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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take Tyneside in the early 20th century for example. You could write a history of the North East as a tale of integrated industrial elites, families tied together by business and in some cases marriage. Armstrong dredged the Tyne into a world-class river. Stephenson (father and son) built the world’s first railway nation. Joseph Swan invented the electric lightbulb. C A Parsons built the first steam turbine vessel. Charles Merz built the first interconnected electricity supply. John Wigham Richardson (his uncle) persuaded fellow shipbuilders to use it.

When Yevgeni Zamyatin went to oversee the building of Russian ice-breakers on Tyneside in 1916, he saw shipyards so advanced he based his dystopian novel We on them. In 1906, Wigham Richardson and Swan Hunter launched the four-funnelled RMS Mauretania, the largest, the fastest, and the most beautiful coal-powered steam-turbine ship in the world. And just in case you think strong trade unions and great companies don’t go together, Sidney and Beatrice Webb viewed the North East as one of the best union organised regions in the country, and Tyneside shipyard platers the best paid.

Indeed, as late as the Sixties, Parsons’s steam turbines employed 6,000 skilled draughtsmen and engineers, while A C Reyrolle’s electrical switchgear employed 12,000. Lads wanted to work there because the apprenticeships were famous and the sports facilities unrivalled.

Peter Chapman’s Tyneside Heritage (2021) is exactly the kind of work we need to understand how ‘levelling up’ happened on the ground. Not only is it the first history of South Shields for a very long time, it is also the narrative of the Chapman family and their rise from early 19th century shipwrights, to mid-century drapers, to late-century chartered accountants and significant civic leaders.

At the heart of the story stands Lt Col Sir Robert Chapman (1880-1963), who joined his father’s firm and who, with his wife Lady Helene, became Tory celebrities in a rock-solid Labour town. How could this be? The Chapmans could have lived anywhere they chose (nice Northumbrian rectory perhaps, or dappled Durham farm house) but they chose to live in Westoe village, a mile from the one of the highest death-rate boroughs in the land, a place caught in the teeth of the Great Depression. 

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That’s the dignified part of their tale. The efficient part concerns Chapman’s role in developing commercial enterprises, as you’d expect perhaps from a chartered accountant with fingers in a lot of pies, but also in social housing, clean water, Harton Hospital, the Shields Gazette, the Boys’ High School, and almost every aspect of public life, from member of parliament for nearby Houghton-le-Spring to lord mayor of South Shields, from magistrates’ bench to colonel in the Northumbrian 74th Regiment (with a full chest of family medals, including a VC).

When in 1938 Chapman fell out with the Labour council over re-armament (they were against, in spite of new shipbuilding orders), he resigned and he and Lady Helene marched off to don their masks as the town’s first Air Raid Wardens. Whether ladling soup in downtown Zion Hall, or hosting charity fetes up at Undercliff, their baronial sub-suburban pile, or leading the floor at fundraisers, when we talk about levelling-up, we need to bear in mind those who didn’t leave it to others.

If Sir Robert was a local hero, Sir Arthur Munro Sutherland (1867-1953) was a industrial titan when the North East was the most heavily industrialised region in the world. He owned shipping lines, coal mines and shipyards. He ran an extensive Baltic trade in coke and timber.

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Like many other great northern industrialists, Sutherland believed in an ancient Northumbrian homeland that had preceded England, that had brought Christianity and Industrialisation, that had special qualities of skill and character. Marx thought the time would come when advanced societies would have no need for homeland or religion. He was wrong. Not only did Sutherland have a penchant for old Northumbrian castles (he bought one), and New Northumbrian myths (he was one), he was also a committed Methodist.

 His wife’s family, the Hood Haggies of Willington were the biggest makers of steel hawsers in the world. They were also active Methodists. Newcastle department store pioneers the Bainbridges and the Fenwicks were Methodists too, along with the great ship-owning Shields Runcimans, close family friends of the Chapmans.

A picture emerges, then, of an integrated business elite knowing each other and working together in the markets and in the chapels, in the suburbs and civil society, and in the two great hubs of Newcastle business, the Commercial Exchange down on the Quayside, and the Union Club up by Central Station. Sutherland’s head office was in walking distance of both. Of course, networking can mean cronyism too, and Sutherland was up in court for it in 1943. But it can also take you out of yourself. Chapman enjoyed his middle-class coteries it is true, but he also served with distinction in a war where men like him saw not only how the other half lived, but how it died as well.

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Long before “levelling-up”, therefore, the northern regions were able to foment indigenous growth where self-belief and belonging were part of an economics of agglomeration.

In 1945 Tyneside to Teesside was still one of the world’s great techno-industrial regions. In ruined Germany, by contrast, Bavaria was nichts. Now the positions are nearly reversed. Bavaria is one of the world’s great techno-industrial regions and the North East, if not nowt, is certainly not what it was.

Why so? First, after the war, Bavarian small to medium-sized firms surged while North East England remained dominated by three heavy industries, one of which (the National Coal Board) actively campaigned against the introduction of new industries. By the Eighties, public sector employment in the region stood at 63%, and the age of the entrepreneurial elite was all but over.

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Today Bavaria has a cluster of technical universities, colleges and linked apprenticeships, and manages to retain its graduates. The North East hasn’t, and doesn’t. In small to medium high-tech businesses there is much talk of “brain capital” and “spin out”. That the top British spinners are Oxford and Cambridge comes as no surprise because the economics of cultural agglomeration doesn’t just happen in the business hubs. It happens, it especially happens, in ancient colleges as well.

The North East may lack some or all these Bavarian features, but one thing it has in abundance is positivity. In spite of years of decline, and declinism (a North East trope), the people remain upbeat, friendly, and drawn to their own regional myths. Love of the craic is one of the first things visitors notice and although everybody talks about it, nobody sees it as an economic quality. 

Positivity is a form of entrepreneurial activity. How people feel about who they are and where they live can be transformative. This is easy to see in the hospitality industry, say, or in teaching, or sales and marketing, but how it relates to more technical fields, or R&D, or business start-ups, is harder to explain even though all these activities demand positive relationships whether in matters of trust, or problem solving, or training, or site location. Not everything is down to money.

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All market activity is as much social as economic, and all contracts, as Durkheim reminded us in a brilliant insight, depend on non-contractual obligations. In what he called the “Protestant Ethic” Max Weber recognised what he called the “Spirit of Capitalism” and “Ethic”, in this sense, meant a power within. And ‘power within’ is what is missing from the government’s levelling-up strategy.

Their white paper is a remarkable document nevertheless, promising to “unleash” and “empower” “every part of England that wants it” with generous and sustained funding settlements, six kinds of “capital”, five kinds of policy (“pillars”), 12 kinds of target (“missions”), hundreds of promises, application forms and god knows how many acronyms holding untold pots of money. The basic idea is that although the South won’t get less, the North will get more. Orwell would have loved this, but the real question is does Michael Gove mean it?

For sure, his white paper is a huge statement of belief in the regions, but unfortunately not in the people. It invokes the Industrial Revolution, but there’s not much business history. It calls for new forms of capital, but there’s little on accumulation. It talks about culture, but only as galleries and museums up from London, not inside the north’s own traditions and certainly not as something you might find on the street. If motorway service stations are anything to go by, business has not exactly shown us the way. Go to Costa at Woolley Edge, for example, and look for Yorkshire. Indeed, look for anywhere. We have come a long way from the days when Parsons’s steam turbines stood for the north.

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My question is how does a regional business elite grow and to what end? I realise that another way of describing the Chapmans and the Sutherlands is in terms of a capitalist class. In the past, I have made my own modest contribution to this way of looking. This essay, however, is about something different. Given that not everything can, or should, come from the state, levelling-up has no other choice than to think in terms of regional pride and purpose.

The North East continues to make things — Nissan cars, for instance — and some very good companies are locally owned. Barbours of South Shields for instance is listed in the region’s top 50. Founded in 1894 to make hard-wearing clothes for seafarers then motorcyclists, Barbour showed its drive and adaptability by re-inventing itself for the third time as a world-leading fashion brand.

If you want to see how Geordie pride and purpose matters in manufacturing go and see the woman who leads it and the 600 women who work there. Michael Gove is a clever man and his civil servants mean well, but if they are serious about levelling-up, they need to start with the people, stupid, before all else. 

It feels weirdly incongruent, then, that the monastery where Bede lived and prayed is now adjacent to the vast car park where Nissan’s output waits to be exported around the world. The vast Port of Tyne complex sits on the edge of Jarrow Slake, a tidal lagoon, known locally as ‘Jarra Slack’, a name that hints at the town’s ancient history: ‘Släcka’ is the Norwegian word for slake, or quench. In 794 a Viking raiding party met a sticky end here when they were repelled by the local Anglo-Saxons and their retreating longboats were dashed on the rocks at Tynemouth.

Over a thousand years later, Jarrow was once again the site of bloody violence. In the febrile decades of industrial unrest that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a local magistrate was murdered, ostensibly by a striking miner called William Jobling, though the case remains controversial. Jobling was hanged in 1832 and his body was tarred, hung in chains and bolted into a gibbet that was toured through the colliery districts to intimidateee the striking pitmen. At Jarrow Slake it was then attached to a 21-foot wooden post to swing in the wind as a warning to all others (and in full view of the house where Jobling’s widow lived).

Jobling’s trial took place amid what the general commanding the British Army in Northern England called an “almost military occupation”, and his hasty execution was undoubtedly meant as an example to the newly formed miners’ unions of Northumberland and Durham who were striking for better working conditions — including reduced working hours for children from 16 hours per day to 12; indeed the sentencing judge described their strike action as “illegal proceedings which have disgraced the county”, and urged them to take “warning by his fate”.

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The pitmen’s final defeat by starvation and intimidation had a profound influence on the generations that followed. In 1939, the local Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson published a famous j’accuse against the capitalists who had laid waste to her constituency of Jarrow: The Town That Was Murdered. She argued that ruthless tyranny abounded in the coalfields, citing the strike-breaking actions of aristocratic coal-owners like the pantomime villain Charles Vane Stewart, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry (who is known for his forceful opposition to the ban on child labour in collieries.)

Londonderry’s was an example followed by the heartless Victorian plutocrat and Liberal MP, Sir Charles Mark Palmer. It was his vast shipyards that turned Jarrow into the archetypal one-industry town, with all the attendant socioeconomic problems. The yards attracted thousands of migrants, especially the Irish, whose presence saw the town become known as Little Ireland, and rekindled in that part of Tyneside a Catholicity that Bede might’ve recognised (“Our Father who art in Hebburn, Jarrow be thy name.”) In matters of industrial relations and employee welfare, Palmer shared the same outlook as The Simpson’s Mr. Burns. Although overblown tributes to civic worthies are not uncommon, it’s rare to see a lie as brazen, and frankly laughable, as the encomium on his statue opposite the town hall: “a life devoted to the social advancement of the working classes”.

The experience of crushing defeats at the hands of coal-owners in the 1830s and 40s, and then in the General Strike of 1926, had bred a cautious and conservative approach among the trade unions of the North East. It partly explains why the Durham Miners Association became the last of the miners’ unions to affiliate to the Labour Party. This pathological resistance to confrontation meant that even as the “hungry thirties” bit hard following the closure of Palmers in 1931, with unemployment levels reaching up to 80% in places like Jarrow, there was surprisingly little unrest, or much in the way of Communist stirrings. This was met with disbelief from those who knew how miserable conditions were for the unemployed — and caused Wilkinson to muse, “if not Jarrow, then where?”

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By 1936, as crippling unemployment dragged on, and promised government support failed to materialise, Jarrow Council made a decision. In the conciliatory traditions of North East England, 200 out-of-work local men would march to Parliament and petition Stanley Baldwin’s government to provide work for the town. 85 years ago this week, they set off.

The strategy of the march organisers was astute: they knew that, unless handled carefully, political demonstrations can repel as much as they can galvanise. Therefore, the march organisers were careful to demonstrate discipline and dignity in their demand for work, not handouts. Churchmen were courted and Communists were wheedled out. And, as over 60% of these unemployed riveters and platers were Great War veterans, they presented a disciplined picture of men marching smartly in step, blankets tightly rolled, demonstrating their endurance and good order in a deliberate appeal to Middle England.

And yet, despite all this, what they got at the Palace of Westminster was not government action, nor even a formal reception, but cups of tea. The reaction was captured brilliantly by Thomas Cantrell Dugdale’s painting “Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London”, where a socialite in a cocktail dress peers out of her drawing room window at the throng outside, while her bored companion blows smoke rings with studied indifference. After causing a little inconclusive chatter in the Commons, the marchers got the train home.

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But it wasn’t just that Londoners didn’t care; it’s that they couldn’t understand. Though the depression may have bit hard in the industrial heartlands of the North, Southern England was booming in the 30s: new light industries producing consumer goods were sprouting along the Thames Valley and London was experiencing an incredible housing boom. Back in Jarrow, the old joke was that Hitler saved the town — albeit temporarily — by providing war-work for the old shipyards.

Still, by 1945, middle-class people had felt “the call of conscience,” as AJP Taylor put it. The immiseration of Jarrow and places like it were uppermost in many voters’ minds when they cast their votes in Labour’s first landslide. But the fundamentals of the British economy did not shift, and have not since — success stories such as Nissan notwithstanding.

Just in recent weeks it’s been reported that the North East has not only the highest levels of child poverty, and the greatest number of deaths from opioid abuse, but it has also seen the sharpest fall in life expectancy of any English region. So, I find it hard to shake the pessimistic view that the North, having experienced a relatively brief few centuries of industrial prosperity, will never again throw off its subordination to the South, or indeed the legacy of its century-long economic decline.

Although there are some signs of optimism, especially in low carbon and renewable energy, with giga factories being built and wind turbine blades emerging from old dockyards — a pleasing narrative arc perhaps given our disproportionate role in carbonising the planet – the ability of the British state to level up the North East will always face the brute facts of geography and history.

Some believe the loan should be permanent. “Stephenson’s Rocket is our Elgin marbles,” says Nick Forbes, leader of Newcastle city council: “It should be here all the time.”

In equating Stephenson’s workaday wrought iron with the marmoreal art of the Parthenon, Councillor Forbes risks hyperbole, but he knows it will get the sympathy of his party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Corbyn’s views on the Elgin marbles are for him unusually clear: they should be returned to Greece.

But what is so important about Stephenson and his Rocket, and why does Councillor Forbes believe it should stay in the city?

Rocket was a steam locomotive built in 1829 for the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway – the first railway built to carry passengers rather than coal. Rocket was by no means the first locomotive, but she (it’s discourteous to call a steam engine “it”) incorporated several innovations which made her the first engine really capable of hauling passenger trains. Rocket was the template for steam engines for the next century and a half, and is, quite simply, the most famous locomotive in the world.

Rocket was designed and built at the Forth Street works of Robert Stephenson and Company, just round the corner from the Discovery Museum in which she now sits – the first company formed specifically to build railway engines. As such, Rocket is emblematic of the North East’s heavy engineering heritage. Coal mining and ironworking, together with shipbuilding and seafaring, gave “Geordieland” its gritty character – industries now gone.

It’s not surprising therefore that today’s Geordies are keen to see the greatest symbol of the city’s tough, pioneering history. Or that schoolchildren facing an uncertain future in this post-industrial age should be brought by their teachers to see how one of its most famous sons took the Industrial Revolution to a new level.

Tyneside today is brooding as well as depressed. The area voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in a sort of modern-day Jarrow March. Those who visit the Discovery Museum are being inspired by the past – by their cultural heritage. Should Rocket therefore remain in the city indefinitely? Or should it return to London, where visitors from around the world, as well as the whole of Britain, can see what Tyneside could once do – and still might? Would it not serve the region better if Rocket continued to take pride of technological place in the Capital of the nation that once led the world – and has aspirations to do so again – in engineering, technology and innovation?

This in essence is the Elgin Marbles argument too. Isn’t Greece better served by showing the best of its exquisite ancient civilization to millions of visitors from around the world each year (6.25 million people visited the British Museum in 2016-17) – a far greater and more international footfall than could ever be achieved in Athens? “The sculptures are part of everyone’s shared heritage and transcend cultural boundaries” says the museum’s website. It’s a strong intellectual case.

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Indeed, Councillor Forbes does Newcastle no good by equating Rocket’s case with that of the Elgin Marbles. “Stephenson’s Rocket is our Elgin marbles” is a clever sound bite, but historically the circumstances of the acquisition of the two artefacts were entirely different. The Elgin Marbles were either purloined or rescued, depending on your viewpoint, but Rocket was bought – legally – by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. And after being sold on, in 1862 was given by the then owners (a mining company in Cumberland) to the Patent Office Museum, forerunner of the Science Museum.

The leader of Newcastle City Council would do better to make the case that Rocket’s intended final resting place (or, strictly, “long-term display”) – the National Railway Museum in York – fails both of what we might call the ‘Elgin Marbles tests’: it neither returns the artefact to its cherished place of manufacture, nor does it maximise its “shared heritage” by being displayed in one of the greatest tourist centres of the world. The National Railway Museum – for all its appeal – is a comparatively niche attraction. Its footfall is barely 50% more than Newcastle’s. It’s not Rocket science.