North Tyneside

Formed from the coast of Northumberland

North Tyneside was created in 1974 from land that had always belonged to Northumberland, not County Durham — principally the former county borough of Tynemouth, together with Wallsend, Whitley Bay, Longbenton and a scatter of colliery villages further inland. The result is a borough with an unusually split character: dense shipbuilding and mining communities along the river, and genteel Victorian resorts along the coast, all within a few miles of each other.

Where the wall ends and the sea begins

Hadrian's Wall reached the Tyne at Segedunum in Wallsend — its name means exactly that, "the end of the wall" — making it the most easterly of the Wall's forts and today the most thoroughly excavated fort along its entire length. A few miles downstream, the headland at Tynemouth has held a fortified religious site since Anglo-Saxon times, later rebuilt into the priory and castle ruins that still dominate the river mouth.

Shipyards and seaside

The Tyne's north bank built ships on an industrial scale for well over a century, above all at Swan Hunter's yard in Wallsend. At the same time, the coastline just to the east — Tynemouth, Cullercoats, Whitley Bay — grew into some of the North East's favourite seaside escapes, reachable by rail and later by the Tyne and Wear Metro almost as soon as the shipyard whistle blew.