, the two exhibitions form an interaction between past and present portraiture, with the award-winning paintings showing where portraiture is now and ‘Exploring Identity’ setting a historical context.

As not everyone may be familiar with the ‘Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award’, I’ll start with a few words on that.

Running since 1980 and organised by the British National Portrait Gallery, the award has become one of the most prestigious international competitions for contemporary portrait painting and a major platform for both up-and-coming and established artists working in portraiture. The competition is known for high artistic standards, and the quality of the submitted work is extremely high. In 2025, the competition received 1,314 entries from artists in 61 countries. The judging panel viewed 274 works in person and selected 46 paintings as a ‘shortlist’ for the exhibition, which showcased an engaging range of approaches to portraiture, from classic to contemporary styles. These paintings largely explore relationships, both social and familial, with a focus on the relationship between the artist and the sitter. At the end of the competition, after the selection of the winners, the National Portrait Gallery hosts a major exhibition of the shortlisted works and also allows them to tour. An important aspect of the latter is that it brings world-class contemporary portraiture to regional audiences.

The competition has a major influence on contemporary figurative painting, establishing a benchmark for technical and conceptual excellence while highlighting the ongoing evolution of portraiture. Many past winners and exhibitors have gone on to major careers, making it a kind of barometer for the future of portrait painting. The winner receives £35,000, second place £12,000, and third place £10,000. The young artist (aged 18-30) winner receives £ 9,000.

Now back to the Laing Gallery, where the two exhibitions sit in separate rooms and in the spirit of van Gogh, they certainly convey how portraitists aim to express the essence of a person, not simply as a physical likeness, but to reveal something deeper about their personality and experience.

So let’s enter the first room and ‘Exploring Identity’, a collection of 27 portraits in distinctive styles drawn from the collections in the Laing, Hatton and Shipley galleries.

The paintings on show span several centuries, helping visitors trace the evolution of portrait painting from the 16th century to today and, across that timeline, explore ideas such as emotional and psychological selfhood, culture and heritage, and the relationship between artist and sitter.

Traditionally, prominent individuals (usually men) commissioned portraits to ensure a memory of them would endure. Filled with symbolism, such portraits regularly depicted an idealised version of the sitter in beautiful surroundings, expensive clothing or uniforms, and indeed armour, signifying power and strength. Props such as books and artworks symbolised knowledge and culture, while a coy smile could hint at an untold secret. Together, the artist and sitter created the identity the sitter wished to present to the world, with each painting telling a story without words.

One notable striking example of this is ‘Hazel in Black and Gold‘ by Sir John Lavery, depicting his wife, Hazel. Lavery’s portraits often sit somewhere between realism and refinement with loose brushwork that’s still attentive to gesture and presence, showing how portraiture can act almost like theatre with the sitter collaborating in moulding their appearance. None more so in this, with golden highlights standing out in this otherwise overwhelmingly dark portrait, and the sharp contrast exaggerates Hazel’s elegance, while her military-style hat may be a nod to the ongoing Great War when ‘Hazel in Black and Gold‘ was painted. As a footnote, Hazel apparently attended the private view of the painting, disguised as a highwayman, to gauge people's honest reactions to it.

Another painting that caught my eye was ‘Study for Figure Vl’ by Francis Bacon, part of a series created during Bacon’s tempestuous relationship with his lover Peter Lacy. Bacon’s portraits are often the most immediately striking and disquieting works in any room, and rather than presenting a likeness, in this painting Bacon distorts the human face into something virtually unstable, as if identity itself appeared in flux. Bacon is known for his exploration of the extremes of human passion, and in this, he seems to capture the sitter’s unease in an enclosed space, a frequent motif in Bacon’s work. There has been speculation that Bacon’s use of claustrophobic imagery indicates instances of neglect in Bacon’s childhood. However, Bacon stated that he simply used cage imagery as a device to focus the image, often referring to “trapping an image or moment” inside a painting.

There are plenty of strong women depicted in the three works by Beryl Fowler (née Menzies) in the exhibition. Born in Newcastle in 1881, Beryl excelled at portraying confident and expressive female subjects. None illustrates this better than ‘Annunciate,’ in which the sitter, peering from behind her dark hair, meets the viewer’s gaze with a defiant expression that conveys strength, confidence, and a hint of challenge.

I wrote about northeast artist Norman Cornish, who is known for documenting the industrial landscape and working life of northeast England, a couple of years ago. Norman began working as a coal miner at 14 (as did my maternal grandfather) and retired 33 years later to pursue a full-time career as a professional artist. Although self-taught, many consider Norman the most celebrated of the ‘Pitman Painters.’ There are 29 known self-portraits by Norman, the most recent discovered in 2024 on the reverse of another painting. The one above is an early one, painted when he was around 30, and painting was a pastime for him.

Space does not allow me to share all the others in the exhibition, but suffice it to say that there are many more portraits by household names such as Frank Auerbach, Christina Robertson, Frederic Leighton, Harold Knight, and Arthur Hughes. Also represented are some of the leading, but lesser-known, artists from northeast England, such as Robert Jobling and Harry Thubron.

So, let’s move from the first room, which offered us a historical perspective on the portrait, to the second room, which presents the exhibition of the 46 shortlisted artists of the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award, offering the portraits of today. Interestingly, the symbolism I mentioned earlier is still used in some contemporary works, indicating that the meanings of such symbols remain relevant to observers today.

There are some sensational paintings in this second room, which can seem a bit overwhelming. Some pieces have a photo-realistic appeal, others have their subjects emerging from a maelstrom of paint, one of which is by the winner of the first prize, Moira Cameron, for her self-portrait, ‘A Life Lived’, of which Moira offers “The lines on my face, the subtle shadows, tell a story of time passing, of laughter and worry, of a life fully experienced”. By all accounts, this portrait grabbed the judges’ attention with its emphatic, non-naturalistic treatment of the figure, combined with the use of vivid colour and pattern. To them, this gives the piece an energy, vitality and humour that contrasts with the subject’s introspective pose and expression, creating a compelling tension that appealed to their eyes and their hearts.

Tim Benson won second prize for ‘Cliff, Outreach Worker,’ whom he first painted in 2019 as part of a series highlighting inspirational London Haringey residents who serve the local community. Some years later, Cliff returned for this portrait, made from sketches and photographs taken in his office, with Tim offering, ‘Cliff has a facial difference, which is as much part of his story as his work in the community. Painting him has afforded me the opportunity to challenge historical notions of beauty in portraiture.” The judges were impressed by Tim’s expressive, sculptural use of paint to build a likeness and felt that the intense focus on Cliff’s face, the dignity bestowed on Cliff, and the celebration of difference created a powerful encounter.

Third prize went to Martyn Harris for his painting ‘Memories’ of Gillian, someone whom Martyn came across when an artist in residence at the Art Yard Gallery. After building a friendship with Gillian, Martyn asked if she would sit for a portrait and though the image touches upon themes of loneliness, sorrow and the burden of time, both Martyn and Gillian found their collaboration uplifting. The sensitivity Martyn brought to painting Gillian, who appears lost in her own world in an instant of contemplation, moved the judges, who also admired Martyn’s exquisite rendering of textures, including Gillian’s woollen jumper and wisps of hair.

The Young Artist Award went to Michelle Liu for ‘Kofi’, who is an occasional life model at Big Turtle Studio in London, where Michelle, who recently relocated to the UK from her native USA, attends weekly drop-in sessions. As a young artist, Michelle says of the communal sittings, “My progress has come on in leaps and bounds since I have had a community of artists around me to share techniques, tips and critiques.” The judges thought this was a beautifully rendered, positive portrayal of Kofi, technically accomplished yet full of feeling and a moving calmness, with details such as a slightly raised eyebrow hinting at Kofi’s interior life.

I’ve just offered a hint here of the ‘Exploring Identity’ exhibition and what stands out for me is its emphasis on portraiture as storytelling rather than mere representation, with works that, together, suggest the multifaceted nature of personal identity and how it evolves over time, while also reflecting social history as much as individual character. It’s an exhibition that lives up to its title well.

Jake Morris-Campbell’s beautiful book is a pilgrimage charting his family’s Northumbrian heritage. ‘Between the Salt and the Ash’ is simultaneously poetic and epic in Morris-Campbell’s sweep of the region’s history, language and landscape. After reading this, you will want nothing more than to take the journey yourself.

Fiona Hill, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Chancellor of Durham University

It’s difficult to define Jake’s book, ‘Between the Salt and the Ash’, as to me it’s part travelogue, part pilgrimage, part social history, and part philosophy that anchors personal identity within the shifting ground of northeast England’s cultural and industrial past. It’s a book that resists grandstanding; instead, it builds its impact through restraint, precision, and a deep attentiveness to place.

At its core, the book explores the afterlife of a part of England that was once its centre of Christianity, then, centuries later, became an economic powerhouse of coal mining, salt production, shipbuilding, and fishing. Jake explores how this past still lingers in the landscape and memory, even though the region's once-important role is now pretty much a thing of the past. Jake uses a ‘coastal’ walk as a narrative for the book, starting his journey on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland and finishing at Durham Cathedral, exploring the region’s past, present, and future and making powerful use of the engagements he has with those he meets and, in some cases, travels with along the way. As he journeys through Northumberland and County Durham, he searches for the identity of the northeast of England, and the book’s title reflects the region’s close ties to the sea and industry.

As Jake offers, it was his great-grandfather’s miner’s lamp that inspired the journey “I had written a poem about his lamp, and I suppose I imagined the world that he inhabited in the mid-20th century. It was a poem I found connected with audiences at readings I was doing, not just in the North East but everywhere. Obviously, it has particular resonance in coal field communities.”

Jake’s nanna gave him the lamp as an heirloom after saving it from her mother’s house. “She rescued it and then saw that I was interested. It became a good metaphor, a way of framing this journey. Because it’s this old miner’s lamp, you’re thinking about what it used to be as opposed to what it is now, and what it might then become. That’s what guided [the journey] from the outset, and it was a strong metaphor throughout.”

While the northeast of England still faces uncertainty today, the region remains a striking and unique part of England, with a history closely tied to English identity. As Jake walks the ‘Camino of the North,’ he reflects on how personal and regional identities have changed over 1,300 years and challenges the idea that communities in the northeast of England are being ‘left behind’ the rest of England. The journey also makes Jake reflect on his role as a writer and how it connects to the people he meets along the way. Some of his encounters with companions as he walks are planned, while others are accidental meetings.

For part of the journey near the Northumbrian coastal town of Beadnell, one of those fellow travellers was poet Katrina Porteous, and in North Shields, Jake was accompanied by the musician Aaron Duff. In Amble, Katherine Renton, an artist who paints with sea coal and brick around Amble and Alnmouth, joined Jake. Amble sits not far south of Warkworth Castle, much loved by JMW Turner, and Katherine pointed out the contrasts in Northumberland's landscape. That to the south of Warkworth Castle is much rougher and more rugged than that to the north, through Seahouses and Craster, which is much more picturesque and more conventionally beautiful. To some extent, that contrast is also reflected in the occupations of the respective peoples who lived there.

In southeast Northumberland, Jake spent time exploring the now often overlooked, but once vibrant coal-mining towns of Ashington and Cambois, offering that in Cambois, “you can’t avoid the fact that it does feel like a one-horse town. People who need to go to the hospital take a one-and-a-half-hour bus journey to get there.” Yet while there, he met Alex Oates and Esther Huss, who run the Miner’s Hall in the village. Alex is a playwright, and Esther is a dance artist, and together they hold community workshops for writers and dancers, reinforcing that cultural pursuits can and do exist in these smaller places, and they should be supported and championed.

Thematically, the book circles around inheritance: what it means to grow up in a region heavily influenced by early Christianity and, more recently, by industries that have largely disappeared, and how that absence defines identity. Jake doesn’t romanticise the past, but neither does he treat it with detachment. Instead, he acknowledges the complexity of hardship, pride, and loss, but without collapsing into nostalgia, seeking an understanding of and a connection to that past. He brings to light overlooked parts of the region’s culture and history, offering a touching tribute to the region and, as you would expect from a poet, writes in beautiful prose.

‘The Salt and the Ash’ has received much praise for honestly appraising the northeast’s regional identity and for giving voice to people rooted in the area and its history, not in some faded, nostalgic, romantic way, but pragmatically. Jacob avoids treating historical events as grand moments. Instead, he looks at them through place, voice, and what comes after, making history feel lived rather than simply told. His approach is less about retelling events and more about showing how they remain in the landscape and in memory. For example, Jake does not present industrial decline as a single event but rather through abandoned buildings, changing coastlines, and the loss of old trades with history found in traces such as ash, rust, and silence rather than in a full story.

While industry often shows up as loss, the sea offers a different sense of time, with fishing and maritime work linked to traditions and skills passed down through generations. There are also the ongoing dangers from the sea, but even when suggesting disasters, Jake does not see them as single events but as a continuum that repeats rather than ends.

Jake’s main achievement is showing that in northeast England, history is not simply in the past, but something we live with now. In ‘Between the Salt and the Ash’, what matters most is not the events themselves, but how they remain in the land, language, and identity of the people here.

Groom draws out the untold stories of Britain outside the South-East, revealing how regional history shapes both our present and our future. His storytelling is widely praised for making the big national questions vivid by examining them at the local scale, bringing depth and immediacy to issues often seen only through a London-centric lens.

The List

Brian Groom’s previous book, ‘Northerners: A History, from the Ice Age to the Present Day’, became a national bestseller, and he is also the author of ‘Made in Manchester: A People’s History of the City That Shaped the Modern World’. In his latest book, ‘These Isles: A History of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland’, he offers a creative and easy-to-read take on the connected histories of the British Isles. Instead of telling a single, straight ‘British’ story, Brian focuses on the differences, conflicts, and connections among the four nations covering all the lands from the Northern isles to the Channel Islands, and the towns and cities in between, tracing how the movements of people, the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, and others, reshaped regions and their relationships, telling the story of these isles through their people, cultures, languages, and shared heritage.

Brian’s book examines the roles played by factors such as religion, empire, and war while covering several themes, from popular culture to sport, via music and literature. Stretching from ancient times to the early twenty-first century, the book gives a vivid and varied picture of the common stories of the countries and islands that make up what we call the British Isles, both past and present.

Brian writes as a journalist, not an academic historian, which gives the book a clear and appealing tone. He often uses anecdotes to show bigger trends, making it a great starting point for readers who want an overview without too much detail. His main goal is to challenge the idea that Britain’s history is just England’s story writ large. Instead, he explores how England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland each developed their own identity, and how their coming together was often uneasy, marked by conquest and political manoeuvring. The book shows why tensions between them still matter today, and one of its strengths is that it connects the past to the present, illuminating debates such as Scottish independence, the legacy of colonial attitudes toward Ireland, and questions of identity in the UK, showing that many current issues have deep historical roots.

While the book spans from pre-Roman times to today, it doesn’t read like a scholarly text. Instead, it tells stories, centring on key turning points and important people. Brian draws attention to themes like power, identity, and resistance. He is selective, choosing examples that illustrate his points rather than covering everything within his main topics, including Roman Britain, medieval conflicts, the Acts of Union, Ireland’s complex history, and modern political tensions, such as devolution. The relationships between the nations were rarely equal, and Brian highlights English dominance in political and military terms, as well as resistance from Scotland and Wales. Ireland has a particularly contentious and painful history, and Brian does not shy away from the consequences of conquest, rebellion, and cultural suppression. While Brian maintains a balance, he’s not neutral. He acknowledges historical abuses while refraining from polemics.

Overall, ‘These Isles’ is more of a corrective overview than a final word on history. It reminds readers that the story of Britain and Ireland is not a single tale. It is a patchwork of identities, shared histories, and enduring tensions.

The British writer Gildas, writing in the 6th century, describes Magnus Maximus, a usurper emperor based in Britain, who in 383, with the support of many troops in Britain, travelled to Gaul to defeat the legitimate Western Roman Emperor, Gratian.

A few weeks ago, I wrote in Following the Eagle about Segedunum, the Roman fort at the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall, close to the River Tyne. In that piece, I mentioned Arbeia, the excavation of which I wrote of in A Striking Sight, an even larger fort about four miles further east on a hilltop at the river’s mouth. Today, its remains sit surrounded by schools and modern domestic dwellings of the town of South Shields.

As I mentioned in ‘Following the Eagle’, the soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall came from all over the Roman Empire, and Arbeia, meaning ‘fort of the Arab troops,’ was named after some of the soldiers once stationed there from what is now Iraq. It’s interesting to think about how they must have felt arriving at a damp, windy hill in northeast England.

Inscriptions on the excavated stones show that the Sixth Legion built the fort around 105 CE, though it’s unlikely they ever stayed there. Building such a large stone fort required specialised engineering skills, which only the Roman legions possessed. The auxiliary units that later garrisoned the fort didn’t have this training. So, it was the legions, especially the Sixth, who managed most of the construction at Arbeia.

Arbeia was an important military base established to defend the mouth of the River Tyne. The first unit stationed there was the Ala Primae Pannoniorum Sabiniana, a cavalry regiment of 500 horsemen from the Pannonian tribes in present-day Hungary. Sometime during the second century, they moved to Onnum (Halton Chester in Northumberland) and were replaced by another cavalry regiment, the Ala I Hispanorum Asturum, from the Astures tribe in present-day north-western Spain.

During the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus, a Gallic infantry unit, Cohors V Gallorum, with about 1,000 soldiers, replaced the Ala I Hispanorum Asturum cavalry unit. The infantry unit may have come from Fort Cramond in what is now Edinburgh on the River Forth, and it’s believed to have been only about half its full strength, possibly because some troops stayed behind at Cramond or spent time guarding supply caravans as they travelled between the forts.

Most people in the UK have heard of Hadrian, but few remember Emperor Septimius Severus, yet he spent the last three years of his life in Britain, arriving in 208 CE with a large army. Some say he came because the Governor of Britain asked for help to stop a rebellion. Others think he was simply tired of his sons, Caracalla and Publius Septimius Geta, arguing, so he brought them to Britain as a distraction. That’s certainly one way to manage family problems. The entire imperial family, including his wife Julia Domna and the court officials, moved to Britain and ruled the Roman Empire from what is now York until the emperor’s death.

After arriving in Britain, Septimius Severus changed Arbeia from a regular fort to a supply base by demolishing most of the old buildings except for a double granary and replacing them with eighteen new stone granaries. Later, this number grew to twenty-four. Altogether, the granaries could hold up to eight hundred tonnes of grain, enough to feed about 25,000 people in the Roman forts and garrisons along Hadrian’s Wall. This expansion also saw the building of four new barrack blocks.

After expanding Arbeia, Septimius Severus began upgrading Hadrian’s Wall, and once that was complete, he led his large army north to try to defeat the Caledonians. This was a huge effort, as fighting in Scotland was difficult because of the rough terrain and skilled opponents who avoided direct combat. In the end, Septimius claimed a kind of victory (a trick employed by modern leaders, too), which allowed him and his sons to take the title ‘Britannicus.’

But my recent visit to Arbeia wasn’t about learning more about Septimius Severus. I went to see a new exhibition called ‘After the Fire,’ which highlights a dramatic but often overlooked event in the fort’s history, at the end of the 3rd or early 4th century, when a major fire destroyed or damaged many key buildings, including some of the large grain stores and living quarters.

It’s believed the fire resulted from an attack by Northern Tribes, possibly the Picts of modern-day Scotland and/or other northern British groups. The Picts were a major threat to the forts along Hadrian’s Wall, often taking advantage of any weakness in Roman defences, especially in the waning years of Roman occupation.

The exhibition explores the fort’s rebuilding and repurposing after the fire, in the context of Rome’s declining power, and shows how the story of Roman occupation of Arbeia shifted after the disaster to adaptation and survival, culminating in the end of their rule in Britain.

Using artefacts found during excavations that provide evidence of rebuilding, the exhibition shows how life went on after the disaster. The exhibition also places the fire within the broader context of late Roman Britain, a period known for instability, and presents it as part of the broader decline of Roman rule.

One of several important items discovered is a ring-mail shirt, now deemed the best-preserved in Britain. The shirt, worn over a padded garment for extra protection, was part of an auxiliary soldier’s kit. And this one belonged to a soldier from the Fifth Cohort of Gauls I mentioned above. Other items found in the remains include a precious gold ring, probably hidden by a soldier in his barracks who, for whatever reason, was then unable to retrieve it. You must remember how cramped the conditions in the barrack blocks were. Each block had five ‘apartments’ consisting of two small rooms, with each room occupied by eight soldiers with small, narrow beds and a fireplace or small hearth to offer warmth and a place to cook. Each soldier would therefore have had minimal personal space, and you can’t help imagining how the air must have had a rich aroma. With so little privacy, it was no wonder that soldiers took diligent care of their valuables, hiding them from prying eyes, only to make their retrieval much more difficult in an emergency.

Evidence shows that after the fire, some of the granaries were rebuilt as barracks, suggesting an increase in the number of troops stationed at the fort. The rebuilding programme also saw the construction of a new principia, the headquarters building, while the original principia became a granary. The increased number of barracks headquarters and a more impressive commanding officer’s house point to a shift in the Roman military’s focus from expanding their territory in the north to simply holding on to what they already controlled. Further expansion of the fort began between 220 and 235 and continued until at least 270.

The rebuilt fort showed off the latest designs from the eastern Roman Empire. The expanded principia was no longer in the centre of the fort but at the end of a grand processional road at the south, while two main roads divided the soldiers’ living quarters into four sections. The praetorium, the home of the fort’s Roman commanding officer, was now a large courtyard house modelled after a Roman townhouse, with rooms facing the open courtyard. It featured painted walls, private suites for the commanding officer and his family, baths, and large dining rooms for summer and winter, all designed to impress guests. The house served as both home and office, and you can now see a partial reconstruction on the site.

The house was in use for over a hundred years, and its original layout remained the same for about thirty years. After that, it must have become ‘tired’ looking and in need of renovation, as a new bath suite was installed. However, simpler designs were later used to cover the original elaborate wall paintings, probably indicating that the house (and thus the fort) was losing its importance. By the late fourth century, all the decorated plaster had disappeared, leaving the walls simply covered in white plaster. The grand summer dining room, once the largest room, had become just an open space with a rough stone floor.

The deterioration of the fort didn’t end there. From the mid-4th century onward, many small alterations occurred as Arbeia’s role as a supply base faded. There is evidence that the Tigris Bargemen were the last of the ‘Roman’ occupants, and at some point in the 4th century, the fort ceased to be used as a military base and became a civilian settlement.

This repurposing of the once Roman commander’s building might well have been to answer what was still a demand in the area for fine furniture and quality jewellery. Artefacts found on the site show that Arbeia had a lively community at the end of the fourth century, with a workshop set up in what had been the commanding officer’s private rooms, where people made wooden furniture such as boxes and chests with antler inlay. There was also evidence of food preparation in the courtyard, while in other parts of the fort, artefacts found reflect that workers made jewellery from jet, probably brought from present-day Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay, on the coast further south of Arbeia.

But I’ll end with one mystery that remains, and it’s the story behind the killing of two young men in the house’s final days, around the end of the 4th Century, some years after the Romans withdrew from Britain, never to return. The men’s skeletons reflect a violent death, and afterwards their bodies were left exposed to the elements long enough for dogs to gnaw the bones before the burial of what remained in the courtyard of the house. Perhaps the two men were former Roman soldiers who became craftsmen, but for some reason, they fell out of favour with the locals? Or maybe just a dispute between locals. We’ll never know.

Dr Shane McCorristine, of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University

Late last year, I wrote about Newcastle's Crime and Punishment and Newcastle Gaol/Prison, a relatively short-lived building in the city centre, all traces of which have virtually disappeared. Built in the early 1800s, it replaced the notorious Newgate prison, with its overflowing sewers, poor ventilation, prisoners chained together, and frequent, untreated outbreaks of fever. Newcastle Prison differed from Newgate because each prisoner had their own cell, with a small window and a hammock or a bedboard. At least at first, but by the later Victorian era, an increased prison population led to overcrowding again becoming a problem. However, one significant difference from Newgate was the separate wing for women at Newcastle Prison, and of them I write this week.

The exhibition ‘Women Behind Bars: Life in Newcastle Prison, 1828–1925’ at Newcastle Cathedral shares the stories of incarcerated young girls and women in Newcastle Prison, revealing the realities of crime and punishment and the fortitude of some women in a society marked by inequality. The exhibition blends local history with modern voices, and rather than simply listing crimes, it focuses on the social history of imprisoned women, challenging the usual narrative and bringing attention to often-forgotten voices.

Despite the separate women’s wing offering some privacy at first, conditions were still often criticised, with one prison chaplain saying that overcrowding and poor conditions made it impossible to help young women, especially those jailed for minor crimes alongside hardened offenders. Discipline was strict, and one example of this was locking a girl called Margaret Benson alone in a cell with no light after she refused a cold-water punishment called the ‘shower bath,’ which was used despite concerns about its safety and legality. Another punishment was the ‘muzzle,’ an iron headpiece used to silence women who shouted or disobeyed. An improved women’s wing built in the 1860s had better light and ventilation, but overcrowding and strict rules persisted, making life difficult for the prisoners and limiting opportunities for rehabilitation.

One ‘positive’ thing to note is that while the women’s diet in prison may seem basic with a breakfast of a pint of gruel and six ounces of bread, and dinner of half a pint of soup or a pint of gruel with six ounces of bread, it was probably like or even better than that for many ordinary people. Also, several women in Newcastle Prison were pregnant or arrived with babies. Caring for infants in cramped cells was difficult, but for some women, prison offered a bit more stability and support than life outside. This shows how uncertain their lives were outside of prison.

In the early days, public hangings took place at the prison gate, drawing crowds of thousands. In 1833, Jane Jamieson, an alleged sex worker convicted of killing a client, became the only woman executed at the prison. Her case sparked a major public debate about self-defence and class bias.

Mary Ann Cotton was one of the most notorious women held in Newcastle prison. It is believed that she killed up to 21 people, including husbands, lovers, children, and stepchildren, by poisoning them with arsenic. Held in Newcastle prison during her trial, after conviction came a move to Durham Gaol for her execution in 1873. Some people in the UK may remember her story from the 2016 TV series ‘Dark Angel’, which was based on her life.

Although it might seem like executions were common, there were few in northeast England’s prisons during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some believe this was because local juries were reluctant to convict on capital charges unless the crime was especially severe. Instead, they often preferred to find people guilty of a lesser charge that would lead to transportation, especially after laws in the 1830s and 1840s reduced the number of capital offences. In the early days of such sentencing, transportation would be to the USA, then later to Australia.

At certain times, women made up a third of the prisoners in Newcastle prison, which was unusually high even for that era (today, women make up only 4% of the UK prison population). A Newcastle prison governor at the time said this was likely due to social and economic problems in northeast England. For example, there were fewer jobs for women in the northeast than in the northwest, where many women found work in the textile industry.

Until 1854, young girls often received prison sentences ranging from a few days to a few months, usually for stealing money, clothes, or other items they could sell easily. For example, Ellen Woodman was only 11 when she was sentenced to seven days of hard labour (i.e. oakum picking, rock breaking, the treadmill (Newcastle Prison had one of the largest in northern England), tailoring, or shoemaking) for stealing iron with her friends. Another example is three other girls: Anne Kelly (16), Sarah Cain (15), and Mary Henry (15), who were imprisoned for stealing towels. Even after serving time, Cain and Henry continued to reoffend, while Kelly became such a repeat offender that she eventually received a sentence of transportation to Tasmania for seven years.

Cases like these raised concerns about locking up children instead of tackling the social issues that caused reoffending. The Youthful Offenders Act tried to reduce this by limiting under-18s to short prison terms before sending them to reformatory schools focused on education and moral reform. In 1891, Jemima Brown, aged 13, spent 10 days in Newcastle Prison for two theft charges, then attended a reformatory school for five years. There is no record of her reoffending. Of course, there are some cases where rehabilitation is not going to come about, such as that of Bridget Creggans, who appeared before magistrates 250 times. Her problem was alcohol, and if a pub landlord refused to serve her, she would smash the pub’s windows.

In October 1909, the Women’s Social and Political Union organised protests during Chancellor David Lloyd George’s visit to the Palace Theatre in Newcastle. Women’s suffrage activists were frustrated by the Liberal government’s refusal to give women the vote, so they adopted the motto “Deeds not Words.” Even though Lloyd George was well protected and the city was full of police, some activists broke windows at the Liberal Club, General Post Office, and Palace Theatre. These events, later called the “Battle of Newcastle,” led to the arrest of 12 women, who served sentences of up to one month.

The treatment of these women in prison often depended on their social status. For example, the sentence received by Lady Constance Lytton, daughter of the first Earl of Lytton, Viceroy of India, was “for disorderly behaviour with intent to disturb peace” by throwing a stone at Lloyd George’s car (Constance said she aimed low to avoid hurting anyone), damaging it to a cost of repair of £4 (about £3,800 today). Because of her status, the court offered her the chance to pay £50 (over £40,000 today) instead of going to jail, but she refused and received a one-month prison sentence.

Constance began a hunger strike right away, but quickly became tired and developed back pain, waking up with her knees pulled up to her chin. As her health got worse, the prison doctor came to see her, but thinking he was about to force-feed her, Constance stood in the corner of her cell “with my arms crossed and my fingers caught in my nostrils and mouth.” To her surprise, the doctor was there to check her heart and found she had heart disease. Seeing she was in a ‘feeble’ state, he recommended her immediate release.

Constance knew she had heart disease, but she believed this early release and the absence of force-feeding were due to her social rank. She continued to campaign, raising awareness about the “partiality and injustice” of force-feeding in prisons. Later, she disguised herself as a working woman and was once again arrested and imprisoned, this time in Walton Gaol in Liverpool, but her earlier gentler treatment stood in contrast to this occasion when, in the belief she was of low social rank, she was force-fed. Constance never fully recovered from her time in prison, suffering a heart attack and stroke that led to her early death in 1923 at age 54.

Unlike Constance, Dorothy Pethick Lawrence received a sentence of 14 days of hard labour for throwing stones at the General Post Office. It was her first time in prison, and she became the spokeswoman for the other 11 women jailed after the protests. For three days, she refused to eat and was then taken to the prison hospital, where three doctors, the matron, and a wardress forced her into a chair and tied her down with a bedsheet. One doctor pushed a tube up her nostril while a wardress covered her mouth. A letter to the Governor noted the ‘feeding’ of three-quarters of a pint of milk and egg through the tube, against which Dorothy struggled violently, striking the officers and even causing one officer’s nose to bleed. Dorothy remembered one doctor saying, “Oh, we have not tested her heart,” and another replying, “Oh, I expect that is all right,” before continuing. This happened twice a day for several days until her nostrils became sore, necessitating the lubrication of the tube with petroleum jelly. Ironically, Dorothy lost weight from vomiting after these feedings, so after a few days, prison staff used a force-feeding cup. Dorothy’s freedom came after serving her fortnight sentence, and friends took her to a nursing home to recover.

Kitty Marion, a well-known music hall performer, was another suffragist activist who came to Newcastle to protest Lloyd George’s visit. Her sentence was one month of hard labour for deliberately breaking a plate-glass window worth £3 17s. 6d (about £3,500 today) at the General Post Office. It was also her first time in prison, and she immediately joined the other women in going on a hunger strike. More than that, as soon as she entered her cell, she barricaded the door with furniture and refused to let anyone in except the Governor, and only then, after the granting of voting rights for women. Kitty continued her hunger strike for another 24 hours, keeping her bed in front of the door. Eventually, frustrated staff forced their way in with a crowbar, removed the door’s hinges and moved her to another cell for closer monitoring.

Later that evening, eight wardresses took Kitty from her cell to see three doctors. She told them she had a throat problem, but they ignored her and force-fed her through a tube in her right nostril. In her memoir, Marion described the “horrible feeling of choking and vomiting. My head felt as if it were bursting, my heart beat furiously. Words cannot describe my sensations.” Reports describe her choking and retching as the tube was pushed down into her stomach and liquid was poured in, most of which she then vomited back up.

Kitty then thought of Harry Houdini, with whom she had once performed, and wondered how he might have escaped. From this, she decided to start a fire, tearing the stuffing from her pillow, pulling out the coconut fibres, and setting them alight from the gaslight jet. However, the resultant smoke soon overcame Marion, who was dragged out of her cell and moved to a padded cell with no furniture.

The next day, Marion returned to a regular prison cell and was closely watched, receiving visits from the governor, the matron, and the doctor. Because she was so weak, she gave up the hunger strike, but ate only tiny amounts of food at her own pace. This was not enough for the doctor, who instructed the use of a force-feeding cup. However, the matron, whom Marion described as “most kind and motherly,” did this gently.

Marion served a month of hard labour, and her release was welcomed enthusiastically. In a statement to ‘Votes for Women’, she said: “I am more than ever convinced of the necessity for militant action.” Recognition of Marion’s courage and determination came with the award of a ‘For Valour’ medal from Sylvia Pankhurst.

The exhibition also connects historical stories to modern experiences of incarceration, making it participatory and reflective rather than just observational, and a part of this is the ‘Story Chair’ installation, which represents the voices and testimonies of women who have current experience within the criminal justice system.

In February 2022, Storm Arwen knocked down one of the 200-year-old oak trees along the ‘Long Walk’ at Gibside. The Story Chair, crafted by Nick James from wood from that tree, was part of a programme supporting women in the criminal justice system, helping them explore their stories and move from their past towards better futures. Nick’s imaginative piece represents the twists and turns of the women’s lives, the need for a solid foundation, and the sense of relief that comes from sharing stories. Nick consulted with the women to shape its design and said, “It’s been a creative challenge and listening to the ideas from the women and the reason behind those ideas has been insightful and enlightening. It’s pushed me to think differently about what I’m doing creatively.”

The programme, a creative partnership between the social justice charity Changing Lives, the School of Design at Northumbria University, and the North East Probation Service, also involved several cultural organisations, including the National Trust and Newcastle Cathedral. The idea for a physical chair came from a group of women after a visit to Newcastle Cathedral and its crypt. Once upon a time, that space allowed people to say goodbye to the dead, and the women liked the idea of having a space to leave behind old stories of their lives that no longer served them. The cathedral welcomed the initiative and hosted the chair as part of its ‘radical welcome’ initiative.

The ‘Story Chair’ programme helped women with experience of the criminal justice system to talk about, accept, and move on from parts of their past, recognising that many women in the justice system are there because of outside factors in their lives, which they often face again after release. These women experienced domestic violence and abuse, leading to them reoffending, yet through the programme, they learned different narrative approaches to express their experiences within a safe space, with time to have difficult conversations that help them out of the cycle of reoffending.

Overall, the ‘Women Behind Bars’ exhibition is not only about history, or a prison or statistics and records, but the personal stories that lie behind them that quietly challenge how we think about crime and punishment both in the past and today.

Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances
Victor Hugo

Two recent theatre trips in Newcastle offered contrasting glimpses into tragedy: ‘The Thrill of Love’ at the People’s Theatre and ‘Boiler Room 6’ at the Live Theatre, each exploring how people respond to heartache and adversity.

This was not my first time seeing Amanda Whittington’s ‘The Thrill of Love,’ which explores the later life of Ruth Ellis. I previously watched the play at the St James Theatre (now the Other Palace Theatre) in London in 2013. That production was riveting, and I was curious to see how the People’s Theatre would stage it anew.

Many people in the UK know Ruth’s tragic story as the last woman executed here. Born in Wales in 1927, Ruth’s childhood was marked by instability and hardship, shaping much of her later life. As a young woman in London, she became a nightclub hostess and manager, known for her striking looks and strong personality.

In the early 1950s, Ruth became involved with David Blakely, a wealthy, charismatic racing driver. Their intense but troubled relationship involved heavy drinking, arguments, separations, and physical abuse by Blakely. Despite the violence, Ruth remained emotionally attached, and the relationship was further destabilised when Ruth miscarried as a result of the abuse.

On 10 April 1955, just ten days after her miscarriage and believing Blakely wished to separate permanently from her, Ruth confronted him outside a Hampstead pub and shot him multiple times. He died at the scene, with Ruth making no attempt to flee or deny her actions; her calm admission became central to what followed. However, lurking on the edges of the act was another man, Desmond Cussen, a former RAF pilot and accountant who became closely involved with Ruth in the months leading up to the shooting. Their relationship was complex, part friendship, part dependency, and possibly romantic, though not straightforwardly so.

As Ruth’s relationship with Blakely dissolved, Cussen supported her financially and emotionally but, more chillingly, also provided her with the revolver she used in the shooting and allegedly drove her to the confrontation. At trial, his influence remained largely unexplored, with Ruth insisting on her sole responsibility. Only just before her execution did Ruth reveal the extent of Cussen’s involvement, further complicating the story.

Since then, Cussen’s role has been re-evaluated more critically, challenging the view of the crime as solely an individual act and highlighting how the men around Ruth coerced her and shaped events.

Ruth’s startlingly brief trial at the Old Bailey lasted just over a day. The most notorious moment occurred when Ruth, questioned about her intention, replied, “It is obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him.” That admission sealed her fate under a legal system that allowed little nuance regarding domestic abuse, emotional distress, and coercion. Convicted of murder, Ruth, a 28-year-old mother, was sentenced to death and then hanged on 13 July 1955.

Almost immediately, Ruth’s case provoked debate over the fairness of her trial, with many questioning whether her abusive relationship was properly considered and, in the circumstances, whether the death penalty was just. Over time, her story became central to the movement against capital punishment in the UK.

Today, Ruth’s trial would likely be much longer and include expert testimony from psychologists. Questioning of witnesses, such as Cussen, would delve deeper, and Ruth’s statement about ‘intent’ would be discussed in more depth as courts are more aware of trauma and how power imbalances in relationships can affect behaviour and responsibility. UK law also now recognises a defence of ‘loss of control’, from which a person can argue that years of abuse and fear caused them to lose self-control when they committed a violent act. Unlike in Ruth’s time, if the court now accepts this reason, a verdict of manslaughter is more likely in recognition of how such abuse may lead to extreme actions.

Whittington’s portrayal of Ruth in ‘The Thrill of Love’ brings out both sympathy and complexity. Rather than seeking a clear villain, the play focuses on how adversity shaped Ruth’s actions within a world stacked against her, highlighting the pressures of post-war femininity, economic hardship, and coercive relationships.

The play unfolds as a series of flashbacks from Ruth shooting Blakely, with a fictional Inspector Jack Gales lending a gentle, fatherly voice to a case he believes deserves more investigation than the otherwise straightforward confession Ruth gives at the start of the play. Through his questions to Ruth, we understand the poignant sequence of events leading up to the shooting, but it is the scenes between this timeline that tell a more sorrowful story. Neither Blakely nor Cussen is portrayed in the play; instead, it centres on the close relationships between Ruth and other women at the club, who function as a chorus, grounding the play in everyday female experience, with their perspectives on Ruth ranging from sympathetic to sharply critical. One of the play’s greatest strengths is its ability to hold two worlds in tension, contrasting the glamour of nightclub life with the harsh reality beneath it, and how Ruth’s life unravelled with her confessions of her shattered hopes at becoming an actress to her late-night finishes, high on drugs and alcohol and covered in bruises. The play’s simple set design follows Ruth’s downward spiral in equal measure, transforming from a smoky nightclub into a trashy room littered with cigarette packs and bottles of booze.

This is not an investigative thriller, but a drama offering an unvarnished glimpse into a woman’s certainty that she had no alternative but to kill, and as a result, have the State kill her. The play avoids easy judgments, instead presenting a genuinely human, tragic portrait that leaves lingering unease about justice and women who defy categorisation. I found this production at the Little Theatre as engrossing and engaging as the one I saw in 2013, with performances as thoughtful and quietly powerful.

The second play, ‘Boiler Room Six’, also embraced a tragic story, but one better known on the world stage, as it centres on the survival of Frederick Barrett, a crew member aboard the RMS Titanic. The story of the RMS Titanic is a familiar one, yet there will always be a grim fascination with the disaster on the White Star Line vessel’s maiden voyage. While others might tell the story as a tale of romance and doom, of impoverished migrants seeking new lives and the wealthy sailing the seas in splendour, ‘Boiler Room Six’ reframes the horror of that night into the story of the grim, hard-working men who toiled in the soot and sweltering heat of the boiler rooms below decks.

Before I discuss the play, let’s consider the actual Frederick Barrett, who signed on to the RMS Titanic in 1912 as a leading fireman for £6:10s a month (about £950 today). A leading fireman was responsible for managing a team of stokers who fed coal into the furnaces and for controlling the steam pressure from the boilers that powered the ship.

Just after departing Southampton on 10 April 1912, Frederick, who gave testimony at both the American and British Inquiries into the sinking, stated that after the discovery of a fire in the coal bunker in boiler room 6, he received orders to empty it. The work took around ten firemen, until Saturday, 13 April, and afterwards Frederick claimed that the bulkhead was fire-damaged from top to bottom; the lower half was warped aft, and the upper half was warped forward.

At the time of the collision on Sunday, 14 April, Frederick was on duty in the same boiler room, talking with an engineer, when the ship jolted, followed swiftly by a bell ringing and a red light flashing. The jolt was so strong that it knocked men off their feet, and water began coming through the side of the ship. Frederick and the engineer retreated into boiler room 5 just as the watertight doors dropped. There, they noticed that the ship's damage extended into that section.

Despite the incoming water, Frederick and his colleagues kept as many boilers running as they could to maintain power aboard the ship. However, after a while, the bulkhead between boiler rooms 5 and 6 gave way, causing a violent rush of water, and Frederick was ordered ‘up top’ where he reached the promenade deck and was ordered, as ‘crew in charge’ into lifeboat 13, one of the last lifeboats left on the starboard side and crowded with about 70 people, as it was lowered. When the lifeboat hit the water, it was so crowded that Frederick estimated the gunwale was less than six inches above the water. Then the discharge from the ship’s side caused the lifeboat to drift aft directly under another descending lifeboat. Calls from Frederick’s boat to stop lowering the other lifeboat were ignored, and Frederick had to scramble over other occupants to cut the lifeboat’s ropes and push it free from the Titanic, an action that probably saved the lives of those in his lifeboat.

But even after the rescue, there was no time for those who remained of the Titanic’s crew (four out of five perished) to recover from the tragedy (and no money, as surviving Titanic crew members had their wages stopped at the moment the Titanic sank), and Frederick was soon back at work on the Olympic, Titanic’s sister ship. Frederick was still working at sea at the advent of the 1920s, but for how long is not certain, as at some point he left to work as a timber labourer, before contracting pulmonary tuberculosis and dying in early 1931.

‘Boiler Room Six’, superbly crafted by writer and director Tom Foreman, brings Frederick to life in a play that is full of moody, claustrophobic detail yet runs at a good pace as it delves into the physical and psychological realities of life below deck, in the furnace-heart of an industrial age.

We follow Frederick from the beginning of the voyage, hanging out in the crew’s quarters, meeting the other crew members, and getting a sense of normality before the disruption when the ship hits the iceberg. From then on, we are right there as Frederick deals with the sinking of this unsinkable ship, trying to keep the lights on for as long as possible, whilst at the same time trying to do right by his colleagues. Foreman also intelligently instils a tone of optimism with the stokers’ perseverance, offering an infectious hopefulness that all might still come good.

From the outset, the production establishes its environment with bold clarity. The only props are two benches, but the play’s staging is so clever that your mind soon visualises the heat and confusion, and as the water and jeopardy rise, the tension builds as our own knowledge of the disaster’s outcome comes into play. The effect is deeply immersive; you don’t simply watch the action, you feel the pressure-cooker environment of the ship’s boiler rooms with the incessant rhythm of shovelling and machinery, the smothering heat and the claustrophobic press of metal and bodies. While the energetic parts are enlivening, the play offers enough moments of calm for reflection and a glimpse of Frederick’s personal life.

In the later stages of the play, the uncanny calm and sadness of the upper deck, with the sound of serene violins playing amid the unfolding tragedy, contrast with the water-filled boiler rooms from which Fredrick has escaped. Interestingly, he does not seem to feel at home in the upper deck, playing into themes of survivor’s guilt that making it through the disaster would surely instil.

Charlie Sheepshanks, in a tour de force performance, plays Frederick and the play’s other characters with the energy and physicality required for such a dynamic, dramatic story. Sheepshanks jumps fluently between recognisable individuals, with language ranging from the rough, unpolished banter between the crew to more poetic descriptions, such as when ‘Fredrick’ describes the hard work of keeping the fires burning as a “dance”.

What sets ‘Boiler Room Six’ apart from other accounts of the Titanic is that this isn’t a story of woeful sadness or frantic and maddening panic. It’s a moving homage to the working men who kept their heads in the worst of situations, making decisions they know might cost them their lives, just for the slightest chance to save their ship and those on board. It’s a gripping play, tightening the screw for all its worth, yet also a story of regret and survivor’s guilt. Right now, the play is on a UK tour, so if you enjoy good theatre, you’ll enjoy this.

The bronze diplomas on display give us an extraordinary window into the real lives of Roman soldiers. Because they survive almost complete, they allow us to trace individual units, movements across the Empire, and sometimes even glimpses of personal identity and family. They’re rare documents, and having five examples together, including three never displayed in the UK, makes this a truly exceptional moment for Segedunum.

Alex Croom, Keeper of History at North East Museums,

Last week I went along to the Segedunum Roman Fort and Museum near modern-day Wallsend to look over the ‘Following the Eagle’ exhibition there that explores the lives, identities, and worldwide reach of the Roman army using rare artefacts to tell a surprisingly human story.

The Notitia Dignitatem, written in the late fourth century AD, around the time of the end of Roman Britain, records Segedunum, meaning ‘strong fort’, built in 127 CE at the easternmost point of Hadrian’s Wall as an extension to that wall, to help guard the mouth of the River Tyne. The fort replaced the earlier eastern terminus of the wall at Pons Aelius in the centre of modern-day Newcastle-upon-Tyne, some three miles to the west.

Archaeological interest in Segedunum began in the late 1800s, when antiquarians tracing Hadrian’s Wall identified the eastern end of the wall, and small finds (inscriptions, stones, altars) hinted at what lay beneath a large estate of Victorian terrace houses built directly on top of the fort.

However, after the demolition of those houses in the 1970s, large-scale excavations led by local authority archaeologists and supported by what is now Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums identified the full fort plan with barracks blocks, the commanding officer’s house (praetorium), and granaries (horrea), along with defensive features such as walls, gates, and ditches. Because excavation was extensive rather than piecemeal, Segedunum became a model site to understand Roman fort layouts.

Excavations also uncovered a diverse array of everyday and military artefacts, including pottery and cooking vessels, coins from various centuries, personal items such as brooches and tools, as well as altars and inscriptions that reveal the identities of units stationed there. One of those units was the Fourth Cohort (typically around 500 soldiers) of Lingonians who came from the Roman province of Gallia Belgica, in what is now north-east France. Their capital was at Langres. They were one of 21 units stationed in Britain in AD 130 or 131 that hailed from areas as diverse as modern-day Belgium, Spain, Romania, Croatia, Syria and Iraq.

It is believed that the occupation of Segedunum lasted until the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the early 5th century, although historians can’t rule out a slightly earlier vacation due to the massive empire-wide recall of troops at the end of the 4th century. At its peak, Segendunum would have held up to 600 Roman troops, divided into 120 cavalry and 480 infantry. In the 2nd century, it was largely recruits from Belgium who manned the fort, whilst in the 3rd and 4th centuries, it was mainly recruits from the Alsace region of France.

The fort stood on a small plateau overlooking the north bank of the River Tyne, at the point where it turns to run to the Coast at South Shields and where the Romans built Arbeia (of which I wrote in A Striking Site). The location chosen commanded views eastwards down the river towards Arbeia and upriver towards Pons Aelius.

Before the Romans built Segedunum, the area was farmland, lying within the territory of the Brigantes, a large tribe whose lands stretched from Yorkshire to Northumberland. Archaeologists have found evidence of ploughing and hand-dug furrows in preparation for sowing crops, suggesting that the local people were not expecting a fort to be built there. It’s suspected that the Romans confiscated the land, and the farmers had to move elsewhere.

But to the exhibition whose title refers to the eagle (aquila) used by the Roman army as a powerful military symbol, because it represented qualities the Romans admired of strength, dominance and watchfulness from above, projecting the idea that Rome ruled by right and by strength, both earthly and divine.

The eagle was sacred to Jupiter, the Roman god of the sky, thunder, and supreme authority, and seen as his messenger and companion. By using the eagle, Roman legions were effectively placing themselves under divine protection and approval.

From the time of Emperor Gaius Marius in the late 2nd century BCE, each legion carried a single eagle standard held by a special officer called the aquilifer. The standard was the most important object in the legion, representing its spirit and honour, and if required, soldiers would rally around it in battle, as losing the eagle was a terrible disgrace. If lost, then recovering it was a matter of Roman pride.

Given that, as the Roman Empire grew, the army was composed of soldiers from across the empire, the eagle helped unify them under a shared symbol, regardless of origin, connecting troops stationed in faraway places such as Britain to Rome itself. The eagle also served as imperial messaging, as decoration on armour, weapons, belt fittings, horse armour, inscriptions, coins, and in architecture, signalling Rome’s presence and authority wherever it went, as a visible representation of imperial power.

For me, though, the highlight of the exhibition is the five remarkable near-complete bronze Roman military ‘diplomas’, three of which have not been displayed in the UK before. They reveal the different identities, careers, and long‑distance movements of soldiers across the Roman Empire, including a Syrian archer stationed in Britain and an elite Praetorian Guard.

To prevent desertion, a Roman military unit formed in one province was usually assigned to serve in a different province, often thousands of miles away. The career paths of higher military officers and civilian administrators also transported individuals across vast distances within the Empire, as demonstrated by the career of Statius Priscus, who once commanded the Fourth Cohort of Lingonians at Segedunum and held 18 different posts in seven provinces.

A Roman military diploma was a cross between a military discharge paper, a citizenship certificate, and a legal identity document. Auxiliary soldiers in the Roman army received this after honourable discharge following 25 years of service. It should be remembered that a soldier in the Roman Army had only a 50:50 chance of reaching such ‘retirement.’ Once enlisted, there was no early exit except by death, whether in battle or from disease, yet, around 1500, these diplomas were issued annually.

Unlike the Roman legions, the men making up Auxiliary units were not Roman citizens, so one of the benefits of signing up was that, despite the danger, if you survived your 25 years of service, auxiliary soldiers would earn Roman citizenship for themselves and their descendants. This gave the auxiliary soldier legal rights denied to those who, despite living within the Empire, were not full citizens.

Some early awards of diplomas were given to soldiers and sailors while they were still serving, rather than at the end of their service, as a token of appreciation. For example, after Nero's death, there were four emperors in quick succession: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian, who rewarded the sailors in his fleet at the end of the civil war of AD 69–70 by awarding them diplomas for helping him become emperor.

As one would expect of the Roman Empire, there was a sophisticated administrative system to support the issue of diplomas.

Each auxiliary unit in a province kept records of its soldiers, and the province governor received the names of any soldiers who completed their 25 years of service, compiling these into a list sent to the imperial administration in Rome.

Officials in Rome then compiled a list of soldiers sent by the provincial governors and drafted a legal document granting them Roman citizenship for the emperor's approval. Once approved, a large bronze copy of this list, the ‘citizen constitution’, was displayed publicly in Rome, and individual diplomas were created, returned to the province, and presented to the soldiers, most likely during a special ceremony. It is not known whether soldiers had to pay for their diplomas, as people do for passports today.

The diploma itself consists of two bronze sheets about the size of a hand, with legally binding text written on the inside, typically recording the soldier’s name, his place of origin, his unit and commander, the reigning emperor, the date of discharge and the privileges granted to him. A copy of this text was made on the outside, and then the two sheets were wired shut and sealed by the seven men who served as witnesses by impressing their seals into wax beside their names on the diploma. The seal usually took the form of an intaglio (a design cut into a semi-precious stone), which was normally set in a finger ring. A solid metal cover then protected the fragile sealings.

For early diplomas, soldiers seem to have occasionally served as witnesses, but this changed over time to be the task of professional administrative clerks who, historians believe, worked in a government department in Rome. As a result of government reforms, likely imposed by Hadrian, the witnesses also began to sign in strict order of seniority. They could be in post for a long time, and at least one was known to have signed diplomas for over 30 years. When one witness retired or died, everyone below in seniority moved up one step, and a new junior witness was appointed.

If necessary, a retired soldier would show the outer text to any official seeking proof of citizenship. If the diploma seemed suspicious, the official would break the wax seals and cut the wire to examine the internal text.

While the most important benefit of the diploma was Roman citizenship for the soldier and his descendants, it also afforded the legal right to marry (connubium).

In theory, Roman soldiers who served in the first two hundred years of the Empire could not marry. A rule, however, that in practice was impossible to enforce, although, in the eyes of the army, a ‘marriage’ contracted by a serving soldier was not legal. And if a married man enlisted, the army considered his marriage annulled.

While a serving soldier and his wife’s social circle might recognise them as married, the army considered the woman a concubine. This consideration created several complications because, as a concubine, a woman did not have to offer a dowry on marriage, and those who did would have no legal recourse if they split up and the soldier refused to return it. Also, any children the couple had during his military service would be illegitimate, meaning that they couldn’t inherit from their father unless he made a will. And if a soldier’s ‘wife’ wasn’t a Roman citizen, neither she nor any children could inherit, even if there was a will.

A diploma legitimised the marriage of the soldier and a non-citizen woman by recognising any pre-existing relationship that had developed during his service. This right, however, only extended to one wife; if she later died, he could not legally marry another non-citizen woman.

In AD 212, Septimius Severus granted all free men within the Empire citizenship and partly repealed the ban on soldiers marrying, probably to keep himself in the soldiers’ favour, but only for soldiers marrying Roman citizens. So diplomas continued to be issued, perhaps because they served as proof of an honourable discharge, but more importantly, they legitimised any current or future marriage to a non-citizen woman, thus ensuring the couple’s children would be Roman citizens.

Roman diplomas are extremely valuable to historians today because they provide precise dates and official records of unit stationing, as well as insights into the diversity of the Roman army. For example, I mentioned the Praetorian Guard earlier, and the man in question was Lucius Marius Maximus, who came from Nicopolis in the province of Moesia Inferior (now in northern Bulgaria), and his recruitment probably stems from the reorganisation of the Praetorian Guard by Emperor Septimius Severus in 193, when he appointed mainly soldiers from the Balkans.

There is a good possibility that Lucius was in the Praetorian Guard that came to Britain with the Emperor and his two sons, Caracalla and Geta, in the year 208. When Septimius Severus died at York in 211, his sons, who hated each other, separately returned to Rome. Their mother arranged for them to meet, hoping they would reconcile, but instead, Caracalla had soldiers from the Praetorian Guard kill his younger brother. Lucius’ diploma was issued just weeks later. Might he have been involved in the murder, and his diploma a reward?

Alongside the diplomas, the exhibition displays a wide array of artefacts that reveal how various Roman soldiers carried objects from their original homelands across the Empire, including their religious practices, as demonstrated by an altar from North Africa and rare glazed pottery from Asia Minor. Many pieces of military equipment and domestic goods bear inscriptions recording details such as people’s names, places of origin, and ranks. The inscriptions provide insight into the lives of everyday soldiers, including, in one case, an incredible curse tablet in which a Roman soldier vented his anger against many of his fellow troops.

I will conclude this by returning to the eagle, that powerful national emblem of strength, vision, and dominance, which is still used by around 25 countries today as a symbol of their identity. Typically, the single-headed eagle symbolises strength and sovereignty, while the double-headed eagle symbolises empire or rule over East and West. In Europe, countries with the eagle include Germany, Poland, and Albania, which display a double-headed eagle on their national flag. In Africa, Egypt, with its Eagle of Saladin, uses it, while in Asia and the Middle East countries such as Iraq and Syria do as well. And of course, both the United States and Mexico have their own eagle symbols: the bald eagle and the eagle with a snake on a cactus, respectively.

England, in contrast, has a land-based animal symbol, the lion, a follow-on from the lions on William the Conqueror's emblem, representing courage, strength and royal power. Yet for me, you can’t beat Scotland’s national animal, the unicorn, which symbolises purity, innocence, strength and, above all, independence, reflecting that the Scots see themselves as fierce, noble and difficult to conquer. So much so that even with their eagle, the Romans had to build a wall.

Northamptonshire remains the shoemaking capital of the world... There’s nowhere else that can claim they produced the boots for Darth Vader, and shoes for James Bond and Prince Charles.

Guy West

A week or so back, I spent some time staying with Sarah and catching up with family. It involved a journey south to Northampton, a town that is often overlooked and, some might say, unremarkable today. However, it has a significant history that, in some ways, mirrors that of my home city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. On my visits to Northampton over the past couple of years or so, I’ve taken some time to appreciate the town more, so for this Meander, I stray from my native northeast England.

The earliest record of Northampton as a settlement dates back to the 8th century, where it was called ‘North-ham-tun’, meaning ‘north farm’ or ‘north settlement’. In truth, the town is in the Midlands, not the north, but I guess, in Anglo-Saxon times, as some born and bred in the south of England still do, belief was that the north began north of the Watford Gap. Once established, Northampton grew quickly into a natural trading centre due to its central location in England along important land routes and its closeness to the River Nene.

Although by the end of the 9th Century Northampton lay in what became known as the Danelaw (Viking-controlled territory), its incorporation into the ‘burh’ (fortified settlement) defensive system came soon after as Alfred the Great and his successors began to regain lost Anglo-Saxon land, pushing back the Viking invaders. Although begun under Alfred the Great, the actual fortification of Northampton was likely completed during his son Edward the Elder's reign in the early 10th century, as he advanced into the Midlands of England and secured important towns there.

During the medieval period, England didn’t have a fixed capital in the modern sense. The royal court and administration moved with the king, and the seat of power followed him. During the reign of Henry II in the mid 1100s, Northampton became one of the most important royal centres because of its central location and its major royal fortress, Northampton Castle.

As with Newcastle, the first castle built in Northampton, overlooking the River Nene and key road routes through the Midlands, was built shortly after the Norman Conquest under the orders of William the Conqueror. Again, as with that at Newcastle, it started as a motte-and-bailey castle (a wooden fort on an earth mound with an enclosed courtyard) before being rebuilt in stone, turning it into a major stronghold. King Henry II, his son John, and his son Henry III all used Northampton Castle regularly, almost like a de facto political hub with a base of government, its law courts and thus a main administrative centre of their kingdom. One important event held at Northampton Castle during the reign of Henry II was the trial of his Archbishop, Thomas Becket, in 1164, during a power struggle between the Church and the Crown. At the trial, Becket confronted Henry and, fearing possible imprisonment, Becket fled the castle in disguise and went into exile in France, a pivotal moment in their conflict that would eventually culminate in Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral by knights loyal to Henry in 1170.

By the 17th century, the castle’s importance had declined, and it was no longer a royal residence. While it continued mainly as a jail and local administrative site, gradually parts fell into disrepair, with its most dramatic loss coming with the arrival of the railway, which saw much of the castle demolished to make way for Northampton railway station. A common fate for many historic buildings during the railway boom, and indeed Newcastle Castle nearly suffered the same fate. Fortunately for it, there was just enough room to accommodate the railway lines north to Scotland that now run an arm’s length from the castle’s keep. Northampton’s Castle was not so fortunate, and today only parts of the postern gate (a small defensive gateway) and some earthwork traces of its layout remain.

In a different scenario, Northampton might well have become England’s capital. Ultimately, it was not to be. Although, as I’ve mentioned, a series of Angevin kings stayed there for extended periods, when they moved on, the core of government moved with them, while all the while London was growing as England’s largest city, with the River Thames enabling it to become the dominant centre of finance, trade, and administration. By the end of the 13th century, London had become the de facto capital.

If not a capital, then Northampton, if fortune had turned yet another way, might celebrate today its status as an old university town on a par with Oxford and Cambridge. Around 1261, King Henry III granted permission to establish a university in Northampton, a significant development, as England had only the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge at the time.

Northampton was a logical choice given the frequent visits of Angevin Kings, and indeed, scholars had already begun gathering in the town informally. The royal licence for the university formalised this, and it is believed that teaching included theology, law, and the liberal arts.

However, within four years, the King ordered the university to close and instructed scholars to attend Oxford after the turmoil of the Second Barons’ War, during which Northampton revolted against King Henry III. He issued a decree that not only closed the university but also stated that, going forward, Northampton could not establish a future university. A situation that essentially lasted some 700 years before the creation of the modern University of Northampton, which gained full university status in 2005.

In truth, closing Northampton’s university may not have been just the rebellion, as before that, there had always been strong opposition to the new institution from the University of Oxford, which was fearful of losing students and prestige and had already petitioned the king to suppress the rival.

But Northampton continued to have its ‘moments’ in history, one of which was during the Wars of the Roses and the Battle of Northampton, when Yorkist forces captured England’s Lancastrian King Henry VI. Before the battle, the Lancastrians assumed a strong defensive position near the River Nene, protected by ditches, stakes, and supported by early cannon under the ‘command’ of Henry VI and his nobles, including Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. The Yorkists were led by the ‘Kingmaker’ Earl of Warwick and allies of the Duke of York, and on paper would appear to have little hope of victory; however, the fighting turned out to be surprisingly brief, lasting perhaps only half an hour because a Lancastrian commander, Lord Grey of Ruthin, betrayed his side and allowed Yorkist forces through the defences. Once inside this defence, Yorkist troops overwhelmed the Lancastrians, whose resistance collapsed quickly after the killing of some key leaders. The most dramatic outcome was that the Yorkists found King Henry VI in his tent and took him prisoner.

This marked a significant turning point in English history as it granted the Yorkists control of the monarchy and led to the Act of Accord, as they now needed a legal justification for seizing power. It was considered too risky and unacceptable to the people of England to simply remove Henry VI from the throne. Instead of deposing Henry VI immediately, the Yorkists created the Act that defined a power-sharing arrangement under which Henry VI would remain king, but after his death, succession would not then pass to his son, Edward of Westminster, but instead to Richard, Duke of York and his heirs, effectively rewriting the royal succession.

This forced change in succession outraged the Lancastrians, and Henry’s wife, Queen Margaret of Anjou, refused to accept it. Rather than ending the conflict, the Act of Accord worsened the situation by inciting renewed fighting, which ironically led to Richard, Duke of York, being killed shortly after at the Battle of Wakefield. However, the Act served its purpose by clearing the path for Yorkist rule under Richard’s son, Edward IV (despite Henry VI still being alive, although imprisoned), and by showing that force followed by a parliamentary act could alter the line of English succession.

However, then came the ‘readeption’ of Henry VI after nearly a decade of Edward IV’s rule of England, when the powerful noble, the Earl of Warwick, whom I've already mentioned as Edward IV’s main supporter, fell out with the king. Warwick then changed sides and allied with Henry VI’s Queen, Margaret of Anjou, invading England with French support and forcing Edward IV to flee. Afterwards, Henry VI was released from prison and formally restored to the throne.

However, this was more symbolic than actual, as by this time Henry VI was mentally fragile and politically weak, with real power held by Warwick. A few months later, Edward IV returned from exile and defeated Warwick’s Lancastrian army at the Battle of Barnet (in which Warwick was killed) and then defeated the Lancastrians again at the Battle of Tewkesbury, with the recapture of Henry VI soon after.

As with the Princes in the Tower, Henry VI’s death in 1471 in the Tower of London is somewhat of a mystery, but it is believed that he was murdered in some way. At the time, the Yorkist regime announced that Henry died of “Melancholy” or natural causes, a convenient explanation that few believed. Most historians agree that Henry VI was killed, probably on the orders of King Edward IV, to remove a dangerous symbol that might lead to future Lancastrian rebellion.

As with London, Newcastle, and many towns in England, Northampton also saw its own Great Fire in 1675. Like that in London, it proved devastating, with some three-quarters of the town destroyed, leaving thousands homeless. No one knows exactly how it started, but the common belief is that sparks from a domestic fire (the common cause of fires at the time) in a street not far from the castle caused the blaze. At the time, Northampton, like many other such towns and cities, was highly vulnerable to fire due to the proliferation of timber and thatch-built buildings in narrow streets and extremely limited firefighting methods. Once the fire began, it raged for several hours with fierce winds quickly spreading the flames, turning a small blaze into a major catastrophe.

Help came from King Charles II, who provided funds and promoted rebuilding in stone and brick instead of wood, along with a redesign of the town’s layout featuring wider streets. One of the most important buildings to emerge from this effort was All Saints’ Church, rebuilt in a classical style. Its portico still stands today as a symbol of the town’s recovery.

During one of my visits to Northampton, I took a tour of the 19th-century former county gaol, now home to the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, though the high perimeter walls and obvious prison windows reveal its former purpose. Although not usually open to the public, on the tour we saw some of the remaining cells and followed the walk a condemned person would take to the gallows.

While coal mining and shipbuilding were the dominant industries of northeast England, Northampton specialised in shoe and boot manufacturing. Such activity in Northampton dates back to at least the Middle Ages; however, it was from the 17th century onwards that rapid growth took place, due to an abundant supply of leather from nearby cattle-rearing regions, water from the River Nene for processing hides, and excellent transport links to all parts of the country and beyond.

By the 18th century, shoemaking was a significant cottage industry, with families working from home, but the real change occurred during the Industrial Revolution, when handcrafting was replaced by mechanised production, especially following inventions such as the sewing machine and new methods for attaching soles. A key turning point was the adoption of the Goodyear welted construction, which made shoes more durable and easier to repair.

Soon, factories replaced home workshops, and Northampton became dominated by large employers. By the late 19th century, tens of thousands of people worked in footwear production and manufacturers based in the town not only supplied footwear to the Armed Services (some 50 million pairs during the Second World War), but they also exported shoes across the British Empire.

However, the common story of UK manufacturing decline began after the Great War and accelerated after the Second World War, with increased competition from cheaper overseas production, changing fashions and materials, and automation lessening the need for labour. By the late 20th century, most large shoe factories in Northampton had closed.

Yet, despite the decline, Northampton did not lose its shoemaking identity. Instead, shoemakers shifted toward high-end, handcrafted footwear, producing luxury shoes in classic styles from the likes of Church’s, Crockett & Jones and Edward Green. I mentioned the museum above, and it holds one of the largest shoe collections in the world, through which you can explore the history of Northampton shoemaking. And of course, there is Kinky Boots, the story of Northampton-based Steve Pateman’s family-run shoe company, W.J. Brooks, which experienced financial trouble in the 1990s and turned to making high-heeled women’s shoes in men’s sizes for transgender women, drag artists, and anyone else who wanted to buy them. The BBC later produced a documentary about the factory near Northampton, followed by a Miramax film in 2005 and based on that, a 2012 award-winning musical that is still running today. As Steve offered, “It’s all good for Northamptonshire, it’s not my story anymore, it’s a Northampton story - it belongs to us all now. And it’s good for the county, which is what we need nowadays”

After the Second World War, the UK government initiated a plan to create several ‘new towns’ in England. The first ‘new towns’ were around London to absorb population overspill from the heavily bombed city, and Stevenage was the first designated as such in 1946, followed by Harlow, Basildon and Crawley. The aim was to overcome a severe housing shortage and improve living conditions by offering more space and green space.

A second generation of New Towns came in the 1950s, and a third in the 1960s, including an expanded Northampton, designated a new town in 1968, along with Milton Keynes and the expansion of Peterborough. The intent being these new towns benefited from ‘zoning’ (separating housing, industry, and shopping), pedestrian-friendly layouts, green belts and open spaces and new transport and traffic networks (in the case of Milton Keynes, the grid roads that exist today). To me, these echo T Dan Smith’s effort in the 1960s to recreate Newcastle as a ‘Brasilia of the North’, and while there was some success, many felt the ‘new towns’ felt artificial or lacked character, with too much reliance on cars in some of them.

The plan wasn’t to stop at new towns; the government aimed to create new cities in Telford and Washington (already a ‘new town’) in northeast England, but ultimately the plans did not materialise.

And finally, back to history and Spencer Perceval, born into a well-connected political family who entered Parliament as MP for Northampton in 1796 and rose steadily through government, becoming Prime Minister in 1809, during a difficult period for Britain, as it was fighting the Napoleonic Wars, with an economy under strain and much political division. Spencer was seen as a steady, if not flamboyant, leader; however, his life ended dramatically on 11 May 1812 when he was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, a merchant with a personal grievance against the government.

Bellingham was a Liverpool merchant trading in Russia, where he was imprisoned over a commercial dispute and accusations of debt or misconduct. He claimed he was wrongfully imprisoned, and grew angry because he believed the British government had a duty to protect him as a subject abroad, yet officials failed to intervene or secure his release. Eventually, after being released and returning to Britain, he was denied compensation or redress. He spent years petitioning authorities, including Government departments, Members of Parliament and legal officials, yet all his claims were rejected. He decided that only drastic action would bring attention to his case and chose to shoot Spencer Perceval because, as head of the government, Bellingham held him personally responsible for the failure to deliver justice.

Alas, Perceval died almost immediately, and Bellingham, who made no attempt to escape, was swiftly arrested and charged. After a guilty verdict at trial, his execution followed. Yet the initial shock of Perceval’s assassination did not lead to major political upheaval, and the government simply carried on under new leadership.

Whether it's political assassinations, deaths of kings, great fires or major battles, the fact remains, as recalled in Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”: amid tragedy, life still goes on.

Our mission is to transform North Shields into a vibrant canvas for public art as part of the town’s 800th anniversary celebrations. We have identified key local buildings with prominent elevations, such as gable end walls, to host a series of striking murals

Elevation

I shared in other Meanders that the northeast England coastal town of North Shields celebrated its 800th anniversary last year, so I thought it was about time I took a stroll around the street art produced as part of that celebration, for which local residents and artists formed a community arts charity called Elevation to organise the project.

That project created a self-guided walking route linking murals painted by artists from the UK and Europe, turning empty walls into large public artworks celebrating the town’s maritime history and identity, and thereby encouraging people to explore various parts of North Shields.

I found the artworks all over the town, whether on gable ends, public buildings, or the Fish Quay, the historic riverside area long associated with fishing and maritime life that remains a working quay, albeit with far fewer boats operating from it. Numerous murals celebrate North Shields’ heritage, highlighting themes such as fishing, shipbuilding, maritime trade, and local music.

Here are a few that stood out to me:

The Chase, by Nina Valkhoff, a muralist and painter from the Netherlands, seen above, is one of the most dramatic pieces. Nina is known for her vibrant, large-scale murals that often feature wildlife, plants, and strong female figures, and in this piece, on a gable end close to North Shields Exchange, Nina depicts an underwater hunting scene in which two gannets and a cormorant chase a herring through swirling seaweed. The artwork is full of movement and energy, capturing the wild ecosystem where the River Tyne meets the North Sea and reflecting both the natural life of the coast and the fishing traditions that shaped North Shields. The nearby Victorian Italianate Exchange building also developed from maritime trade, and while it once served as a commercial and civic centre, it now operates as a cultural centre for music and theatre productions.

On a wall of the Fish Quay is Net Worth by Prefab77, a Newcastle-based artist known for large street art projects and fine art, and aptly given its position, this bold, intense portrait shows a weathered fisherman, symbolising the strength and resilience of the local fishing community and celebrating North Shields’ heritage as a fishing town.

Another by prefab77 is The Siren, a striking black-and-white mural of a mythical siren, painted on the gable wall of a building near the centre of the town, symbolising both the fascination and danger of the ocean, emerging from twisting forms linked to the sea, again expressing the deep connection between the town and maritime life.

Spirit of Shields by Mark One87, another Newcastle-based artist, specialises in murals that blend graffiti with design and illustration. This mural, painted on a building at North Shields’ football club ground, shows a fishing boat battling rough seas and crashing waves, highlighting the bravery needed to work at sea and honouring generations of North Shields fishermen who faced such dangerous conditions.

Oceanus by KMG, a Scottish-based artist, explores themes of mythology, community, and local history. This large mural, painted on the rear wall of 55° Fisheries, a working fish merchant, combines classical mythology and local heritage by depicting Oceanus as a hybrid human-fish figure. Oceanus was a Titan in Greek mythology, believed to be the god of the great river that encircled the world. Later Roman traditions associated him with vast waters and tidal seas, making the god particularly relevant to North Shields at the mouth of the River Tyne, where the river meets the sea.

I Beg That Sound by Ricky, an artist and designer based in Poole, Dorset, is a colourful mural featuring the title of a song by local lad Sam Fender on the wall of Arbor Seven café just back from the seafront. The mural celebrates the town’s musical heritage, and I can also certainly recommend Arbour Seven as a peaceful haven serving great coffee, where I rested my feet for a while.

The last mural in my selection, but certainly not the least, is North Shields No.4 by Anthony Downie, who lives and works in North Shields. His mural, celebrating the everyday character of the town and aptly on the wall of the Gunner pub, a solid, community-focused modern local, focuses on neighbourhood scenes of ordinary street life with back lanes rather than famous landmarks, and its terraces and alleys that shape the town’s identity.

I certainly believe Elevation has achieved its goal of celebrating North Shields’ fishing heritage, maritime roots, and coastal wildlife, as well as everyday life and culture. They’ve also left a legacy of North Shields 800th anniversary celebrations, creating an open-air gallery that visitors and local people can enjoy for many years to come.

…..Ouseburn: if Newcastle upon Tyne had a Shoreditch, this would be it

The Guardian

The Guardian newspaper isn’t the only organisation that has compared the Ouseburn area of Newcastle, about a mile east of the city centre, with London’s Shoreditch, as both districts have undergone a very similar urban transformation. From industrial growth and subsequent decline to becoming artistic and cultural hotspots, although it has to be said that Ouseburn covers a far smaller area. Also, during my years living in the south of England, Shoreditch has become very commercialised and expensive, whereas Ouseburn remains a community-focused, less gentrified area that feels more village-like than urban.

Three years ago, I wrote in Better Damp than Dead of my visit to the Victoria Tunnel, which you now enter in the heart of Ouseburn, which strictly speaking, is the Ouseburn Valley, although everyone here just calls it Ouseburn.

The valley takes its name from the Ouse burn, the River Tyne’s largest tributary and Ouse is a Celtic word for ‘rushing water,’ showing how familiar the waterway was to people in ancient times. There are, in fact, several rivers called the Ouse in England, including the well-known River Ouse in York. Although some people refer to Newcastle’s Ouse as a river, it is technically a burn, starting as a small stream northwest of the city, about a mile north of Walbottle, a village on Hadrian’s Wall. That stream grows as it winds through the wooded valley of Jesmond Dene, then goes underground before reappearing in Ouseburn and finally flows into the Tyne east of Newcastle’s Quayside, about 14 kilometres from its source.

Ouseburn’s initial claim to fame is that it played a significant role in Newcastle’s industrial revolution; some even call it the cradle of that revolution. It was originally part of Byker, which was first recorded in 1198 as a distinct township built outside Newcastle’s city walls. Before the 19th-century industrial boom, the area was mostly farmland, with a few water-powered mills along the Ouse Burn.

As with many place names in Britain, Byker could have a couple of meanings. One is Viking, derived from ‘by kiarr,’ meaning ‘village on the marsh’; if so, it’s one of the very few Viking placenames in Tyneside. However, the words ‘carr’ and ‘kerr’ were also used in northern English after Viking times, so Byker might simply mean ‘next to the marsh,’ since carrs are marshy scrubland. In another of my meanders, I wrote of Byker’s well-known public housing block, the Byker Wall, designed by Ralph Erskine in the early 1970s. Some people in Britain might also remember the children’s TV show Byker Grove, which brought young Ant and Dec to public attention. Interestingly, much of the series' filming took place in Benwell, on the west side of the city. That’s TV magic for you.

Byker is also where Newcastle United Football Club began as Stanley FC, founded in 1881 by the Stanley Cricket Club to occupy themselves during the winter, with their ground in the Stanley Street area of South Byker. In 1882, a rival Newcastle-based club, West End FC, was founded in Elswick, to the west of Newcastle, and that same year, Stanley FC changed their name to East End FC. Not because of West End FC, but to differentiate themselves from teams from the town of Stanley in County Durham. Over the coming years, East End FC moved around Byker, then in 1886 to Heaton, northeast of Newcastle. East End FC eventually became Newcastle United in 1892 after West End FC went out of business and East End FC took over the lease of West End’s ground, St James’ Park. The new name (the other contenders were Newcastle and Newcastle City) was chosen to attract fans from across Newcastle.

Anyway, enough of that diversion, so let's get back to Ouseburn’s key role in Newcastle’s industrial growth, with the first recorded industry being glassmaking, after three glasshouses were set up in 1619, where the Ouse Burn met the Tyne. This industry eventually led to Newcastle becoming a leading centre for glass production, supplying containers for many industries, especially food and drink, before the widespread use of tin cans for storing perishable food.

Pottery started in the valley in 1782, paving the way for Maling Pottery, one of the most distinctive and successful ceramic manufacturers in northeast England, to open in the following century.

The business actually began in 1762, when Thomas Maling established a pottery on the Newcastle Quayside, producing simple earthenware household wares. Then, in the 1880s, the much-expanded company moved to Ousburn and into a large new factory known as the Ford B Pottery, producing industrial ceramics, especially jam jars, food containers, sanitary ware, and utilitarian pottery. At its peak, this was one of the largest pottery factories in Britain, employing hundreds of workers and producing millions of items annually, blending craft with mass production.

However, Maling is best remembered today for its decorative ceramics, especially from the interwar period in the 1920s and 30s, when the company began producing highly decorative wares that reflected contemporary tastes, with bold, glossy glazes, rich colours, intricate patterns, and transfers, often with an oriental or Art Deco influence.

By this point, Maling pottery was not only sold across Britain but also exported overseas and regarded as both affordable and stylish, occupying a middle ground between mass production and artistic design, making it accessible to a wide audience.

However, after the Second World War, the company faced growing challenges with changing tastes in home décor and competition from cheaper imports, and despite attempts to modernise, the business closed in 1963.

But going back to 19th-century Ousburn, Maling’s move there was soon followed by various industries and businesses, including flax spinning, masonry, lead works, iron foundries, soap makers, tanneries, sawmills, corn mills, flint mills, and coal shipping. The area provided many jobs and became a self-contained community, with terraced housing, tenements, a doctor’s office, a school, and about fifteen pubs or beer houses. The latter became more common after the Beerhouse Act of 1830, which made it easier to open small drinking spots.

In the early 1850s, Scottish engineer Robert Morrison opened the Ouseburn Engine Works that produced a new type of steam hammer for forging iron and steel parts. These hammers could strike with a force of about 125 tons to shape steel plates.

Unfortunately, the works had a troubled history, for example, the Manchester Times reported that on 31st July 1858. “A great sensation was created in the neighbourhood of Ouseburn yesterday morning by a boiler explosion, which occurred a little before six o’clock, at Messrs. R Morrison and Co’s Engine Works. Seven or eight persons were injured, some of them being very seriously scalded. ….. The force of the explosion was tremendous. The boiler went right through the roof of the shed high up into the air, and, clearing some sheer legs, which stood about 35 feet high, it passed over the yard, a distance of many yards, alighting on another shed, smashing through the roof, and penetrating right into a new boiler which lay on the floor….” It wasn’t just accidents; the business also struggled due to financial mismanagement, and after a series of bankruptcies under different owners, the works finally closed for good in 1881.

All the industries I’ve mentioned relied on the Ouseburn’s tidal waterway, which allowed boats like keels and later wherries to travel upstream from the River Tyne to bring in raw materials and ship out finished goods to and from tightly packed buildings sitting all along the water’s edge, with slipways, boat supports, loading equipment, mill races, and waterwheels. By the mid-1800s, the valley was a mass of factories, workshops, and workers’ housing, making it one of Newcastle’s first industrial suburbs. The area was lively but crowded, with people living close to heavy, dirty, and often dangerous industry. The lower Ouseburn Valley’s industrial scene was vastly different from that of the upper part, which became home to Victorian parks such as Jesmond Dene, Heaton Park, and Armstrong Park.

The iron arches of the Ouseburn Viaduct still stand over the valley today. Built in 1869, it replaced an earlier timber bridge from 1839 that carried the first railway from Newcastle to the coastal town of North Shields. The current bridge is about 360 yards (330 meters) long and 108 feet (33 meters) high. Today, it carries the main east coast railway line and is a Grade II listed structure. Nearby is the red brick Byker Bridge, another viaduct built in 1878 as a Victorian road crossing to avoid the steep descent into the valley. There was once a half-penny toll, but that ended in 1895, and the road was widened in 1899 to accommodate trams. No one knows exactly how many bricks were used to build the bridge, but estimates put the number at over 12 million. More recently, in 1986, the deck was rebuilt with modern concrete beams, but the brick-built arches remain. For many years, this was the main eastern road exit from Newcastle. The third bridge, the Byker Viaduct, is much newer than the other two, opening in 1982 for the Tyne and Wear Metro and constructed from pre-cast concrete box-girder sections joined with epoxy resin. It follows an S-shaped curve and even crosses over the top of Byker Road Bridge at one end.

After the Second World War, traditional industries began to collapse across Tyneside. In Ouseburn, many factories closed, and buildings were abandoned, leaving the lower part of the valley as a derelict industrial landscape filled with empty warehouses and decaying infrastructure. Demolition of many buildings took place, but not all, and in the 1970s, artists and musicians began moving into the empty industrial buildings because rents were low. Over time, studios, music venues, galleries, and small creative businesses filled the old factories and warehouses, and in 1996, the creation of the Ouseburn Trust helped guide regeneration and protect the area’s heritage, turning Ouseburn into one of Newcastle’s main arts and creative hubs, with the repurposing of many of its old industrial buildings.

One site near where the Ouseburn meets the Tyne shows how industry in the area changed over time. Until 1868, it was home to corn mills and brickworks, yet just two years later, it became a centre for the unloading of livestock, mainly from Scandinavia, and a sanatorium holding sheep and cattle for health inspection.

By 1906, the site’s usage changed again when a large part of it became the steam-powered Maynards Toffee Factory, meeting the Victorian demand for sweets. The original Dobson steam engine is gone, but the old chimney still stands as a local landmark. After many years of inactivity, the factory was converted into offices for the arts and crafts community in 2011, with the rest of the site being developed into a multi-storey residential building. The Maynards name lives on through the ‘wine gums’ you can still buy today, although the original company is subsumed into the Mondelez group.

Another example of reuse is a former flax mill built in 1848 that now houses studios and the popular Cluny music venue and bar, which takes its name from the business that operated there, after flax milling ended, producing a blended Scotch whisky of the same name. Yet another is Seven Stories, the national centre for children’s books, opened in 2005 in a nineteenth-century brick flour mill, while nearby, along a bend in the burn that hints at the area’s rural past, is Ouseburn Farm. This urban farm, run by a charity, has goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, and more. Part of the farm’s site was once home to the Northumberland Lead Works, founded in 1871 and later called Walker’s Paint Works because of the white lead paint made there. The works closed in the 1960s, and the land was cleaned of pollutants with new topsoil added. There is also a memorial to the women who suffered lead poisoning while working in the factory.

Although the area no longer has 15 pubs, there are still places like the Ship Inn, which was once a house in a Victorian terrace, and there’s also the popular Tyne Bar, originally the old Ship Tavern, dating back to the 1850s, where the Ouseburn meets the Tyne. The Free Trade Inn, from the 18th century, sits high on the bank of the Ouseburn with magnificent views over the Tyne. The area also has its own microbreweries, such as Brinkburn Street Brewery, Kitchen & Bar, which has a basement bar and an outdoor terrace, and the Out There Brewing Company.

Ouseburn is one of the few places in Britain that offer such a clear transformation from industrial centre to creative district within the same historic setting, and this is important because it highlights three major phases of Newcastle’s, and indeed northeast England’s, urban history. First came the industrial rise, with glassworks, engineering, and river trade. Then came industrial decline, leaving the area with vacant buildings and abandoned homes. Finally, creative regeneration brought galleries, music venues, cultural spaces and modern housing.

Nothing better than sitting in a pub, looking out of the window at another pub, to work out where you’re going in life
Benny Bellamacina

In my Meander The Death of the English Pub of some years ago, I wrote about the difficulty of finding a pub I could settle into and call my ‘local’ when I moved to Blaydon. In that piece, I mentioned I thought I had found one in the Queens Head in the nearby town of Winlaton, but alas, that too has closed. Assuaging my disappointment, however, was the discovery of a micro-pub in Blaydon, ‘The Yard’. Or, as it has been recently rechristened, the ‘Half Irish’ after a makeover.

That makeover got me thinking of how many of the pubs I regularly frequented in London when I first moved there in 1974 are still going. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that most are.

I actually enjoyed my first pint in London before I moved there. It was in the ‘Royal George’, just across Eversholt Street from Euston railway station, and I know exactly when I drank that pint, 11 March 1974, as it was after my interview for a job as an Assistant Scientific Officer at the Laboratory of the Government Chemist. The reason I recall the date is that it was the Monday after I watched a match at St James’ Park between NUFC and Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup sixth round, when a 10-man NUFC won 4:3, having been 3:1 down with some thirty minutes to go. I was in the pub with my father, who travelled with me for company and to show me the fire station on the Euston Road, just around the corner from the pub, where he and other firefighters from his northeast England fire station were seconded during the London Blitz. It’s still a working fire station today.

As to my interview, I thought I’d messed it up, but I obviously did myself justice, as a couple of weeks later I received an offer, and a couple of months after that, at the tender age of 17 (yes, I know that means I was drinking underage), I left northeast England for London. Over the decades, I travelled back to visit my parents while they were still around and often went back to watch NUFC lose, but it would be another fifty years before I moved back to northeast England to live.

In truth, I didn’t frequent the Royal George much after first moving to London, but I have called in there for a beer on occasion if I had time to kill while waiting for a train. There’s been a pub on the site since 1877, named after the HMS Royal George, a Royal Navy flagship that sank in 1873 with the loss of 1,200 crew. In the late 1930s, Truman Hanbury & Buxton, the then-owners, rebuilt the pub, with its front designed to echo the stern of a boat, and I’m pleased to say the pub is still serving customers today.

My next two pints were on the day I moved to London, Saturday 13 July 1974 (and yes, I was still underage; my 18th birthday was still two days away), and if you read my London Reflections on my first months in London, you’ll become acquainted with my very basic early accommodation. On reaching that accommodation around lunchtime, I encountered one of my new roommates, and we decided to decamp to the nearby Prince Alfred. Again, not a pub I frequented often after my first visit; in fact, I don’t recall ever making a second visit. I'm not sure why, as I remember it being a decent enough place on a site that has had a pub since 1860, and like the Royal George, the Prince Alfred is still going strong.

Maybe one reason I didn’t return is the trauma I felt coming to terms with the difference between northeast England and London beer prices. On entering the pub with my new roommate, I offered to buy the beers and expected to see change from 30p (yes, I know, but remember this is 1974, before the rampant inflation that was soon to hit the UK) as a beer in the northeast at the time was around 13p a pint. Not in London. In London, it was 17p, and yes, I know, by today’s standards, that’s not much, but it’s a 30% rise I didn’t see coming. Although thinking about it, the differential is even greater today, with beer at around £4 a pint in my local micropub and probably around £8 a pint in London. Anyway, I’d love to say that the extra cost curtailed my drinking, but alas, no.

And much of that drinking was in the Leinster Arms, a pub that was a two-minute walk from my hostel accommodation, in Leinster Gardens. I last visited this small Victorian-era pub a few years ago, and it hadn’t seemed to have changed much over the past fifty years, maintaining its charm with ornate plaster ceilings, dark wood panelling, and period mirrors. However, it’s the fascinating architectural quirk that’s just across the road from it that captures many people’s interest.

The steam trains running on the 1860s-built Metropolitan Railway, which later became part of the London Underground, required open-air sections for ventilation. To maintain the elegant look of Leinster Gardens, developers built dummy house fronts, complete with fake windows and doors, to conceal the exposed railway cutting behind. From the street, the terrace looks continuous, but go around the back of the dummy houses, and you’ll find an open railway track below.

While the Leinster Arms was my ‘local’ when out with my roommates, the two pubs I frequented near my work in Waterloo were the Hole in the Wall and the Wellington at Waterloo, and I’m pleased to say they, too, are both still going strong today.

The Hole in the Wall is one of London’s most atmospheric railway pubs, tucked directly beneath the brick arches opposite the main entrance to London Waterloo Railway Station. Trains rumble overhead, and the low ceilings and brick vaulting give it a compact, almost subterranean character, retaining the feeling of a working railway-era drinking house that’s practical rather than ornate.

Because of its location, the HitW attracts a mixed clientele: commuters grabbing a quick pint before a train, railway staff, locals living in the area, and people like me who work around Waterloo. I recall it had a lively atmosphere, and when I last went there a few years ago, it hadn’t lost any of that. I think it survives because it offers something increasingly rare in central London, and that’s a keen, no-nonsense sense of place and history, and while it’s less polished than some nearby bars, that’s precisely its appeal. I celebrated my first promotion at the HitW and played my first video games there, the legendary PONG and later Space Invaders. Nowadays, people play such games privately at home, but in the past, they were social activities involving competition while other drinkers looked on.

If the HitW feels like a tucked-away, claustrophobic pub, the two-minute walk away, Wellington at Waterloo, while also built in the Victorian era, stands in contrast as a large, open, bright pub more in keeping with the flow of modern central London life. But unlike the HitW, the Wellington has changed much since my first days of drinking there. Then there were cubicles dividing the interior, while now the space is open-plan, and the pool table room, where I spent many of my misspent youthful Friday afternoons, has been replaced by a dining area.

I write misspent Friday afternoons as that’s when preventative maintenance of the huge computer, size-wise but not memory-wise, was ‘taken down’, leaving us computer programmers and programme designers with little to do other than retire to the pub for long sessions playing pool. Come noon every Friday, the computer maintenance engineers would swarm over the thing, essentially dissembling it, then, having given it a good dusting and polish, reassembling it for our use the following week. On our way to the pub that stood a 5-minute walk down the Waterloo Road from the laboratory, we would nod to the Great Train Robber Buster Edwards, whose flower stall stood almost opposite the Wellington. A place now occupied by a burger van.

The Wellington was also the penultimate venue for my first stag-do pub crawl back in October 1975. My friends and I started at noon in the Dalston area of London, where I attended day release and night school at the long-gone Hackney Technical College, then worked our way through East London to Waterloo, seeking out pubs that were open along the way. No mean feat back in 1975, when licensing laws were much stricter but flexed to suit the needs of those working in different areas of London, such as Smithfield and Billingsgate markets, and the reporters on Fleet Street.

The destination of that stag do back in 1975 is no longer with us. It was the New Inn on Tottenham Court Road. I confess I don’t recall much about the pub other than its association with Scottish and Newcastle Brewery and thus its sale of northeast ales such as McEwan’s Export and Newcastle Brown Ale, which was its attraction for me. As you can see from the photograph below, taken in the pub on my stag do, I look surprisingly quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, given I had been drinking a fair part of the day. I can’t say the same of my dear and now departed sleepy-headed friend Kelvin, who is sitting beside me on the right. For the record, the others in the photo are, from left to right, Adrian, Ernie, and, to the right of Kelvin, Bonnie. The New Inn became a casualty of the major transformation of Tottenham Court Road in the late 20th century, with commercial redevelopment and the expansion of offices and retail spaces.

And while writing of pubs belonging to Scottish and Newcastle, another venue in which I enjoyed a beer or three in my early years in London was what was then called the Savoy Tavern, which unsurprisingly stands on Savoy Street just off the Strand, and I’m pleased to report is another pub still there today, but with a slight name change to the Savoy Tap. While the current building dates from 1926, the site has a long tavern tradition dating back at least to the early 1700s. Records show that a licensed public house was here as early as 1723, primarily serving soldiers at the nearby Savoy Barracks and the surrounding military accommodation. Rather than just a pub, it was a suttling house, a tavern that sold provisions to troops. Over the next century or so, various records list it as Savoy Barracks and Savoy Palace through several changes in ownership. Its affiliation after the building’s 1926 reconstruction was with William Younger & Co., a prominent Edinburgh brewery of the era that later merged with McEwan’s to form Scottish Brewers in 1931, and a subsequent merger led to the pub’s ownership by Scottish & Newcastle in 1960. In 1998, the pub was renamed Savoy Tup, and in 2018, Shepherd Neame, Britain’s oldest brewer, took on the lease and operation of the pub, refurbishing it and renaming it the Savoy Tap.

And while I’m in the Waterloo area, another wonderful pub I’ve enjoyed a pint in is The King’s Arms on Roupell Street, not just in my first years in London but on a number of occasions since. It’s a distinctive example of a classic London neighbourhood pub that retains a sense of history while thriving in a modern city context. Roupell Street and the streets around it, developed between the 1820s and 1840s as part of the Lambeth Estate, are a rare slice of 19th-century London as it once was with the uniform terraces and workers’ cottages forming a charming Grade II listed conservation area that I’ve heard tourists say feels “like a film set”, apt given it is often used for TV and cinematic productions. The King’s Arms is situated on the corner of Roupell Street and Windmill Walk. It's retained a feature once common in Victorian pubs of separate public and saloon bars, and these days focuses on real ale, with multiple hand pumps offering a rotating selection of cask ales from British breweries. It has a cosy, convivial vibe and, to me, is a quintessential local pub popular with both locals and visitors to the area, without feeling touristy. While the focus is on real ale and a classic pub atmosphere, it has also long hosted a Thai kitchen, adding a slightly quirky, cosmopolitan twist to its traditional character.

In 1978, I left the world of Forensic Chemistry to join the Defence and Aerospace industry. Yes, quite a career change, and my leaving ‘do’ from the Laboratory was in the pub ‘The Stage Door’ that sits behind the old Vic Theatre. I’m not sure why that pub was chosen, rather than my more regular haunts around Waterloo and as it turns out, I’ve never crossed its threshold again, and given the occasion, my memories of the pub are cloudy!

Of course, over the course of fifty years, there are many other London pubs in which I’ve sampled the delights of their offerings, Far, far too many to include, though I will give an honourable mention to the tiny Red Lion just off Pall Mall, where in my later career I would occasionally relax with colleagues at the end of the day. It’s still going strong, unlike the Captain’s Cabin tucked away just off Haymarket. Other notable pubs in which I’ve supped an excellent pint include the Lamb and Flag, a Georgian haunt of Dickens near Covent Garden, while another frequented by Dickens (and the likes of Samuel Johnson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) is the Old Cheshire Cheese. Originally part of a 14th-century monastery and then a 16th-century pub lost to the Great Fire of London, the current pub, tucked down an alley off Fleet Street, dates from 1667 and serves some excellent Samuel Smith’s beer. And mentioning old pubs, Ye Olde Mitre, hidden just off Holborn, also comes to mind. There is debate over its true age, with some asserting the pub dates to the mid-16th century, while others claim the building dates to the 18th century. What there is no argument over, in my opinion, is the great range of Fuller’s beers it offers.

Despite my deep affection for the northeast and its hostelries, I still like a good old London pub, and when meeting up with my southern-based friends, we often go to the Ship and Shovell or the Chandos. The Ship and Shovell is the only pub I’ve come across that’s on two sides of a street (and close to where Dickens began his working life as a 12-year-old boy in Warren’s Blacking Factory, sticking labels on bottles of boot blacking). The other pub is the Chandos, just off Trafalgar Square, close to the statue of Edith Cavell. It’s another Samuel Smith’s pub, so you know you’ll get a decent pint at a reasonable price (well, reasonable for London)

Cheers!!

I saw it — and I loved it.

The artist L S Lowry reflecting on Sunderland and Wearside

I’m conscious that in the years I’ve written my meanderings on northeast England, I have made frequent mention of two of its cities, Durham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but have sadly neglected Sunderland, the region’s third and youngest city. I’ll try to redress the balance a little here, and rather than photographs, I’ve used paintings to illustrate the piece. And in this, I’ve focused on the city rather than the wonderful countryside and nearby beaches. That will be for another day.

Each of the three cities has a distinctive character, with Durham, the most visited by tourists, dominated by its Norman ecclesiastical core and Medieval street patterns. At its heart stands Durham Cathedral, one of Europe’s great Romanesque buildings that sits beside Durham Castle, giving the city a historic, not industrial, feel. In contrast, Newcastle’s architecture embodies mercantile prosperity through Georgian town planning, Victorian infrastructure, and monumental bridges. Newcastle’s Grainger Town area, dating back to the 1840s, offers one of the finest neoclassical urban cores outside London. Sunderland’s architectural character is different still. Though it retains some older sites, such as the Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens and St Peter’s Church, Second World War bombing and then clearance saw Sunderland lose much of its nineteenth-century fabric. As a result, it’s post-War rebuilding that now shapes the city.

The earliest known mention of Sunderland appears in medieval documents of the Bishopric of Durham, dating to around 1179. These refer to a settlement at the mouth of the river Wear, named Sunderland or sometimes Suthlanda, which is believed to have derived from ‘sundered land’, land separated either by the River Wear or by the monastic boundaries of the Wearmouth community. That community dates to 674 CE, when Benedict Biscop founded the monastery at St Peter’s Church, Monkwearmouth, a house that later merged with its sister foundation at Jarrow, forming the community associated with the Venerable Bede.

As I’ve shared in other meanderings, the joint monastery became a centre of scholarship, manuscript production, and early Christian art, and while Viking raids in the 9th century disrupted monastic life, the site retained its importance, and by the Middle Ages, the settlement in the area drew its income from fishing and small-scale ship repair.

From the 16th century, Sunderland exported salt, at the time a vital preservative for food, produced at coastal works using seawater evaporation. Glassmaking also started around the same time and later grew into a major industry, with the town known for both fine and industrial glass. Although for centuries, Newcastle, which controlled much of the coal trade in northeast England, eclipsed Sunderland economically, the town began to challenge that monopoly on coal exports, and by the 18th century, Sunderland had grown into a prominent port. The Industrial Revolution and the nearby County Durham coalfields, just inland from Sunderland, then triggered the town’s explosive economic growth, transforming it into a shipbuilding powerhouse that, at its peak in the late 19th century, was one of the largest shipbuilding towns in the world.

As mining expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries, railways and wagonways were used to transport coal to the River Wear at Sunderland. From there, ships took coal to London, the Baltic, France, and the Mediterranean. The ever-increasing demand for coal meant a regular demand for Sunderland-built colliers and cargo ships to transport it. At their peak, coal exports from Sunderland constituted about 10% of Britain’s coal exports, reaching 6 million tons annually. This coal trade kept orders flowing to Sunderland’s shipyards.

During that era, Britain produced around 60% of the world’s shipping, with the main shipbuilding centres on the Rivers Wear, Tyne and Clyde, and in Belfast. Sunderland focused on reliable commercial vessels, building fewer prestige liners or naval ships, and by the turn of the 19th century, with the River Wear lined with shipyards, it built more ships by tonnage, about a quarter of the world’s merchant shipping, than anywhere else. Shipbuilding, in turn, boosted related industries such as marine engine works, iron and steel fabricators, ropeworks, and sail-making.

The River Tyne shipyards, in contrast, specialised in naval ships that required engineering innovation, especially in marine engines. While the shipyards’ overall merchant output was lower than Sunderland’s, Tyne-built ships were often larger and more complex.

By the early 20th century, the most advanced shipyards were on the Clyde, and as a result, where once Sunderland shipyards had led in quantity, those on the Clyde eventually surpassed the Wear in total tonnage. Clyde yards also produced prestige vessels, including major Cunard liners, battleships, and advanced passenger steamers. And one can’t ignore Harland and Wolff in Belfast, who specialised in giant ocean liners such as the RMS Titanic and the RMS Britannic, as well as other White Star liners. Belfast shipyards built fewer ships than Sunderland’s; however, they constructed some of the largest and most ambitious vessels.

For Sunderland, the link between coal and shipbuilding became a weakness when global coal demand fell, as other energy sources became popular. So as mining declined after the Second World War, Sunderland’s shipbuilding also declined. Competition also increased as steel shipbuilding consolidated elsewhere in the world, and the result was that more and more Sunderland shipyards closed. The final Wear shipyard closed in 1988, and around the same time, coal mining in northeast England was also nearly gone, leaving Sunderland facing economic restructuring.

One key post-industrial development was the opening of the Nissan car plant in 1986. It has since grown into one of the largest plants in Europe and is a major local employer. The plant produces vehicles for both domestic and export markets and is now central to Sunderland’s modern economy.

The granting of city status, an honorary title granted by the Crown, in 1992 was a symbolic step in recognising Sunderland’s regeneration, boosting civic pride, and acknowledging the shift in identity from declining industrial town to a developing regional city. One could say that Sunderland is a Millennial or Generation Y city compared to Newcastle, which gained city status in 1882, although both are much younger than grand old Durham, which achieved such status in 995.

Neither Newcastle nor Sunderland has the architectural highlights that define Durham’s cityscape, such as its cathedral or castle. Newcastle’s Church of England Cathedral, St Nicholas, is notable for its lantern tower, the light from which historically guided ships up the Tyne, and of course, the city boasts a castle, the predecessor to which gave the city its name. Although Sunderland does not have a cathedral, it houses a minster, redesignated in 1998 from being St Michael’s parish Church, to reflect its broader civic and regional significance. Although parts of the minster date to the 12th century, the majority dates to the 14th and 15th centuries.

The Minster has a medieval Gothic style with Victorian restoration, and its large west tower is a major feature of the city skyline. The nave is spacious, with memorials to shipbuilders, seafaring families, merchants, civic leaders, and maritime plaques, reflecting Sunderland’s industrial heritage and coastal setting.

I mentioned earlier Newcastle's iconic bridges. Well, there are some notable bridges in Sunderland too, the Wearmouth road and rail bridges, the Queen Alexandra Bridge and the more recent Northern Spire Bridge, all of which reflect very different eras of engineering and civic ambition.

The Wearmouth Road Bridge is Sunderland’s most historic river crossing, a structure that links the north and south of the city and has stood at the centre of its story for over two centuries. The first Wearmouth Bridge opened in 1796 and was revolutionary for its time and aptly designed by Thomas Paine. Yes, that Thomas Paine, one of the American Founding Fathers, who, as well as advocating the ‘Rights of Man’, designed bridges. In this case, the second major iron bridge in the world, after the famous span at Iron Bridge. At the time of its opening, Wearmouth’s single cast-iron arch, which is over 230 feet (circa 70 metres), was one of the largest of its kind in existence. However, by the early 20th century, road traffic demands had increased dramatically, but instead of demolishing the bridge and replacing it, engineers encased and strengthened the original iron arch, allowing a widened bridge to reopen in 1929.

The Monkwearmouth Railway Bridge that sits cheek by jowl with the road bridge is one of Sunderland’s most important and often overlooked river crossings, as it carries a crucial north-south rail line over the River Wear as part of Sunderland’s transport infrastructure for nearly 150 years. Opened in 1879, it was built for the North Eastern Railway Company to connect Sunderland’s growing rail network with lines north of the Wear. It’s an Iron lattice girder bridge with multiple spans supported by masonry piers, and unlike the more decorative Road Bridge, was designed primarily for strength and efficiency rather than visual grandeur. Today, the bridge carries the Tyne and Wear Metro and Mainline rail services linking Sunderland with Newcastle and beyond to Carlisle.

The Queen Alexandra Bridge (named in honour of Queen Alexandra, the Queen Consort of Edward VII), designed to carry both road and rail traffic and allow tall-masted ships to pass beneath, opened in 1909 at the height of Sunderland’s industrial power, when the Wear was crowded with shipyards and coal staithes. It was one of the largest steel trussed arch bridges in Britain and symbolised Sunderland’s industrial confidence.

The youngest of the bridges is the Northern Spire Bridge, which opened in 2018, as part of Sunderland’s 21st-century regeneration strategy, improving road links and unlocking development land on the south side of the Wear. It’s a sleek and modern cable-stayed bridge with a striking white, curved shape, designed as much for visual impact as for functionality, serving as a symbol of renewal rather than industry.

Also part of its regeneration is Sunderland’s heavy investment in arts and creative venues with the intent of hosting up to 300 cultural events annually.

A leading part of that ambition is the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. With links to Sunderland University, it is one of the northeast’s top contemporary art spaces, showcasing work by artists from around the world. The gallery also supports the development of new talent, helping make Sunderland a serious arts centre. Furthermore, glassmaking now links industrial heritage with modern craft and design, with the National Glass Centre offering artist residencies and public workshops featuring live glassblowing demonstrations along with exhibitions of studio glass.

Sunderland’s Empire Theatre is the city’s premier performance venue and one of the largest theatres in Northeast England. It hosts West End tours, opera, ballet, and major musicals. I’ve seen many performances there over the years—from Les Dawson in pantomime to, more recently, the chilling 2:22….

Sunderland also boasts a vibrant live music scene and has produced noteworthy musicians and bands as part of the wider northeast music culture, including Eric Burdon of the Animals, Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, the influential punk band Leatherface, and, more recently, the Futureheads, Field Music, and Frankie and the Heartstrings. Music venues range from grassroots to larger concert halls, and a particular favourite venue of mine is The Fire Station, a beautifully restored cultural hub that was the former Sunderland Central Fire Station. After closing as a working fire station in the early 1990s and lying vacant for decades, it is now part of a wider redevelopment effort to rejuvenate Sunderland’s city centre and create a dedicated cultural quarter. The Fire Station has a mid-size performance space and offers a varied programme of music, theatre, comedy, dance and spoken word with a capacity of up to 800 people. Over the past three years, I watched my beloved Lindisfarne there, listened to talks, and attended a silent-film gala.

Sunderland’s Museum and Winter Gardens is one of the oldest municipal museums in the UK and one of northeast England’s most significant cultural sites. Part natural history museum, part art gallery, and part tropical botanical conservatory, the museum’s permanent collection of more than 100,000 objects spans a remarkable range of subjects. Detailed galleries explore Sunderland’s industrial past, including shipbuilding, coal mining, glassmaking, and pottery, while the natural sciences collection includes important specimens and nationally designated artefacts such as the only known UK example of a Coelurosauvarus fossil, a type of gliding reptile.

The museum also has a strong art collection, notably works by L.S. Lowry, the celebrated painter of industrial life who had a long and close relationship with northeast England, with Sunderland becoming almost a second home for him towards the end of his life and from which he explored the region. Alongside paintings, local craft and heritage exhibits include Sunderland Lustreware pottery, known for its distinctive iridescent glaze

Attached to the museum is the Winter Gardens, a modern glass rotunda completed in the early 2000s that replaced an earlier Victorian glass conservatory lost to bombing during the Second World War. The gardens offer a lush tropical botanical space amid the city centre, housing over 2,000 plants from around the world, including exotic trees and rainforest species. Features include a pond with Koi carp, a treetop walkway, and scenic views over nearby Mowbray Park.

And of course, I could not close this without mentioning Sunderland Association Football Club, especially as I was born into a mixed marriage. My father, who played for Newcastle United youth back in the late 1920s, was unerringly a ‘Magpie’ through and through. My mother was an ardent Sunderland AFC supporter, as was my maternal grandfather. At the age of 10, I had to decide which football team I was to support. I loved my mother, but I chose the black-and-white.

And given I’ve mentioned Newcastle United's nickname, I’ll share that Sunderland’s is the ‘Black Cats.’ As with Newcastle United's nickname, the ‘Magpies’, the source of Sunderland’s nickname is argued over. One of the well-known theories is that, supposedly, in 1805, at the gun battery on the south pier at Roker, near Sunderland, one of the soldiers heard a loud howl coming from a black cat. The battery then became known as the Black Cat Battery, and, as it was close to the ground where Sunderland AFC played their first matches, the team gained the nickname.

Wherever their respective nicknames came from, Sunderland AFC, like Newcastle United, is one of England’s historic football institutions, with both clubs firmly embedded in the identity of their respective cities. Sunderland AFC is the older club of the two, having been founded in 1879 as Sunderland and District Teachers AFC.

Sunderland AFC joined the Football League in 1890 and quickly became a leading team, winning the league title in their second season and successfully defending it the following season. By the mid-1890s, they were widely known as “The Team of All Talents”, winning three league titles in four seasons. At that point, no English club had achieved greater success in league football, and arguably, Sunderland AFC was the strongest club in England, setting the standard for the game and becoming a symbol of the industrial northeast’s ambition. Sunderland even played Scottish champions Heart of Midlothian F.C. in what newspapers billed as a “World Championship” match between the English and Scottish league winners. Sunderland AFC were victorious 5:3.

A key factor in Sunderland AFC’s dominance was the early acceptance of professionalism and the recruitment of skilled Scottish players, with the town’s vibrant economic circumstances offering the club strong financial backing from local industrial wealth. This money attracted players of ability and offered strength in depth that many rivals lacked. We see the same in the modern game with the likes of Manchester City; money has always powered football.

In 1898, the team moved to Roker Park, famous for its tight stands and intense atmosphere, which soon became one of the most intimidating grounds in England, with crowds regularly exceeding 30,000, an enormous number for the time and indicating the club’s stature. Sunderland AFC played there for nearly a century before, in 1997, moving to the Stadium of Light, whose name symbolises the region’s mining heritage.

However, with the decline of industry in northeast England, Sunderland AFC’s fortunes also declined, and after their fifth title win in 1913, the balance of power shifted as the competition coming from clubs in the Midlands and northwest England grew stronger. The style of football also changed, becoming a more tactically organised game, and it wasn’t until 1936 that Sunderland won a sixth and to date their last league title.

As you might imagine, with two cities only 12 miles apart, there is much rivalry between Sunderland AFC and Newcastle United, and its roots run far deeper than sport, defined by regional pride and industrial history. Long before football intensified things, the two towns, as they then were, were economic rivals competing for port traffic and industrial contracts. Although both cities were industrial and working-class, slight distinctions emerged: the people of Sunderland often saw themselves as the hardworking, shipbuilding town, whereas the people of Newcastle felt they lived in the regional capital and commercial centre of northeast England.

This civic pride in industrial and commercial strength directly fed into football identity and intensified the rivalry between the two teams, especially when Newcastle United, formed in 1892, rapidly rose to challenge Sunderland’s dominance, and by the early 1900s, were winning league titles too. The rivalry became a battle for football supremacy in northeast England, with supporters seeing matches as more than sport but contests for regional leadership.

Although suffering disappointments over recent decades, Sunderland AFC’s 1973 FA Cup win remains legendary. Sunderland, as a then-Second Division side, defeated the then-mighty Leeds United F.C. 1–0 at Wembley in one of the greatest cup upsets in English football history. I watched it with a bunch of soldiers when spending some time with my brother at a military base in what was then West Germany. No matter what your team affiliation was, everyone in the room wanted Sunderland to win (well, apart from the one soldier from Leeds)

More recently, Sunderland AFC gained international attention through the marvellous Netflix documentary series, ‘Sunderland ‘Til I Die’ that chronicled the emotional and financial struggles of the club and its supporters and showed how deeply football is embedded in local identity. Last season, Sunderland AFC made it back into the Premier League and are doing well; though it pains me to write this, they are even currently above Newcastle United in the league.

I will therefore conclude with the theme ‘Shipyards’ by The Lake Poets from that series, which, in its sparse, intimate, and almost elegiac manner, perfectly captures the emotional essence of a series that wasn’t simply about football, but a reflection of the spirit of a city whose fortunes have risen and fallen yet rise again. There’s no bombast to the song, which unfolds slowly, almost conversationally, conjuring a shadowy, lingering memory of industrial collapse yet underlined with the fortitude to prevail. The ‘Shipyards’ theme captures the spirit of people rooted in the same streets, docks and terraces that the documentary explores with a melancholy affection. It’s a meditation on place, pride and generational memory, capturing something truer about Sunderland and, indeed, the whole of the northeast of England. Hope mixed with disappointment, loyalty despite hardship and a quiet, stubborn resilience.

To the deservedly venerable body of outstanding Peter, whom high faith proclaims the head of the church, I Ceolfrid, abbot from the furthest regions of the Angles, send pledges of my devoted affection, desiring that among the heavenly joys of such a father I and my men may forever have a place in memory.

Dedication, in the Codex Amiatinus, by Abbot Ceolfrith to Pope Gregory II

In my Meander, The town that survived its murder, I mention the Codex Amiatinus, one of the most significant early medieval manuscripts of a complete Latin Bible, and last week I went to see ‘Rivers of Ink: Codex Amiatinus and the Northumbrian Heritage,’ a short exhibition in the Galilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral, which took the form of a light-and-sound installation celebrating one of the most iconic ancient books ever created.

Although Codex Amiatinus is not the oldest Christian Bible, it is the earliest surviving complete Latin manuscript and remains among the most significant books created in Anglo-Saxon England. It contains all the books of the Latin Vulgate Bible as copied by monks around 700 CE at the twin monasteries of Wearmouth–Jarrow in northeast England for liturgical use and study.

In 692 CE, Abbot Ceolfrith commissioned three enormous single-volume Bibles at the Wearmouth–Jarrow scriptorium. These were luxury manuscripts that required massive amounts of vellum (parchment), with each codex nearly a foot (30 cm) thick and weighing 75 pounds (34 kg). Scholars believe the work was influenced by an earlier model, the Codex Grandior of Cassiodorus, a large Bible brought to Northumbria from Italy, which the English scriptorium adapted as a template for the Codex Amiatinus' layout and text.

Codex Amiatinus is in a very elegant, large, clear uncial script, a formal, rounded capital handwriting typical of high-quality books of the period, on hundreds of massive parchment folios. This script is arranged in two tall columns per page, each with about 44 lines, creating a spacious, solemn rhythm. There is little punctuation and few breaks between words, typical of early medieval manuscripts. Unlike richly decorated Insular manuscripts such as the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels, Codex Amiatinus features only a few elaborate images that exhibit Mediterranean/Byzantine influences, probably following the model of the Codex Grandior. The use of vibrant colour and careful brushwork, along with occasional gold elements, gives these images visual richness, even though they are fewer than in later illuminated Bibles.

One of the most famous is a full-page image of the Old Testament prophet Ezra the Scribe shown writing with a stylus and flanked by an open cupboard showing the bindings of nine codices, symbolising the complete scriptures, which is one of the earliest extant ‘author’ or scribe portraits in Western manuscript art. with such a scene. Another major illumination is a full-page depiction of Christ in Majesty, an iconic image in medieval Bibles that represents Christ’s divine authority and presence at the start of the New Testament. The manuscript also includes a two-page plan of the Tabernacle from the Hebrew Bible, demonstrating an interest in visualising scriptural structures.

The Ezra image in Codex Amiatinus helped define a visual convention that influenced how medieval artists depicted authors and scribes at work and the authority of scripture as text. The seated writing pose also influenced later evangelist portraits and hero-figure imagery, and is considered by art historians to be part of a broader tradition affecting manuscript illumination in subsequent centuries. Although it was unusual in Anglo-Saxon England to depict figures in book production, this image clearly draws on late antique models of portraiture, likely mediated through earlier exemplars such as Codex Grandior. The Ezra image stands out because it attempts a more classical, illusionistic rendering of form and space, modelling the figure and bench in a way uncommon in purely insular decoration. By merging late-antique stylistic models with Northumbrian artistic ambition, the Ezra image in Codex Amiatinus reverberated through the medieval manuscript tradition as a prototype for author portraits and a symbol of scripture transmitted across generations. The inclusion of this image probably also reflects the Wearmouth–Jarrow monastery’s self-view as a centre of biblical learning.

Subsequent medieval manuscripts frequently included portraits of Gospel evangelists and authors of sacred texts, often depicted in a similar seated writing pose. Indeed, art historians have noted that the portrait of Ezra shares a common formal model with the figure of St Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels, produced around the same period, although, while retaining the seated pose, it appears flattened and stylised rather than spatially grounded.

While this early tradition of depicting a religious author at work set a precedent for how portraits of evangelists and biblical authors were shown with the use of bookcases or libraries as symbolic backdrops for textual authority and the idea that the act of writing the sacred text was itself a subject worthy of depiction later medieval art moved toward more formal representation styles, in works such as the Book of Kells. Seated-author portraits became more abstract, with figures dissolving into lines, shapes, and decorative elements, as writing transformed into a mystical act rather than a physical one.

By the 9th century, however, manuscript art deliberately revived classical models, and furniture, desks, and books reappeared, with figures regaining presence, and Evangelists shown as learned scholars and scribes, as the seated-author portrait becomes a political statement of Christian rulership grounded in literacy and order.

By the 12th century, the seated author becomes a figure of command, frontally or rigidly posed, with enlarged hands holding books and mounted on a throne. The author is no longer a humble worker but an authoritative witness, and writing is secondary to proclamation, with a book a symbol of divine law.

Move on a couple of centuries, and we see Gothic naturalism, with authors as working scholars bent over desks, their act of writing feeling immediate with writing implements in mid-stroke, and interiors that look like real studies. By the late medieval period, this had developed further, with seated-author portraits appearing in secular texts, identified by name, dress, or heraldry, and facial features that suggest individuality.

I mentioned that Codex Amiatinus is not the oldest extant Bible, as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus were written in the 4th century in Greek, preserving the Old and New Testaments and representing the Alexandrian text-type, a key Greek textual tradition used in many modern editions of the New Testament. Codex Sinaiticus sometimes differs in wording and in variant readings from later texts, including some non-canonical early Christian writings now excluded from most modern Bibles. It also omits some passages found in later Bibles. Some consider the Codex Vaticanus among the most authoritative Greek witnesses to the New Testament used in early Christianity, but it lacks some Old Testament books due to a later loss. Although incomplete, the two books remain essential for modern textual criticism of the Bible, as scholars compare them with each other and later manuscripts to trace how the New Testament's text developed and where variants emerged. Because they are older than Codex Amiatinus and written in Greek, which is closer to the original languages of the New Testament, some attribute greater significance to them, even though they contain different readings.

However, while Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus reflect the early Greek canon and textual variation, Codex Amiatinus presents the complete Latin canonical sequence of its time in the Latin Vulgate text, the translation from Greek attributed to Jerome that became the standard Bible for Western Christianity. Codex Amiatinus is widely regarded as one of the most accurate and stable versions of Jerome’s Vulgate text and is prized for its clarity and fidelity to the Vulgate tradition, reflecting careful monastic copying. It’s so highly regarded that it influenced later standardised Latin texts, including the 16th-century revision under Pope Sixtus V.

And just while I’m on Jerome and with the seated author image in mind, Caravaggio twice painted the saint writing. Here's the one in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. While many paintings by others depict the saint, some showing him with books, the two by Caravaggio portraying the saint writing are highly esteemed.

Anyway, let’s get back to Ceolfrith, who, around 716 CE, set out with one of his three codices as a gift for Pope Gregory II in Rome, although sadly, Ceolfrith did not travel far before dying on the journey in Langres in France.

No one is sure how, but the manuscript eventually found its way to Monte Amiata in Tuscany, which gives the derivation of the modern name ‘Amiatinus.’ Interestingly, at some point, the dedication text at the start of this piece was altered by removing some letters and rewriting it so that, for centuries, leading scholars believed Codex Amiatinus was a 6th-century Italian manuscript. However, in 1888, Giovanni Battista de Rossi discovered the erasure and identified that the original text matched the description of the dedication mentioned in the anonymous ‘Life of Ceolfrith’, thus proving Codex Amiatinus’ Northumbrian origin.

So to the ‘Rivers of Ink’ exhibition that was set within the small Galilee chapel in the soaring Romanesque vastness of Durham Cathedral. The exhibition was a collaboration between the Cathedral, Durham University researchers, and Projection Studio that blended academic insight with artistic storytelling, as part of a narrative of bookmaking, literacy and cultural transmission that shaped Europe’s intellectual history.

What I particularly enjoyed was that, instead of overwhelming viewers with data from static panels or a traditional display of manuscripts, the exhibition offered a projection-and-sound experience that wove voices, tones, and rhythms into a compelling narrative that traced the journey of written scripture from scattered early texts to the Codex Amiatinus, highlighting the remarkable achievements of those early medieval Northumbrian scribes. The animation flowed and swirled, echoing both the physical act of writing and the metaphorical ‘rivers’ of knowledge flowing from antiquity to the present through faith, history, and storytelling. From the early calligraphic forms and textures through centuries of writing culture to the labour of manuscript production and the legacy of bookmaking in honouring the scribes and artists whose meticulous craft made texts such as the Codex Amiatinus possible.

Its prices range from sixpence to a half-crown, and if you buy a serial ticket for five shillings you are admitted throughout the season for half-price. The productions that season included ‘Peer Gynt’, ‘Widowers’ Houses’, ‘The Insect Play’, ‘Loyalties’ and ‘The Trojan Women’: good fare, solid tack, value for money. The players are all amateurs…

J. B. Priestley, writing in his 1934 book ‘English Journey’, after watching rehearsals of ‘The Trojan Women’ at the People’s Theatre in Newcastle,

Regular readers will know that I love live theatre, and in and around Newcastle there is always much on offer from the tiny Laurel’s in nearby Whitley Bay to the grand productions of the city’s Theatre Royal, with plenty of others in between, such as the Northern Stage and the Live Theatre. I’ve seen some wonderful productions across many venues, but one I’d heard much about but hadn’t got to until recently is the People’s Theatre, a long-established amateur theatre company with a performance venue in Heaton, a suburb to the north and east of Newcastle. The People’s Theatre is among the largest and most active amateur theatre groups in the UK, performing shows in the venue's main auditorium, which seats around 500, and in its more intimate Studio theatre.

The theatre company was founded in 1911 as the Clarion Dramatic Club by a group of politically active local enthusiasts affiliated with the British Socialist Party. Their first performance was a double bill at the premises of the BSP, not far from Newcastle United’s ground, St James’ Park. In keeping with the spirit of the Clarion Dramatic Club, one of the plays performed was ‘The Bishop’s Candlesticks,’ a one-act adaptation of Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Misérables’ that focuses on the compassionate bishop who reforms Jean Valjean. In contrast, the other one-act play was ‘Pot Luck’ by Gertrude Jennings, which centres around a ‘pot-luck’ dinner where guests each bring a dish to share, creating a lively stage for exploring human quirks, misunderstandings, and the subtle comedy of manners.

From its earliest days, the Clarion Dramatic Club embraced challenging and contemporary drama and signalled a commitment to bold theatrical work, even staging the controversial ‘The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet’ by George Bernard Shaw. It’s one of his most provocative short plays and a fiercely satirical attack on moral hypocrisy, frontier justice, and official authority. The play was officially banned from being performed in theatres by the Lord Chamberlain, but the Clarion Dramatic Club got around that by claiming it was a ‘private club’. Something many theatre groups did.

Shaw, a Fabian socialist, polemicist, and champion of theatre as a tool for debate, was famous for his plays that blended wit with provocation rather than sentiment in challenging class hierarchies and interrogating morality, war, and gender. The production of ‘The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet’ led Shaw to develop a notably strong and enduring connection with the Clarion Dramatic Club in Newcastle, even though he generally had doubts over amateur productions. Yet in this instance, he gladly approved the Clarion Dramatic Club's performances of his plays and consented to generous royalty arrangements on their behalf. He also liked the Clarion Dramatic Club for its ideological stance, admiring how they treated drama as a forum for ideas rather than just entertainment.

In 1915, the Clarion Dramatic Club moved to premises in the now demolished Royal Arcade on Pilgrim Street in the heart of Newcastle and adopted the name People’s Theatre. While they formally separated from their socialist origins, they continued to stage Shaw regularly, including plays such as ‘Arms and the Man,’ ‘Candida,’ ‘The Devil’s Disciple’ and ‘Mrs Warren’s Profession.’ All bold choices for an amateur company, particularly given that some of Shaw’s works were still controversial or banned elsewhere.

People may not be aware that, until 1968, the control, and thus censorship, of performances in British theatre was by the Lord Chamberlain, a senior official in the royal household. This originated in the early 1700s because theatre was one of the most popular forms of mass entertainment, being relatively inexpensive and accessible, making it a powerful tool for political satire, with plays often openly mocking politicians, royalty, and institutions. This caused the British Government to fear that such public ridicule could undermine its authority, incite unrest, and encourage opposition to the Crown. The tipping point came during a period of intense political instability under Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first de facto Prime Minister.

The Government therefore introduced the Theatre Licensing Act of 1737, giving the Lord Chamberlain sweeping powers over the theatre, with all new plays subject to their approval before performance. They licensed all public theatres in Britain and were also empowered to close theatres and ban or demand changes to any play. While the stated aim of the act was to regulate theatres, the real motive was to silence political satire, particularly plays attacking Walpole’s government.

The Lord Chamberlain often censored or banned plays that addressed contemporary politics, criticised the monarchy, aristocracy, and religion, or dealt with sexual morality and class conflict. Writers of the period, therefore, became more indirect and coded, using satire, shifting into safer forms like comedy of manners, or setting controversial works in foreign countries or historical periods. However, more modern playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, and others frequently clashed with the system. It wasn’t until 1968, some 230 years after the act’s passage, that the system finally collapsed. The legislation that replaced the Act of 1737 relies on standard legal accountability (for example, obscenity laws) to evaluate the content of performances.

In 1929, the People’s Theatre relocated to Rye Hill in the west end of Newcastle, acquiring and repurposing an old chapel. They staged over 500 productions there, but by the 1950s, they had outgrown this venue, so they launched a prominent appeal, involving doyens of the theatre such as Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Sir John Gielgud, to raise funds to purchase and transform the Lyric Cinema in Heaton into a dedicated theatre and arts centre. This new venue opened in September 1962 with a production of Shaw’s ‘Man and Superman’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’. Sadly, shortly after the People’s Theatre moved out of the Rye Hill building, it was destroyed by fire which led to the adoption of the phoenix rising from flames as the People’s Theatre emblem in keeping with three things central to their self-image of; continuity, the People’s Theatre matters more than the building, collective strength, the company survives through its members and renewal in that each generation reinvents the theatre anew.

By this point, there was wide recognition that the People’s Theatre was one of Britain’s leading amateur groups, particularly for performing plays that, at the time, were unfamiliar to regional audiences and would otherwise have been inaccessible to the people of northeast England. Although the programme was diverse, the People’s Theatre maintained a longstanding relationship with Shaw, which was fundamental to their reputation with critics, and visiting professionals frequently observed the thoughtful rather than reverential approach to Shaw’s work, with performances engaging robustly with the plays’ arguments instead of glossing over them, encouraging audiences to reflect as well as enjoy. All of which echoed Shaw’s view that theatre should be “a factory of thought.”

But as I mentioned, it wasn’t just Shaw’s work, as the People’s Theatre became known for staging provincial or even British premieres of important plays. One such was the first dramatisation of ‘The Bear Dances,’ a play by F L Lucas about the impact of Soviet rule on ordinary people, one of the earliest dramatic treatments of life in the Soviet Union seen on a Western stage. Another first was the world premiere of the darkly comic fantasy ‘Cock-a-Doodle Dandy’ by renowned Irish dramatist Seán O'Casey. Indeed, throughout the mid-20th century, the People’s Theatre helped introduce audiences in northeast England to plays by writers such as John Whiting, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and John Osborne, often before they gained national recognition. The People’s Theatre also performed the British Premiere of ‘After the Fall’ by Arthur Miller in the late 1960s, demonstrating their role in bringing contemporary global drama to a regional stage. A key moment in introducing notable 20th-century poetry and drama to a northeast England audience was the performance of ‘The Ascent of F6’ by W. H. Auden, staged while Auden was in Newcastle. 

Over the decades, the People’s Theatre has nurtured generations of performers and technicians. In 1963, the Young People’s Theatre was established to serve children and teenagers aged 11-17 by providing regular creative opportunities, reflecting the People’s Theatre's ongoing dedication to the local community. The Young People’s Theatre programme gives young performers a real, hands-on foundation in theatre as active creators and performers, meeting weekly for drama workshops that help participants understand how theatre works in practice, from character work to timing and ensemble interaction.

Young People’s Theatre members take part in three to four full productions each year, fully staged on the theatre’s main stage, thus helping emerging actors move from the ‘classroom’ into public performance. Young People’s Theatre isn’t a professional training institution, yet the experiences it offers, from workshops to staged productions, give aspiring actors a solid foundation for future drama school applications or professional auditions. Several past members have said the programme helped them “really build confidence and acting skills,” while also providing valuable practical skills, such as audition practice with many former members going on to professional careers in theatre, television, music and film. Notable names that those in Britain will recognise include Kevin Whately, Tom Goodman-Hill, Andrea Riseborough, Ross Noble and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys.

Today, the People’s Theatre remains a community-run organisation with members involved in all aspects of production, from acting and directing to managing set construction, lighting, costumes, and front-of-house, offering local people of all backgrounds opportunities to gain experience and help them pursue professional careers in the performing arts.

Certainly, there was nothing amateurish about the two productions I recently saw from the People’s Theatre, and they were of such quality that they would grace any professional stage.

‘The Mirror Crack’d,’ Agatha Christie’s classic whodunnit, delivered an engaging and audience-pleasing night of drama at its best, and while a large ensemble production, the cast steered their course with confidence. Director Sam Hinton cleverly utilised the stage, with different locations like Miss Marple’s cottage and the grand Gossington Hall suggested through innovative lighting and sound cues rather than elaborate sets, which kept the action seamless and visually intriguing. There was a playful energy in the transitions, with flashbacks and ensemble movements that enhanced the Cluedo-like mystery structure. The production values also shone through, from authentic period-appropriate costumes to sound effects tucked discreetly yet effectively into the performance.

The second production I watched was ‘Mary Shelley’, a play about imagination, emotional rebellion, and literary ambition. Rather than offering a cradle-to-grave biography, the play concentrated on the formative pressures that shaped Mary’s most famous creation. The script weaves together strands of her radical upbringing, her complicated relationships with her family, and her struggle to be taken seriously. The play’s pleasing emphasis was on language and performance over spectacle, appropriate for a story about the birth of a novel rather than its cinematic afterlife, inviting us to reconsider ‘Frankenstein’ not merely as a Gothic milestone but as the product of a young woman navigating grief, ambition, and an unforgiving cultural climate. Visually, the staging was restrained and effective, and the production avoided hagiography, allowing its characters to be flawed, sometimes selfish, but recognisably human.

And I’ll be back next month to see ‘The Thrill Of Love’, a 2013 play by Amanda Whittington that tells the story of Ruth Ellis, through the eyes of a sceptical police officer in charge of the case. Ruth was a hostess in 'gentlemen’s clubs’ in London’s West End and the last woman to be hanged in Britain in 1955 after being convicted of killing her lover, David Blakely, despite the injustices surrounding the circumstances.

As I’ve discovered, the People’s Theatre isn’t just a local amateur theatre company. Once a platform for groundbreaking premieres and a challenge to conformity, it now offers a diverse range of entertaining yet thought-provoking productions. This combination of ambition and community spirit is one reason the People’s Theatre has sustained such a vibrant theatrical identity for over a century.

Grey towers of Durham

Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles

Half church of God, half castle gainst the Scot

And long to roam these venerable asles

With records stored of deeds iong since forgot

Walter Scott’s romantic verse inscribed on a plaque on Prebend bridge over the River Wear in Durham

In keeping with the name of my Substack, I decided to take a short Meander alongside the River Wear in Durham last week. The weather in northeast England in February gave the day a washed-out appearance, as reflected in the photographs I took along the way, and it wasn’t just Scott’s towers that were grey.

The photograph above shows a building locally called the Corn Mill. The first mill to occupy this site was used for Fulling (more on Fulling Mills later), but by 1462, it had been converted to grinding corn. That building was a victim of the Great Flood of 1771 (it too gets a later mention), and the mill that replaced it ceased corn milling by the mid-19th century. However, it's retained its name even though, since then, there have been many occupants of the building, including masons, plumbers, water bailiffs and ‘banks constables’, the latter employed to keep order on the riverbanks. There was no need for such on my stroll, as the only other people I saw were occasional joggers.

In the bottom right corner of my photograph, you can just make out Framwellgate Bridge, parts of which date to the 12th century, making it one of Durham’s oldest river crossings. When I was young, it was one of the main roads into the city centre, with a constant flow of vehicles, while at the city end of the bridge was the first CCTV traffic control system in the UK. A policeman in a ‘box’ in the market square monitored the TV screen and controlled the traffic lights. These days, the bridge is only used by pedestrians.

Of course, Durham is famous for its iconic cathedral, and that word derives from, of all things, a chair. But not any old chair, rather a chair that symbolises a seat of authority. The etymology is from the Greek kathedra, meaning seat, chair, or bench, and from the Latin cathedra, meaning chair, especially that of a teacher. In Medieval Latin, we then get ecclesia cathedralis, which is literally ‘the church of the bishop’s chair,’ and from this, ‘cathedral’ entered Middle English via Old French cathedrale, referring not to the building’s size or grandeur, but to its function and the fact that it contains the cathedra, the bishop’s official chair. A modest church can be a cathedral if it houses the bishop’s seat; a vast church without one is not. Which is a long-winded way of describing my next photo…

From the front, the chair by sculptor Colin Wilbourn in the photograph looks plain and simple enough…

But the back tells a different story with its intricate carvings of gargoyles. The chair is known by many names: The Gargoyle Chair, The Storyteller’s Chair, The Peace Seat and Order and Chaos, but its official title is Kathedra.

I then moved on to a quite different piece of stonework, known as the Count’s House and built under the instruction of the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral in the 1820s as a folly and summerhouse named after the Polish ‘Count’ Joseph Boruwlaski, who lived nearby.

Count Boruwlaski was a musician and dancer, only three feet and three inches tall, who entertained many of the crowned heads of Europe, including Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette. He arrived in Britain in 1782 and fell in love with Durham writing, in a poem to a lady friend, “Poland was my Cradle, England is my nest; Durham is my quiet place where my weary bones shall rest.” He died aged 97, having lived in Durham for the last 46 years of his life, and was buried in the Cathedral.

Despite its small size, records show that the Count’s House has been a family home on several occasions, including in 1881, when it was known as ‘Miss Wooler’s Garden Cottage’ and occupied by a family of seven.

I took the photo above of Prebends’ Bridge, standing at the footings of an older bridge of that name, built in 1574. It was a timber footbridge built on stone piers, which, like many bridges in northeast England, was swept away by the Great Flood of 1771, as it became known. The name of this bridge comes from Prebendary, an honorary title awarded to senior parish priests for long and dedicated service. Through the arch, you can once again see the Corn Mill and what is locally called the ‘Pink House’, a modern, vividly coloured private residence.

JMW Turner visited Durham many times, painting views of Prebends Bridge and the cathedral. While the writer Walter Scott wrote after a visit, “When you cross the Wear by the Prebends Bridge and, ascending through its beautiful skirt of wood, plant yourself on the hill opposite the Cathedral, the view of the Cathedral and Castle together is superb. Even Oxford has no view to compare with it.”

Of course, I couldn’t end this piece without sharing the view in my next photograph. A view captured countless times over the centuries, be it in paint by the likes of Turner, in words by the likes of Scott, or in more modern photography. But it’s not so much the cathedral I write about but the Old Fulling Mill in the foreground, one of two built in the 15th century to generate income for the Cathedral.

Fulling is the process of cleaning, thickening, and strengthening woven cloth, especially wool, and is one of the oldest processes in textile history, likely developed once people realised that moisture, pressure, and agitation caused wool fibres to tighten. The earliest references to cloth finishing appear in Sumerian and Akkadian texts, which describe washing and beating woollen cloth after weaving.

Greek sources describe knafeis (fullers) as a specialised urban trade, separate from weaving, who cleaned cloth by treading it underfoot in tubs containing alkaline substances such as wood ash and natron to remove oils and dirt. As you can imagine, given the Roman penchant for organisation, during their Empire days fulling grew on an industrial scale with fullonicae (fulling workshops) using a process that included scouring the cloth using water mixed with alkaline agents, famously stale urine, valued for its ammonia content, then treading and beating the fabric to thicken it before rinsing and stretching it on frames. The trade was deemed so important to the Roman economy that Emperor Vespasian regulated it by taxing urine collection,

After Rome’s withdrawal from Britain, fulling here mostly reverted to household production, and later, as Christian and monastic communities grew, monasteries also took on the process as part of crafting durable woollen fabrics for clothing. Then, as towns grew, fulling again became a distinct craft, often organised into guilds, with fullers, sometimes called walkers or waulkers, occupying a prominent position between weavers and dyers.

One of the great technological breakthroughs of the 12th century was the water-powered fulling mill, with waterwheels driving large wooden stocks or hammers, which rhythmically pounded wet cloth. This increased productivity dramatically and reduced reliance on manual labour, allowing some towns to scale up cloth production. Many English place-names, such as Fulling Mill, Walk Mill, Walker Burn, and indeed surnames, preserve this history. And part of the process also gave us an expression used today. I mentioned that at the end of the process comes the stretching of the cloth on frames, known as ‘tenters’, attached by ‘tenterhooks’, from which we get ‘being on tenterhooks’, meaning a person held in suspense.

Finally, a mention of the weir you can see, constructed to maintain the river’s water level and provide a head of running water to power the mills. In the spring, migrating salmon and sea trout are seen jumping this and the other weirs on the river to reach the traditional spawning grounds in the headwaters of the Wear.

Personally, I refuse to drive a car - I won't have anything to do with any kind of transportation in which I can't read.

Arthur C. Clarke - Report on Planet Three

I’ll begin by saying that the LaFerrari Aperta above is not mine (although it could be yours if you have around £5 million to spare). I took a photograph of it while on holiday in Santa Margherita Ligure a few years ago, when Ferrari ‘took over’ the next town along, Portofino, to launch their car of the same name (it comes in at a more modest £140,000). The vehicles I’ve ‘owned’ in life were much more modest still .....

When I moved back to northeast England just over three years ago, I decided to dispense with a car and travel only by public transport or on foot. It’s better for the environment and for my health. In truth, I’ve not really missed having a car and being a natural planner; I am happy to spend time organising which public transport to take to get to where I want to go. Fortunately, travelling in the northeast of England usually offers several good public transport options, and connections to other parts of the UK are also dependable. If I want to travel to continental Europe (I have no desire to go beyond that these days), and since I’ve decided to avoid the tedium of flying, I can take the ferry to Amsterdam from Newcastle or head south and use Eurostar out of London St Pancras. Both of which I’m doing this year for my 70th birthday celebratory train journey across continental Europe. Of course, as I am retired, I have more time to enjoy travelling without the pressure of business or other deadlines.

That’s not how it used to be during my working years, and a recent exchange with a fellow Substacker took me back to my driving days, to recall some of the cars I’ve driven over the decades and a few of my mishaps along the way.

My first car was an old mustard-coloured 850cc Mini, though it didn’t quite cut the mustard in terms of power, given its top speed of around 65 mph, and that was downhill with a strong tailwind. Try to push it further, and it was like driving an unbalanced washing machine. The vibrations were so hard that they could shake your fillings loose. Nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed that early experience of being behind the wheel, just as I did with my next car, though I’m not sure you could call that a move upmarket, given it was a Hillman Imp.

Again, it wasn’t the most powerful car you could drive, and while it wasn’t as enjoyable to drive as the Mini, it did have some character, with a boxy body shape and, like the VW Beetle, a rear-mounted engine. There was, however, a drawback to that when it came to driving in freezing temperatures. I once saw an Imp described as ‘basic but airy,’ and never mind airy, I can definitely confirm it was drafty in wintry weather, and the heating was so underpowered that at times your breath froze on the windscreen, an unwanted optional extra. I reckon a lightbulb generated more warmth than the heater in that car.

Back in the late 1970s, when winters in the UK meant real snow, I remember driving home in the Imp to the south of England after visiting my mother in the northeast. The snow on the ground was so deep that the two-lane southbound A1 had only two tyre tracks in one lane. You might not see too many gritters or snow ploughs in England these days, but they didn’t seem to exist at all then. Anyway, as to the drive south, if you kept your wheels in the tracks, you were fine, but if you strayed, as I did once, the tyres would lose grip and, as happened to me, begin to slide. There was no central barrier, so the car gently pirouetted to a stop across the northbound carriageway. Luckily, there was no traffic heading north. The engine had stalled but started again on my first attempt, so I gently coaxed the Imp forward back onto the southbound carriageway and once more followed the tracks. That journey of around 240 miles from Newcastle to the south took over eight hours.

I wouldn’t call myself a ‘car man’ because I’ve never been very interested in a car’s style, performance, or similar aspects. I simply want them to get me from A to B without mishap (and for a period in my driving days as quickly as possible). I’ve had little connection with any of the vehicles I’ve ‘owned’, with maybe a couple of exceptions. One was my next car, a red Ford Cortina with a black vinyl roof, for which I had a soft spot. I was never as fit as when I owned that car, since I often had to push it! It was known as a ‘bad starter’, or more honestly, as was the case with many Ford models of the late seventies, a temperamental beast. The joy of hearing the engine fire into life was often lost to the dull click of an ignition key turning to no effect. Once the car was running, it was fine, but getting it started was always a gamble. The choke setting that worked one day might not work the next. Still, I was sad to sell it, but I needed to put down a deposit on a house. My next car, a much cheaper and much older, far less fashionable Vauxhall Viva, at least made my journeys more predictable.

Bring an old car, the Viva had a lateral speedometer and real wing mirrors, not the kind attached to the front doors. It was a reliable, cheap, and cheerful car, but I had a mishap in it once on a very icy January morning around forty-five years ago. I was driving to work and didn’t see a patch of black ice on a tight bend of a small road, so as I turned the steering wheel, the car wasn’t having any of it and kept going straight, up the curb, and into a lamppost. Luckily, I wasn’t going fast, so there wasn’t much damage, but a couple of seconds after the initial bump, the lamp fitting, displaced by the impact, fell and landed on the car’s bonnet like a bomb going off!

In all my years of driving, I never hit another moving vehicle. Well, except for the time my next-door neighbour and I both backed up without noticing each other and bumped rear bumpers. Other than that, all my accidents involved inanimate objects: trees (once sideways, once backwards), lampposts, the side of a garage, the side of my house, yes, the side of my house!, and I even managed to pull down my up-and-over garage door by catching the front bumper on the frame while reversing. Maybe it’s a good thing I stopped driving!

By now, the Viva had given up the ghost, so I moved on to a Vauxhall Cavalier, and that’s when I had one of my close encounters with a tree. It was a freezing cold New Year’s Day morning in 1984, and no, I hadn’t been drinking the night before. I was on my way to a football match, taking it steady down a long suburban road narrowed by parked cars. Ahead, I saw an elderly gentleman crossing with a small boy when, suddenly, I hit a patch of unseen ice, and instead of going straight, the car slid sideways down the road. I remember looking out the driver’s-side window to see the man quickly grab the boy and hurry across the road just as I sailed by, missing them and somehow the parked cars on either side. However, I didn’t miss the large tree by the road and hit it hard. People say time slows down during an accident, and I’m sure that as the car hit the tree, I saw the driver’s door mirror break through the window and cross swiftly past my nose. What I definitely saw as I sat there, somewhat stunned, was that a moment later, a small garden wall, which the car’s front bumper had scraped against, fall away from me almost intact. Although shocked, I was unhurt, and as the driver’s door was now wrapped around the tree, I climbed out the passenger side with help from a passerby. The car was a write-off, but the tree looked almost untouched. Nature: 1, machine: 0.

There’s a postscript to this story. Because I’d succeeded in demolishing someone’s garden wall, I called the police to report the accident and ask for advice, since the owner didn’t appear to be home despite my knocks on the door. The police told me to push a note with my details through the letterbox and, if I didn’t hear back within 24 hours, to file a report with them. I followed their advice, and around 5 pm, the wall’s owner called me. He thanked me for leaving the note and said it was a relief to read it. I was surprised at the second comment and asked why he was relieved. He explained that he had celebrated a bit too much on New Year’s Eve and got home in the early morning, collapsing into bed. He hadn’t heard the accident or my knocking. When he finally woke up and saw his garden wall (with my car now gone), he panicked, thinking he’d somehow demolished the wall himself while having a little too much of the hard stuff!

After writing off my Cavalier, I needed a replacement quickly, so I broke the usual rule about not buying a car from family or friends. I bought a Ford Escort from my then-sister-in-law, Marianne. It had given her years of trouble-free driving, but offered me only months of problems. By the time I dispensed with it, I’d replaced so many parts it could have been a new car. Marianne was apologetic, but I didn’t blame her. Maybe the car just didn’t like me, or as people used to say, it was a ‘Friday afternoon car.’

Fortunately, by this time, I was climbing the corporate ladder and entitled to a company car, so dispensing with the Ford Escort, I chose my first, a Sports Rated Injection 2000cc Cavalier. It did go like the proverbial ... off a shovel and I’d joined the herd as it was the company car favoured by thousands, earning it the nickname the ‘Rep-mobile.’ I wasn’t a ‘Rep’ and, even though I wasn’t a ‘car man,’ I did like its sporty performance. I know, I know, but I was young (well, youngish)and foolish. And there was now no more worrying about motoring costs like road tax, insurance, or repairs; the company covered it all. There was a personal tax liability because tax rules regarded the car as ‘income,’ but in a very unfriendly way to the environment, the liability reduced the more miles you drove. If you drove under 2,500 miles, you paid an amount of tax proportional to the car’s value; between 2,500 and 18,000 miles, that proportion was halved; and if you drove over 18,000 miles, the tax liability disappeared. Given that the company would also replace the car after 3 years or 36,000 miles, I racked up the miles. I’d think nothing of getting in the car at stupid o’clock in the morning to drive from the south, say to our Warrington office in northwest England for a day’s work, meet clients, and then drive back the same day and happily do the same to our Newcastle office, or that in Weymouth, Yeovil or any other compass bearing. Considering the distances I drove and the speed I was travelling, seeing the motorway speed limit as optional rather than mandatory, I was a serious accident waiting to happen. I can only thank providence that one never did.

As I climbed higher up the corporate ladder, the cars became more luxurious, and my expanding waistline, calmer driving instincts, and fewer miles travelled meant that both the cars and I were built more for comfort than speed. The Vauxhall Omega Elite I had for a year or two in the mid-1990s was so comfortable that it felt like I was driving an armchair. By this point, the UK government had acknowledged the flaws in the company car tax rules and, more sensibly, began taxing cars according to their emissions. It prompted a rethink by many, including me, about future car selection.

One car I really enjoyed driving later in my career was a Chrysler PT Cruiser, not for its performance but for its 1940s chunky eccentric retro style (maybe I’m definitely more of a ‘car man’ than I thought). I still recall Sarah, my wife’s, words when she saw it at the end of our first date: “Oh my God, you drive a Wacky Races car!” before she burst into laughter, likening it to the ‘Bullet Proof Bomb’ of that cartoon series. I’m incredibly pleased to say my cartoon car didn’t put her off a second date, and indeed, I reckon it was the sight of my car that sealed the deal on our relationship. Although, to be honest, Sarah wasn’t too far out in her description despite my belief that the car had style. In complete contrast to my earlier Cavalier SRi, it had the power of a twisted elastic band, so it’s a good thing that I didn’t care about speed by then. The car’s tall roofline and upright stance were eye-catching, but it felt like someone on a bicycle could overtake me when going uphill. As with the characters in the ‘Bullet Proof Bomb’, I really needed to put my feet through the floor and run to generate extra speed.

After the PT Cruiser, I confess I went through a phase in my mid 50s of driving a convertible for a few years, lost youth, and all that. Thankfully, that passed, and other, more sensible cars appeared on the scene. By the time I left the corporate world, I was driving a very sensible hybrid BMW. Still, it used more petrol than electric as the battery only lasted about 50 miles. Longer-range all-electric cars were still a few years away.

I learned something about driving a hybrid car from another incident. One morning, I drove from my then home in Wiltshire to the company’s office in Milton Keynes, a town famous for its concrete cows and roundabouts (you almost leave the place feeling somewhat dizzy). Since I was early, I decided to fill up with petrol ready for the trip home later that day. Normally, to fill up, you’d press a button on the dashboard to release the petrol cap. After a few seconds, while a safety sensor checks that the level of petrol fumes poses no danger from the battery, the cap would pop open so you could fill up. But this time, the cap wouldn’t open. I pressed the button again, and nothing happened again. I tried a couple more times, but still no luck. Realising I had a problem, I drove to the nearby office and called our company’s transport manager. He said he’d check with BMW, and a few minutes later, he called back to explain it was a sensor issue. If I wanted to fill up, there was a cord in the boot that would manually open the cap, but like a ripcord on a parachute, it was one use only. He suggested I shouldn't trouble myself and mentioned that BMW would collect the car and deliver a replacement to the Milton Keynes office. As I mentioned before, company cars do have their advantages.

All that is behind me, as these days I don’t have to worry about ice, sensors, traffic jams, trees, car tax, etc, etc., because I’m now chauffeured wherever I go by Bert or Bertha, my friendly bus, or Metro or train driver. To use the phrase featured in a train travel advertisement of some years ago, these days I let the train (or bus / Metro) take the strain…

The last verse of Burns’ original poem

While some still actively debate as to who might have really written the works of ‘Shakespeare,’ there’s no doubt about the works of the other great British ‘Bard,’ Robert Burns, whose ‘night’ was recently celebrated. But is the melody of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ his work, or did he come across it on his short venture outside of Scotland to northeast England?

More on that later; first, let us examine that journey and how northeast England was among the first places outside Scotland to celebrate Burns.

While Burns travelled extensively in Scotland, he only ventured into England briefly, on what’s often called his Highland and Border tour, in 1787, shortly after his first major success as a published poet. He set off on a long horseback trip with his friend Robert Ainslie from Edinburgh, soon after the publication of his ‘Edinburgh Edition’ of poems, with the purpose of collecting orders for his work and possibly distributing copies of it, and to look over potential farms he might buy. Not long after setting off, Ainslie suggested that they should cross the Tweed, and then Burns could say he had been in England. They did so on 7 May 1787, although Burns records the event in the travel journal he kept in scant detail, writing, “Coldstream — went over to England — Cornhill — glorious Tweed — clear and majestic — fine bridge.”

It should be said that, unlike many other poets, Burns wrote his journal mainly to record landscapes, locations, and brief impressions with notes written on horseback and in inns, strictly as a personal record, not to produce polished prose for publication.

What Burns doesn't mention but later testimony records is that, to Ainslie’s great surprise, in setting foot in England, Burns threw off his hat, knelt down, lifted up his hands, and with great enthusiasm, while looking back to Scotland, repeated the last stanzas of his own poem, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. A plaque at Coldstream now commemorates this event. Burns and Ainslie then had tea at nearby Lennel House, argued with others over the merits of Voltaire, and then stayed there overnight before crossing back into Scotland.

While that first visit to England only involved crossing the bridge over the Tweed at Coldstream, a few days later he spent some time in the border town of Berwick, describing it as “an idle town, rudely picturesque” before travelling back north to Eyemouth, a small Scottish Borders coastal town in which I recall spending family holidays when I was young and in which Burns “did sup and sleep”.

He continued his travels in Scotland, before on 27 May, he entered England again, recording “Cross Tweed, and traverse the moors through a wild country till I reach Alnwick— Alnwick Castle, a seat of the Duke of Northumberland, furnished in a most princely manner.”

The next day, he travelled to Warkworth, “Come, still through by-ways, to Warkworth, where we dine. Hermitage an old castle. Warkworth situated very picturesquely, with Coquet Island, a small rocky spot, the seat of an old monastery, facing it a little in the sea, and the small but romantic river Coquet running through it. Sleep at Morpeth, a pleasant enough little town, and on next day to Newcastle. These days, Newcastle has sprawled so much that Morpeth is a suburb of the city.

Interestingly, some ten years later, JMW Turner made a sketching tour of the north of England, and the watercolour below is from his own visit to Warkworth, showing the castle very much as Burns would have seen it.

Where Burns spent his one night in Newcastle is not known, although he mentions in his travel journal that he met “with a very agreeable, sensible fellow, a Mr Chatto, a Scotchman who shows us a great many civilities and who dines and sups with us.” A story about Burns’ visit to Newcastle, first reported in 1834, is that during his evening meal, he was surprised to find the meat served before the soup. Apparently, he found it amusing when told that Northumbrians “eat the beef before we sup the broth, lest the hungry Scotch make an inroad and snatch it.” No doubt a reference to the frequent uninvited visits made by the Scots to northeast England over the centuries. In the case of Newcastle, it was under Scots control for many months on two separate occasions; in the latter case, they also held King Charles I in their ‘care’, making a handsome profit from then handing him over to the Parliamentarians.

While in Newcastle, Burns wrote to Robert Ainslie, who had left Burns and returned home, suggesting Burns wasn’t particularly happy while in Newcastle, writing, “Here am I, a woeful wight on the banks of Tyne. Old Mr Thomas Hood has been persuaded to join our Party, and Mr Kerr & he do very well, but alas! I dare not talk nonsense lest I lose all the little dignity I have among the sober sons of wisdom and discretion, and I have had not one hearty mouthful of laughter since that merry-melancholy moment we parted.”

It’s not known if Burns met up with his younger brother, William, who lived and worked in Newcastle at the time. After finishing his apprenticeship at the saddlers, Messrs Walker and Robson, William then briefly worked in London before his premature death in 1790. While William was trying to find work in Newcastle, Burns wrote to him: ‘I need not caution you against guilty amours – they are bad and ruinous everywhere, but in England they are the very devil.’ And given Burns' track record in ‘guilty amours’, he should know; why he believed these in England were worse, we know not.

Burns left Newcastle early the next morning, riding westwards to the Northumbrian town of Hexham, writing in his journal, “rode over a fine country to Hexham to breakfast; from Hexham to Wardrew, the celebrated spa, where we slept.” After that, he travelled on to Carlisle and then back into Scotland.

The local papers did not record the visit to Newcastle, although the poem ‘On a Scottish Bard’ appeared in the local Journal newspaper a few days after Burns’ visit. The paper’s distributor was bookseller William Charnley, listed in the Edinburgh Edition as the only subscriber to Burns’ book of poems residing in Newcastle.

Burns died aged only 37 in 1796, and by then his work was extremely popular in Scotland, and the idea of a Burns Night, in effect a second national day, began with the first recorded supper in his memory at Burns Cottage in Ayrshire in 1801. This was an informal memorial among friends, but it quickly set the pattern for annual celebrations.

Although Burns did not spend much time in northeast England, the themes of egalitarianism, shared humanity, humour, and, at times, poignancy in his poems also resonated here. There was also a strong Scottish migration into the industrial towns of the region, focused on shipbuilding, coal, and engineering, in the 19th century, and a keen sense of civic pride in Burns’ personal visit to Newcastle.

According to Burns scholars, Sunderland, a town in northeast England, was home to one of the earliest Burns Clubs, founded in 1804, arguably the oldest officially established Burns Club in the world. Members themselves claimed it as “the oldest Burns Club in existence.” The club organised annual dinners and gatherings celebrating Burns’s life and poetry, particularly around his birthday on 25 January. For example, it’s recorded that in 1823, a Burns’ Supper at Miss Lowsey’s Bridge Inn in Bishopwearmouth near Sunderland featured piping and recitations of Burns’ works, accompanied by traditional Scottish music. This combination of food, verse, and music was the classic pattern of Burns’ celebrations that spread far beyond Scotland.

Burns Clubs then proliferated across northeast England, where Scots immigrants and admirers of his work gathered to celebrate his poetry, and a Newcastle club was established by 1816. Historical records also indicate Burns suppers in Oxford by 1806 and in London by around 1810, demonstrating how quickly Burns’s reputation spread to southern England even before the establishment of formal clubs. And not just in Britain, as reports are of the holding of Burns suppers in India in 1812 and North America in 1817, before formal clubs even existed in some Scottish towns.

The Burns Club of London was founded in 1868 by Colin Rae Brown, a Scot linked to the Greenock Burns Club and although late to the party this London club became one of the most influential by coordinating the activities of other clubs to form the Robert Burns World Federation in 1885 with an aim to sharing programmes of events between clubs, and promoting Burns’s works worldwide. This federation helped standardise traditions, such as the ‘Address to the Haggis’, the ‘Immortal Memory’ toast, and poetry recitals, making Burns Nights recognisable wherever they were held. And returning to the link with northeast England, the first conference of the World Federation held outside Scotland took place in Sunderland in 1907, while 400 delegates attended the 1937 conference in Newcastle. More recntly Seaton Burn in northeast England hosted the world conference in 2008.

The 100th anniversary of Burns’ birth catalysed a wave of celebrations across Britain, with one contemporary estimate suggesting hundreds of events that year, including dinners, parades, recitals and public concerts. In Newcastle, major events included a festival dinner for 400 people at Newcastle Town Hall, featuring Joseph Cowen Senior, a progressive MP, and his son, a radical Liberal politician, journalist, and reformer who became one of the most influential political and social figures in the northeast in the late 19th century. There were also two theatre events: a ‘People’s Festival’ at the Music Hall and an alcohol-free abstainers’ festival attended by 1500 people. The Newcastle Chronicle published a free Burns supplement that included opinions, poems, and reports on events.

On the centenary of the poet’s death, along with a dinner, the Burns Club in Walker, an area to the east of Newcastle, which comprised mainly workers in the local shipyards, raised funds to erect a statue and drinking fountain in the local Park to commemorate Burns’s visit to the city. That statue, unveiled in 1901, is the only Burns figure in the North of England and has since become a cultural focal point for later Burns celebrations in the city. It bears the lines from his poem ‘For A’ That,’ a celebration of human dignity and fellowship. The original statue is now in the park café, while a replica remains in its original spot in the park. There is also a bust of Burns in Sunderland Museum, presented by the Sunderland Burns Club in 1936.

As many know, the northeast of England is a hotbed of football, and between 1925 and 1928, Newcastle United’s home, St James’ Park, saw the playing of an annual game for the Robert Burns Memorial Trophy between teams of Home Scots and Anglo Scots. The home-based Scots won the first three matches, while the English-based Scots took the last, with Newcastle United’s Hughie Gallacher, the superstar of British football at the time, scoring twice for the Anglo-Scots. That same year, he was part of the Scotland ‘Wembley Wizards’ team that trounced England 5:1 at Wembley. My father, who was part of Newcastle United’s youth team at the time, always said he never saw a better player than Gallacher. The Burns Memorial Trophy match attracted an average crowd of 18,000, and players were awarded a gold medal featuring a portrait of Robert Burns. Although the initial aim was to use gate receipts to fund a statue of Burns in Newcastle, the funds ultimately were donated to charitable causes.

Another connection between Burns and Newcastle was through Thomas Bewick, one of the most influential artists and printmakers of the 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly recognised for reviving and perfecting wood engraving and his beautifully detailed illustrations of animals and birds. Bewick, who was born in Northumberland and had his studio in Newcastle, provided wood engravings for two editions of ‘The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, with his life’ published in 1808. Bewick also engraved a likeness of Burns on wood for an edition of his poems.

And so, to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the debate that began in the 19th century and continues in some quarters today. The claim by some is that it was Gateshead composer William Shield, and not Burns, who wrote the melody we now sing with Robert Burns’ words to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as part of Shield’s 1772 opera Rosina. That opera’s overture includes a melody in the last section remarkably similar to the familiar tune, and some believe that this passage, played with a bagpipe-like drone, is an early print appearance.

Shield, born in Swalwell, a town about a mile to the east of my hometown, Blaydon, around 4 miles from Newcastle, was a successful English composer, violinist, and violist. Indeed, one of the most notable musicians of late-18th- and early-19th-century Britain. From the late 1770s, Shield began composing theatrical music, writing for London’s major stages. His first dramatic success was ‘The Flitch of Bacon’ in 1778, although his most enduring work was Rosina, a light opera that became extremely popular and remains complete in score. Other works included ‘Robin Hood’ and a host of operas and afterpieces often incorporating folk melodies, especially Northumbrian airs, into his music, a practice later noted by scholars as linking him stylistically with composers like Haydn and Beethoven who also made use of folk material. Shield died in London in 1829, and at the request of King George IV, was buried in Westminster Abbey.

As the melodies for Auld Lang Syne and the piece in Shield’s Rosina are not identical, it may be that both Burns and Shield borrowed from an older song, especially given that tunes similar to that of Auld Lang Syne appear in earlier Scottish collections. Indeed, Burns never claimed total authorship of the poem and stated that he “took it down from an old man’s singing,” and a ballad printed in 1711 called ‘Old Long Syne’ shows considerable similarity in the first verse and the chorus to Burns' later poem, although he did expand the lyrics in his 1788 version. Publication of the familiar pairing of Burns’s words and the melody most people sing today wasn’t until 1799, two years after Burns’s death, in a Scottish song collection.

We’ll probably never know for certain how ‘Auld Lang Syne’ came about, but given Shield lived just across the water from Newcastle, maybe it was on his visit there that Burns heard “an old man’s singing” …

Frederick Douglass during his visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1860.

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in the early 19th century, yet later became a leading abolitionist, orator, newspaper publisher, author and arguably the most important black man in late 19th-century America. Although now a recognised figure in the USA, less known are his visits to Britain, particularly northeast England, during the first of which he was still enslaved. The quote above from his second visit shows Frederick’s view of the people of Newcastle, as it was from here that the funds were raised for him to achieve his ‘freedom’.

Frederick’s connection with northeast England is one of the most human chapters in the region’s radical history. Here, far from the USA, Frederick found both political allies and something closer to personal freedom than he had ever known, later reflecting that people treated him as a man, not as a “coloured curiosity”, and he was able to walk the streets without fear, experiencing a social equality he had never known in the USA.

In his early years, Fredrick, a ‘house-slave’, was given some education by the wife of his ‘owner’, but after an insurrection of enslaved people elsewhere in the southern states, that stopped. Frederick then took to educating himself, even going so far as exchange food with white children in order to borrow their books. He educated himself so well, in fact, that in 1845 he published his ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’, which made him famous but also vulnerable, as under American law, he was still legally enslaved and if captured, even though he lived in the north, at risk of being returned to his ‘owner’.

By travelling to Britain in 1846 and thereby avoiding that risk, he gave speeches that became renowned for their intellectual force and moral clarity, as Frederick refused to soften the realities of slavery for his audiences. For example, while in Scotland, he suggested that the Free Church of Scotland return the donations that it had received from churches in the southern states of America, given that the money was tied to slavery. They didn’t happen, however, given the conditions of employment of many of the people of North Shields and Newcastle, where there was a long tradition of radicalism shaped by Chartism and religious non-conformism, it’s no surprise that in his two speeches in North Shields Frederick found a receptive audience of largely working-class people responsive to his arguments about freedom, dignity, and the moral cost of exploitation.

We might think we have a multicultural society in northeast England today, yet in the mid-19th century, in North Shields, given its role as a trading port, it is suggested that English was not the first language of many of its inhabitants. In addition, the majority of those practising a religion were non-conformists such as Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers.

Local historian David Young, who gives an excellent talk on Frederick's connection to northeast England, describes Frederick as a ‘workie-ticket’, a Geordie colloquialism for someone who likes to push their luck, a chancer or a cheeky troublemaker. The origins of the phrase are varied, but one theory from Tyneside suggests it referred to a written record of how an employer saw what they believed to be a troublesome employee. This ‘worker’s ticket’, as it was called then, was used to justify dismissal, so a ‘workie ticket’ became someone who was constantly receiving adverse reports from their employer. The more tongue-in-cheek modern meaning of the term clearly reflects Frederick, as in his younger days, he constantly rebelled against his enslavement to the point of risking his own life. Even in his later years, when something of an elder statesman, when asked for advice on how to inspire change, he simply replied, “agitate, agitate, agitate”.

Newcastle and North Shields’ connections to anti-slavery campaigns stretch well back, and that legacy is still held as important today, as marked by the recent unveiling of the statue of Mary Macham, an enslaved woman who escaped servitude, whose story I included in my piece The Old Lowlight, to eventually settle in North Shields in 1831. It's not known if Frederick met Mary on his first visit to the town in 1846, which was at the invitation of the North Shields Anti-Slavery Society, but we do know he spoke at the Baptist Church on Howard Street in North Shields, of which Mary was a member of the congregation, so it’s very possible. He went on to give talks across Britain, but it wasn’t until December of that year that Frederick achieved his ‘freedom’ after two Newcastle women, Anna and Ellen Richardson, raised the required money for him to ‘buy’ himself out of enslavement.

Anna and Ellen were prominent members of the Quaker community, from which much of the region’s antislavery views came. Anna, a philanthropist and writer from Newcastle, passionately championed equality for all and believed in a moral duty towards everyone. Anna was part of a quietly powerful yet often marginalised tradition of female activism against slavery in Britain, grounded in Christian ethics and empathy for those enslaved. She was one of the most important yet long-unrecognised figures in British abolitionism, operating largely outside formal political power yet with remarkable effectiveness, leading movements such as the ‘Free Produce’, which promoted a boycott of goods made through slave labour.

Anna organised petitions, fundraised, wrote campaigning letters and pamphlets, edited abolitionist publications and held public meetings while also building transatlantic networks that linked British reformers with black American activists who, like Frederick, could offer lived testimony to the horrors of slavery.

It was Anna and Ellen’s fundraising effort that secured Frederick Douglass’ legal freedom by organising and coordinating among British abolitionists to raise the £150 (over £22,000 today) necessary to purchase Frederick’s manumission, the act of freeing an enslaved person from slavery, through legal intermediaries from his former enslaver, Hugh Auld, in Maryland.

That act was not without controversy, reflecting deep tensions within the abolitionist movement between principle and pragmatism. Anxiety, over buying someone’s freedom, was especially strong in many abolitionists in America in the 1830s and 40s, especially William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, who insisted on a non-violent approach of moral persuasion with no compromise with slaveholders and no participation in systems that recognised slavery. Garrison often positioned Frederick, in his younger days, as a moral witness to slavery and a speaker whose authority came from personal experience rather than political theory, but also as a figure expected to reinforce Garrisonian ideas. In Garrison’s view, and he was not alone, ‘buying’ an enslaved person’s ‘freedom’ undermined the moral absolutism at the heart of many abolitionists’ arguments. Such purchases might encourage other enslavers to demand payment rather than voluntarily freeing people, turning abolition into a series of individual transactions that would distract from achieving systemic change.

While the buying of Frederick’s freedom was seen by many as a morally troubling act, it proved practically liberating for Frederick, and it forced white abolitionists to confront whether they were imposing ideological purity at the expense of black freedom and agency, and whether it should be black leaders like Frederick who were in the best position to decide how to pursue the abolitionist cause.

In truth, Frederick was also initially uneasy about purchasing his freedom, as he was concerned it might imply that his liberty was a gift rather than a right. However, he ultimately accepted the manumission because it removed the constant threat of re-enslavement, allowing him to speak and travel freely in America and no longer dependent on white abolitionist patrons. He returned to America in 1847 and broke from Garrison’s view of the US Constitution as a pro-slavery document (he and Garrison did not speak for nearly two decades afterwards) and influenced by thinkers such as Gerrit Smith and Lysander Spooner, Frederick emerged as a far more independent, strategic, and politically engaged thinker arguing that the Constitution could actually be interpreted as anti-slavery given one could use its language around liberty and rights to turn against slavery itself. Frederick also founded The North Star, his own abolitionist newspaper, and his views on violence evolved as he shifted from his early stance favouring non-violence and moral persuasion.

Many will know of John Brown and his failed raid in 1859 on the armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, but they might not know that Frederick first met John Brown in the 1840s and admired him as a man of absolute commitment to abolition, treating black people as political equals, not as causes. Brown, in turn, revered Frederick as the movement’s most powerful black voice. While John Brown was planning the raid at Harpers Ferry, intending to spark a mass slave rebellion, he met Fredrick secretly and asked him to join the raid and recruit black participants. Frederick refused, believing the plan was suicidal and the ensuing slaughter would harm rather than help enslaved people.

As we know, Brown was captured and ultimately executed, and the US government sought to arrest anyone connected to the plot. Because Frederick had met Brown, he was briefly accused of involvement, so to avoid arrest, he fled first to Canada and then to Britain, which prompted his 1860 visit to northeast England, where he spoke in Newcastle, Hexham, Morpeth and North Shields.

Like his earlier visit, this trip relied on local anti-slavery societies, churches, and reform groups in the region to organise venues and audiences but on this tour Frederick did not just recount his own life story as he had done in 1846 he also spoke about the increasing conflict over slavery in the United States, the moral and political significance of physical resistance and the need for continued international attention to the struggle for freedom and fundamental rights for enslaved people. Although Fredrick did not join the raid on Harpers Ferry in his speeches he did defend Brown’s moral courage and argued that his execution helped expose the brutality of slavery

And the Harpers Ferry raid highlighted the painful truth that systemic abolition of slavery was making little progress. Many abolitionists, therefore, became more willing to prioritise affirmative action to free enslaved people even when that action violated the law, marking a move from purely theoretical campaigning to operational resistance, such as support to the likes of the Underground Railroad, a secret, informal network that helped enslaved people escape from the southern states to the North, Canada, and sometimes Mexico. Frederick became part of the Underground Railroad, which was neither underground nor a railway but a metaphor for a secret escape network.

With the risk of arrest gone, Frederick returned to the USA but remained sceptical of politicians’ motives. However, he believed that one must confront power with power and therefore supported anti-slavery political parties, seeing the election of antislavery politicians as a means towards emancipation. In that regard, Frederick’s relationship with Abraham Lincoln evolved from deep suspicion between the two into mutual respect, and finally into something close to political partnership.

When Lincoln became president, Frederick supported Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery but was angry that he did not move immediately to abolish it, criticising Lincoln for prioritising preservation of the Union over black freedom and allowing slavery to continue in loyal border states, calling Lincoln, at this stage, “preeminently the white man’s president.”

Things changed with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and Lincoln’s decision to allow black men to fight for the North. Frederick became one of the most important recruiters of black troops, including his own sons, but he also highlighted that black soldiers were being paid less and would likely be killed or enslaved if captured.

It was also in 1863 that Frederick received an invitation to meet Lincoln at the White House, an almost unheard-of thing for a black man at the time. When the two met, what struck Frederick was that Lincoln treated him with respect and seriousness, listening carefully to his arguments, writing later that Lincoln was the first white man in a position of power to treat him “entirely as an equal.” Frederick later became both Lincoln’s ally and, importantly, an independent advocate for black issues.

Frederick’s assessment of Lincoln came full circle after his death when Frederick said Lincoln was not morally perfect and often slow and cautious, but “emphatically the black man’s president” in understanding that Lincoln, as a politician, was initially constrained by political limits but gained confidence from the increasing support of abolitionists, Civil War successes and the bravery of black soldiers.

In September 1886, Frederick, now an elder statesman who had held three significant federal appointments, and his second wife, Helen, began an extended international tour of Great Britain, France, Italy, Greece, and Egypt. During the British leg of the tour, Frederick delivered a series of speeches on topics including civil rights, liberty, and the condition of African Americans. During that leg, Frederick also visited Newcastle and Anna and Ellen Richardson, later remarking that his visit was primarily to meet again “the two ladies who were mainly instrumental in giving me the chance of devoting my life to the cause of freedom.”

And what of Ann Richardson? Well, she remained consistent with her Quaker principles, and her campaigning didn’t end with the abolition of slavery, as she continued to speak out against what she saw as continued racial injustice in the USA while supporting education and welfare initiatives for formerly enslaved people. She also served as a prison visitor in Newcastle and established several teetotal refreshment rooms. And despite the controversy, the act of raising the money for Frederick’s freedom, which some feared would weaken abolition, instead strengthened one of its most outstanding leaders.