The full story
A history of Tyne and Wear
Two rivers, one Roman wall, a thousand years of learning, coal and steel — here's how a stretch of the North East coast became the county of Tyne and Wear.
Tyne and Wear itself is young — the county was only created in 1974 — but the land it covers has been settled and fought over for close to two thousand years. This page follows that longer story; visit any borough or town page for the detail closer to home.
Rome on the Tyne
The Romans reached the Tyne in the first century AD, but it was the emperor Hadrian's order to build a wall coast-to-coast, begun around AD 122, that fixed this river permanently on the map. Hadrian's Wall ran roughly along the line of the modern Tyne, guarded by a chain of forts: Pons Aelius where Newcastle's castle now stands, Segedunum at Wallsend — literally "the end of the wall" — and Arbeia, a supply base at South Shields where grain and goods were landed for the garrisons further west.
For nearly three centuries this was a working military frontier, not a backwater — Arbeia's granaries alone could feed thousands of soldiers, and the wall itself was as much a controlled customs line as a defensive barrier. When Roman authority in Britain finally collapsed in the early fifth century, the forts were abandoned, but their footprints survived well enough to be excavated, rebuilt and opened to the public today at both Wallsend and South Shields.
Bede and the twin monasteries
Two and a half centuries after Rome left, this stretch of coast became, briefly, one of the intellectual centres of Europe. In 674 the nobleman-turned-monk Benedict Biscop founded St Peter's monastery at Monkwearmouth, on the north bank of the Wear; in 682 he added a sister house, St Paul's, a few miles upriver at Jarrow. Biscop travelled repeatedly to Rome, bringing back books, relics, glaziers and stonemasons, and built up a library that had no equal in early medieval Britain.
It was at Jarrow that a monk named Bede — later "the Venerable Bede" — spent almost his entire life, reading that library and writing roughly sixty books on history, theology and science. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished around 731, is the single most important source for early English history and earned him the title "the Father of English History." The twin monastery site is now on the UK's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status.
Viking raids and a new castle
The wealth of monasteries like Monkwearmouth-Jarrow made them obvious targets once Viking raiding began in the late eighth century, and Northumbria's golden age of scholarship faded under repeated attacks and shifting political control. By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, the settlement on the Tyne where the Roman bridge had once stood was a modest place with no fortress of its own.
That changed in 1080, when Robert Curthose, William the Conqueror's eldest son, built a timber castle on the site to secure the river crossing against the Scots. It was known simply as the "New Castle upon Tyne" — and the name stuck, first to the fortress, then to the town that grew up in its shadow, and eventually to the city it became.
Walls, wool and the start of the coal trade
Medieval Newcastle grew rich on the wool trade and was eventually ringed by some of the strongest town walls in England, parts of which still stand. But it was a black rock, not wool, that would define the region's next five centuries: coal, dug from seams close to the surface along both riverbanks, was already being shipped from the Tyne by the 1200s.
By the sixteenth century "sea coal" from the Tyne was heating London, and Newcastle's Hostmen — the merchants who controlled the trade — had become extraordinarily wealthy. The saying "carrying coals to Newcastle," meaning a pointless errand, was already in use by the 1600s.
Keelmen and King Coal
Getting coal from the pitheads to the deep-water ships anchored downriver required an army of keelmen, who rowed and poled flat-bottomed boats called keels loaded with coal down the Tyne and Wear. It was brutal, skilled, dangerous work, and the keelmen became one of the region's first organised workforces, capable of striking for better pay — most famously in 1750.
Collieries spread across what is now Tyne and Wear through the 1700s, sinking ever-deeper shafts and knitting the region's villages — many of the ones covered on this site among them — into a single industrial landscape long before "Tyne and Wear" existed as a name.
Engineers, turbines and the busiest shipyards on earth
The nineteenth century turned the coalfield into an engineering superpower. George Stephenson, born nearby and raised on Tyneside colliery wagonways, built some of the world's first successful steam locomotives at Killingworth before going on to father the modern railway. In Newcastle, Joseph Swan demonstrated a working incandescent light bulb in 1878-79, and Mosley Street became one of the first electrically lit streets on earth. At Wallsend, Charles Parsons perfected the marine steam turbine and, in 1897, stunned the assembled Royal Navy by racing his tiny turbine yacht Turbinia through the fleet at almost 35 knots — faster than anything else afloat.
Meanwhile the riverbanks themselves filled with shipyards. Sunderland became known as the largest shipbuilding town in the world; on the Tyne, yards like Swan Hunter at Wallsend and Armstrong's works at Elswick built some of the most famous vessels of the age, from record-breaking ocean liners to Royal Navy warships. By 1900, "Made on the Tyne" or "Made on the Wear" meant something on every ocean.
War, depression and the Jarrow March
The First World War kept the yards and pits at full stretch, but the interwar years brought a brutal reversal. Global shipping demand collapsed, and towns that had bet everything on coal and ships were left with mass unemployment — nowhere more starkly than Jarrow, where the closure of Palmer's shipyard in the early 1930s pushed local unemployment above 70%.
In October 1936, around 200 Jarrow men set out to walk almost 300 miles to Parliament, carrying a petition signed by 12,000 residents. The Jarrow March — or Jarrow Crusade — changed no policy at the time, but it became one of the defining images of 1930s Britain, and a lasting symbol of the region's resilience.
War, rebuilding and a New Town
The Second World War brought heavy bombing to Tyneside and Wearside's docks and yards, and full employment returned as the country re-armed. Peace brought large-scale slum clearance and new council estates — reshaping places like Longbenton, whose population multiplied within a generation — alongside a wholly new settlement: Washington, designated a post-war New Town in 1964 and built around the medieval home of George Washington's own ancestors.
Local government across the region, though, still straddled two ancient counties — Northumberland to the north of the Tyne, County Durham to the south — an arrangement increasingly at odds with the reality of one continuous urban area.
One county is born
On 1 April 1974, the Local Government Act 1972 swept the old arrangement away and created the metropolitan county of Tyne and Wear, uniting Newcastle, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Sunderland — the last of these itself an amalgamation of the old county borough of Sunderland with Washington, Houghton-le-Spring and Hetton — under a single county council for the first time.
The arrangement was short-lived at county level: Tyne and Wear County Council was abolished in 1986, and its functions passed to the five boroughs, which have run as unitary authorities ever since, cooperating on shared services like the Tyne and Wear Metro, fire service, and archives. The name and identity of the county, however, endured.
Reinvention
As coal mining and shipbuilding wound down through the late twentieth century, Tyne and Wear rebuilt itself around culture, retail, universities and services. Gateshead's Metrocentre opened in 1986 as Europe's largest shopping centre; Sunderland was granted city status in 1992; and the turn of the millennium brought a wave of landmark regeneration — the Angel of the North in 1998, the tilting Gateshead Millennium Bridge in 2001, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in a converted flour mill in 2002, and Sage Gateshead's silver curves in 2004.
Today the county is home to over 1.1 million people, three universities, a resurgent creative and digital economy, and — through it all — two football clubs whose rivalry across the Tyne-Wear divide says almost as much about the region's identity as the rivers themselves.
Keep exploring
Now see where it happened
Every borough and town on this site links back to this timeline — Roman Wallsend, Bede's Jarrow, industrial Blaydon and dozens more.