South Tyneside

Arbeia, gateway to the wall

At the mouth of the Tyne, the Roman fort of Arbeia supplied the garrisons strung out along Hadrian's Wall with grain and goods landed at South Shields. Historically part of County Durham, this stretch of the south bank became its own metropolitan borough in 1974, and Arbeia's reconstructed gateway and excavated remains are today among the most complete Roman sites anywhere in the North of England.

Bede's Jarrow

A few miles upriver, Jarrow has been a settlement since at least the 8th century, when Benedict Biscop founded St Paul's monastery there in 682 as a sister house to Monkwearmouth. It was at Jarrow that the monk Bede spent nearly his entire life, compiling the Ecclesiastical History of the English People that still shapes how we understand early medieval Britain.

Shipyards and the Jarrow March

Centuries later, Jarrow's identity was rebuilt again around Palmer's Shipbuilding and Iron Company, once the town's dominant employer. Its closure in the early 1930s devastated the local economy and, in October 1936, drove around 200 unemployed men to march almost 300 miles to Parliament — the Jarrow March, now remembered as one of the defining protests of the Depression era.

South Tyneside today

Downriver, South Shields grew through coal, salt and marine engineering into a seaside town in its own right, and gave Britain one of its best-selling novelists in Catherine Cookson. A passenger ferry still links South Shields to North Shields across the water, and the borough's two wide, sandy beaches remain a major draw for visitors.