In Search of a Northern Soul

Chapter 3 - Tynemouth, North Shields

PART ONE – TYNESIDE

Tynemouth, North Shields, Whitley Bay and Newcastle

"We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there."

Pascal Mercier

For a journey that has been preceded by a great deal of eager anticipation, weeks of planning and research, the road north from East Anglia is a tribulation. It's a full 107 miles of mainly single carriageway from Norwich to Newark where one picks up the A1. That the major, indeed pretty much only, road serving the north and west of the country from East Anglia is a mere single ribbon of tarmac is beyond me, jammed as it is with every agricultural implement known to mankind, sugarbeet and turnip lorries and heavy juggernauts slogging to and from the east coast ports of Great Yarmouth, Harwich and Felixstowe.

And then when you do eventually reach Newark, the A1 stretches north to Newcastle for another 150 miles of roadworks, cones and contraflows. Chris Rea had obviously never been on the A17 or the A1 otherwise he would have relocated his "Road to Hell".

But I knew this would happen as I've done it countless times before. I did it many years ago when my father was terminally ill and his death mercifully soon after, and then again for my mother not long afterwards, to rescue her from the dangers of living alone in her eighties, physically and mentally frail, to bring her south to care and compassion. I haven't been back since.

***

As the A1 rolls on northwards, the counties change. The flatlands and cabbages of Lincolnshire give way to the rolling aspect of Nottinghamshire, then on into the Yorkshires where the higher land of the Dales and The Pennines to the west and the North York moors to the east encompass the Vale of York and the Great North Road.

At Scotch Corner the A1 intersects with the A66 which would take me east to Teesside or west to Cumbria, Carlisle and the Lake District. Feelings of familiarity begin here, growing stronger with each landmark as I watch the journey north advancing. I remember Scotch Corner for its bizarrely situated inter-war hotel, standing grandly in the midst of pretty much nothing. There was once a roundabout here, but now the A1 hurtles uninterrupted beneath a flyover.

Past Durham, the columns of Penshaw monument appear silhouetted on a horizon hilltop, a replica of the Temple of Hephaestus dedicated to John Lambton, first Earl of Durham. Its sight has always been a sign I am getting close to home. The road dips and by-passes Chester-le-Street, and then divides, the A1 to pass Newcastle to the west by The Angel of the North, and the other fork to the Tyne Tunnel, then east on the coast road down to Tynemouth and Whitley Bay.

As I approach the coast I remember the shops, the pubs, the filling station on the roundabout. It all seems to slow down around me. The years roll away. It is strangely calming. I know this place.

***

I've taken the risk of booking myself into The Park Hotel for the night of my arrival. It's a risk because I don't hold particularly fond memories of The Park. It's a large, low and sprawling Art Deco building, built in 1939, white with nautical curved lines. Location wise, you can't fault it. It's almost on the beach, the great sweeping Longsands which connect Tynemouth and Whitley Bay, with only the road between the hotel and the sea. The view, it has to be said, is stupendous, which is more than could be said for the hotel itself.

The Park was originally designed in an indulgent, classically art deco style. It was built to cater for the new tourism brought by the railways in the 1920's and 1930's, and it enticed the inter-war well to do with cocktails and dancing. But over the years the paint peeled, investment dwindled, and by the 1970's it had become depressingly shabby. Coach parties and pensioners' excursions moved in. Champagne was exchanged for bottles of Brown Ale and Carlsberg, the corrugated cardboard bar front had all but fallen off, and the high heels had given way to trainers and jogging pants. Although only some 500 yards from the house I was brought up in and one of the nearest bars by far, it was never a destination for me.