Seaside Special - Beating the Beast from the East: Durham and Cleveland
My long-planned trip to England’s frozen north-east in late Winter 2018 was at some risk of not happening at all. A Siberian storm was blowing in from the Continent, dubbed ‘The Beast from the East’ by our inventive media. Nevertheless, I was determined to carry out my trip and found myself watching the weather forecasts with a hawk-like attention to isobar clusters and snow-bearing pressure drops.
It seemed that train services were still running up and down the mainline and so I decided to bail work early and hit the rails. The weather was dirty, in that north-bound corridor, but passable. My journey sped me beyond the next belt of wind and snow swooping up the Thames Estuary to pummel the South-East. I was running away.
There were no problems with the journey. Not really. Although an odd moment at Peterborough caused raised eyebrows. The train had to reverse back up the track and switch lines to bypass a set of frozen points just beyond the station.
This prompted a burble of conversation across the carriage that would not normally happen. The student in the seat next to me was on her way to Newcastle to see her boyfriend. We made further small talk about the snow. I bit into a Pret baguette. She said “Is that mature cheddar and farmhouse pickle?” I nodded, inwardly respecting her precise identification. “My favourite”, she said. Not even an attempt at a subtle hint. She must have been starving. We did that very English thing where I offered her half and she refused three times before accepting. I passed over my crisps as well. She scoffed the lot. Turned out she was the same age as Daughter No 2 and studying exactly the same art qualification. I felt empathy.
Bruv picked me up at Malton station and ran me home to Pickering. This was the most touch-and-go part of the trip. The howling wind was skittering snow across the road at a spot called Low Marishes. As soon as the attendant snow plough cleared it off, we could see the wind funnelling the white stuff straight off the fields, over the hedge and onto the road again. Only a small area of the carriageway was blocked and the Council workers were able to guide us through with care.
There were similar conditions over the Moors road to Whitby the next day. I was aiming to catch a train from there up the picturesque Esk Valley line to Middlesbrough and was hoping services would be able to combat the conditions. The plans had a couple of false starts.
We had stopped at the Fox & Rabbit for lunch. This was a false start of sorts, but for a massive gammon steak, pineapple slice, fried egg, onion rings, triple fried chips and garden peas, I was prepared to make a small dent in the timetable. We had said we would assess the chances of passing over the Moors road at the pub, which was about four miles out of Pickering.
The discussion almost didn’t get that far. A mischievous warning sign had been blinking on Bruv’s dashboard. Whilst I was busy wading through my piled-high plate of comfort food, Bruv was scouring the Hyundai manual to identify the problem. Low tyre pressure was diagnosed. With the wind whipping up the snow and flurries flying in at 45 degrees, this was not the time to traverse the road with dodgy traction. The decision was made to scrap the journey and I would aim to get on my way the next day. I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, even though I knew this was the right decision. False start number two.
As we were paying up, I asked the landlady whether the road to Whitby was open. She nodded to a bloke over in the corner. “John’s made it from Robin Hoods Bay.” She raised her voice “He comes every Friday, don’t you John?.” And then back to us in a stage whisper, “He’s 94. What an inspiration.” He really was. “Nowt much ower’t top. Bit of fluff. Nowt.” That was John’s assessment of the driving conditions. Bruv whistled. We drove back to Pickering, pumped up the tyres and he was more than happy to point the now-buoyant car into the wind. To Whitby and beyond.
The Moors were at their most starkly beautiful. I was clicking away on the iPhone, capturing the bitter landscape above Hole of Horcum and noticed a tractor with a snow plough attachment parked up in the otherwise deserted car park. The driver was hunched over his steering wheel, fast asleep. He would be a farmer under normal circumstances, contracted by the Council for his manpower and horsepower as an emergency measure to keep the roads clear. He had probably been up all night, back and forth over this exposed stretch of moorland. Just so I could take a couple of grainy snaps of crappy weather. Not quite disaster tourism on my part, but food for thought all the same.
After checking that the train to Middlesbrough was running, I waved off Dad and Bruv. They were keen to get back. Despite the reasonable journey over, with the wind still howling, they were quite rightly not taking any chances.
The seas at Whitby were enormous, crunching into the crumbling east coast under the force of a 50 mile-an-hour storm. From the old harbour looking north to Sandsend and Port Mulgrave, boiling breakers and white spray filled the eye. The water was alive. In front of me, grey and white rollers reared out of the turmoil, crashing against the harbour walls and through the pier stanchions. Plumes of North Sea ricocheted, geyser-like, into the steely sky and on to the walkways.
A few folk braver than me had ventured out as far as the lighthouse and were experiencing the violence at close quarter. I was frozen. I couldn’t move my jaw. My feet were without feeling and my eyes were streaming. Yet the scene had me transfixed.
We left Whitby bang on time and the train had reached Grosmont before I began to thaw out. The Esk Valley is a wonder of nature at the best of times, but clothed in snow, the landscape showed off a different aspect of its many charms. The graceful high arch of Glaisdale pack horse bridge seemed even more sublime with snow accentuating the curve against the dark, bare woodland. A grainy snap through the window did not do it justice.
Parts of the Esk remained frozen even on wide stretches around Ruswarp, and particularly where the flow slowed on the inside of bends and through marginal gradients.
My carriage filled up with football fans. Middlesbrough were playing Leeds at home. By Lealholm, I was surrounded by Boro fans and my footie small talk had run out. As had my thaw. Turned out that the heating in the carriage had packed up.
That became a bit of a theme. I took a connecting service from ‘Boro to Hartlepool, where my room for the night was a windy igloo stuck out on a limb at the far end of the top floor, at the very end of the central heating circuit (I imagined). I had to moan to the staff. I rarely have real cause to complain about accommodation on these trips. So to be met with indifference about my complaint that the room was on the Arctic end of the temperate spectrum got my blood simmering. Which was one way of warming up, I suppose.
I liked Hartlepool. Though it was a tricky beast to get a handle on. Particularly at night in the teeth of a gale giving a wind chill of several degrees below freezing. ‘Feels like…’ as they were fond of reporting on the then new MeteoGroup BBC weather forecasts.
I knew that the station and my hotel were part of what used to be called West Hartlepool, where the new docks had been built; and the old port of Hartlepool was a fishing village on the headland to the north east. Yet I couldn’t make sense of it on the ground.
A Teesside solicitor, Ralph Ward Jackson had a lot to do with the emergence of Hartlepool. Frustrated by restrictions on business at Old Hartlepool’s Victoria Dock, he established the West Hartlepool Dock Company. The new town came to overshadow the old by sheer size alone. By 1881 Old Hartlepool’s population had grown from 993 to 12,361, whilst West Hartlepool had grown to 28,000. These numbers signified economic boom-time for both settlements. The year 1900 saw the two Hartlepools become one of the four busiest ports in the country.
But I couldn’t make head nor tail of the geography in the dark. Every route I took brought me back to the new marina and adjacent warehouse-like shopping outlets. There seemed to be no route across to the old port and the headland.
Instead, I explored the marina. No surprise perhaps that in such extreme weather the place was deserted. I skirted the eastern edge of the impressive looking Royal Navy Museum where I could see the masts of HMS Trincomalee shaking in the wind. This sailing frigate was built after the Napoleonic Wars and is the oldest surviving British warship. On I traipsed, past the Premier Inn and then west along the end of the boat gangways. This had all been converted from what was once Union Dock.
Not a soul did I see. The wind screamed through the rigging of the boats. The collective high-pitched howl from the hundreds of stays and spars vibrating under duress, together with guy-lines and cables chinking against masts created an unworldly and faintly disturbing cacophony. I was sure to meet either Jacob Marley or the Hound of the Baskervilles around the next corner.
Most of the yachts and pleasure craft were gathered at the eastern end of the marina. Closer to the mouth of the dock, there were a few flash industrial catamarans used for the transfer of personnel and equipment between there and the offshore wind turbines. Finally, tucked around a side-arm, there was evidence of Hartlepool’s remaining fishing fleet. Most of the boats here were small craft and used for inshore fishing.
The entrance to the marina was controlled by a sea lock from a wider harbour and then in to Hartlepool Bay. Water on both sides of the lock was pretty calm and the harbour wall was clearly doing its job, despite the Eastern beast throwing all it could at the coastline.
On a quay wall in the middle of the lock, I stopped by a brass monkey sculpture with his arms cupped to make a bowl for coins. The words ‘Make a wish’ were inscribed on a plaque on the front. There was, I gathered, a far more impressive monument to the Hartlepool Monkey story on the headland. The famous tale runs that during the Napoleonic Wars, a French privateer was wrecked off the coast nearby and the sole survivor scrabbled ashore a few days later. It was a monkey, somewhat bedraggled, but all dressed up in French uniform. The local fishermen court-martialed the unfortunate animal, and then had him hanged.
The waters over the other side of the lock used to be Coal Dock back in the day, when it was the hub of the area’s mineral exporting trade. There was more life there than anything I’d seen so far. That wasn’t saying much. A row of restaurants and bars overlooking the marina were patchily patronised. Not too many folk had ventured out on a cold and windy March evening. Maybe the place would feel more lively on a balmy summer evening. I had a beer in a sports bar where the giant screens outnumbered the customers and watched the Middlesbrough v Leeds game. Boro ran out easy winners. My erstwhile comrades on the Esk Valley shunter would have gone home happy.
I battled the wind all the way back to the Naval Museum. Sheltered by its wall, I looked over the choppy water to the far side of the dock and the still-handsome Edwardian Customs House and Port Authority buildings. They had been refurbished and were now private dwellings. Nevertheless, the structures were forlorn symbols of a different time. Once directly on the waterfront, they were now out of place, looking over a dual carriage-way and surrounded by derelict land, isolated from any of the industry and trading infrastructure which they used to regulate. The regeneration of Hartlepool may one day bring them back into some sensible and more fitting context.
I had a pint in pub there, where I became involved in an in-depth conversation that really stretched my knowledge of darts. I think I held my own until my acquaintance started asking me what my favourite finishes were.
To ward off the fridge-like climate of my room, I took a doner kebab wrap back, settled over a blown out candle for warmth (nodding here to Tony Capstick) and peeled off the wrapping. I wasn’t paying much attention to the assembly process during purchase and was now horrified to discover the carnage that had been inflicted on this most perfectly balanced of meals. If anyone has read any of my ramblings before, they will have realised pretty quickly that I am a fan of the humble kebab. I have taken to print on numerous occasions to celebrate and castigate, depending upon the circumstances.
The shambles served up in Hartlepool vies for the worst I have ever seen. Let me explain.
The bread was put through an industrial toaster that gave it the consistency of a brittle papadum not a pitta. It had been snapped to fit in to the polystyrene box. Snapped! I’ll return to the box in a moment. Of course, the bread splintered into a million shards once I tried to put anything inside. Horrendous. The meat was luke warm, tasteless and glistening with semi-congealed fat. The salad was a shamelessly limp and vitamin-free effort. Then the crowning glory – a thick, translucent orange and vaguely aniseed-y sludge was presented in a pot double-wrapped in tin foil. It would be an unworthy and possibly libellous act to call it chilli sauce.
Serving this outrageous self-assembly kebab in a polystyrene box is a further crime. The point – indeed, the genius - of the meal is its self-contained quality. A delicacy to be eaten on the hoof, put together as a nutritious and satisfying whole contained within a firm, pliable pitta. A paper wrapping is sufficient. The deconstructed apology served up to me bore almost no relationship at all to the real thing. I supposed it was a long way from Hartlepool to the Bosphorous…
I nursed myself to sleep watching dramatic reports from around the Isles about when Storm Emma smashed into The Beast from The East. Compared to the poor sods sleeping on train luggage racks and trapped in snowbound cars on the A1, my chiller-cabinet of a bedroom and car-crash kebab was a low-level inconvenience.
The next day, I failed again to find Hartlepool headland and the old harbour. I wanted to avoid walking up the snowbound dual carriageway which was the main link through the town out to the coast. My map suggested a few side roads closer to the coast would take me there. In fact those routes ended up being private tracks through to decaying boat yards, abandoned warehouses and assorted low-grade industrial units. All now closed to pedestrian access.
There was a lot of dereliction. Vast acreage of brick, concrete and girder-strewn sites behind tattered eight-foot chain link fencing indicated the presence of demolished ship builders, engineering plants and collecting yards. I found my way (via some new social housing built in an isolated spot beyond the marina and enclosed by post-industrial wasteland) to Middleton Beach. The beach afforded me a view over the mouth of Victoria Harbour towards the headland. Even through the murk, I could pick out pretty colour-washed cottages, a squat, square church tower and the promenade extending out onto a long sea wall.
The main part of Victoria dock was hidden from view, but was where the town’s remaining live dock activity took place. It still offered bulk cargo facilities and services for the oil and gas sectors.
This was as close as I was to get to the Headland. The beach in front of me looked uninviting, though it was high tide and not much beach was in view. From here there used to be a ferry to old Hartlepool. It closed in the 1950’s because, says the Hartlepool History website ‘more convenient ways of travel made it redundant’. Right now, I couldn’t think of anything more convenient than a ferry to get me to the headland.
Three blokes were down on the scrap of visible beach, close to the surf, and were turning over the dirty mud-sand with shovels. Treasure or cockle hunting. I couldn’t decide which. I later discovered that they were in fact sea coal gatherers. They drag the top layer of sand away and pile up the sea coal ready to load it into trucks.
Behind and above me, a couple of hooded figures were having a smoke on their balcony and fixing me with unswerving stares. I felt intimidated and moved off along the edge of the estate to the outer harbour of West Hartlepool docks.
Here I met a cyclist who stopped to have a chat. He was well into his 60’s and layered up against the elements like Black Forest gateaux. Except for his implausible lycra trousers which seemed to offer very scant protection. We were facing the empty outer harbour of the old West Hartlepool docks, with its curious arrangement of curved sea walls. At our back was a low-rise housing estate built on old warehousing and rail heads. The place was deserted.
The cyclist was telling me how Hartlepool had been depressed for so long since the majority of the industry closed and had left behind a landscape of dereliction. He seemed a little shrug-shouldered about the regeneration efforts, preferring the traditional, quiet appeals of old Hartlepool. I told him of my frustrations at trying to get there on foot. “Aye, it’s not easy. Especially in this muck.” He nodded upwind, snow spattering his teardrop spectacles. “I biked over there this morning. There’s a lovely wee caff on the foreshore. 60p for a cup of tea! Canna go wrong with that! Mind, it was shut today. The owner cannut get over from Peet-a-lee in this weather.”
He cycled off south, circled the roundabout and came back. “If you’re looking for a nice cuppa, you could do worse than walk down to Seaton Carew.” With that he waved and was off again.
I liked that old boy. He didn’t bat an eyelid at the insanity of my explorations of the coastline in hostile arctic conditions. Nor did I question in the slightest his two-wheeled pottering around town in the teeth of bitter gale.
I struck out south in search of that decent cup of tea he’d mentioned in Seaton Carew.
Hartlepool disappeared behind me, receding into low cloud and intermittent, horizontal snow. Fascinating place and one I didn’t fully get to grips with. Emerging in front of me was Seaton Carew. By a trick of the sweeping coastline, it appeared to jut out in to the grey North Sea against a brightening sky. Seasiding used to have a muscular tang in these parts. This sweeping view around the bay at the height of the area’s industrial might would have been illuminated by petrochemical plants, steel works, power stations and coalmine. It was known as ‘the ring of fire’.
On the outskirts of Seaton Carew sat a rambling modern diner/pub called the Hornsey Bar and Grill. If you love a bargain, get yourself there as fast as you can. ‘Five Course Special - £7.95’ declared the big red sign near the door. What’s not to like? I hope it’s still there.
Seaton Carew has an unusual background. It grew out of a small fishing village to become a seaside holiday resort for wealthy Quaker families from Sunderland and Darlington in the late 18th Century. They built and stayed in smart lodging houses and hotels along the seafront and around The Green. The Marine Hotel still stood, but other hotels had gone and The Green itself was under reconstruction. Mounds of earth were piled up and guarded by heavy plant machinery behind green fences. A ‘70’s bar/café on the seafront was also boarded up in readiness for demolition.
The town remained a modest affair, despite the Quakers’ investment. Nevertheless, Seaton had avoided the worst aspects of the faded glory that hangs around many traditional seaside resorts like a festering sore; and there was clearly some investment happening. I was particularly taken with the art deco curves of the bus station at the south end of the prom. The years of wear and tear and even the current storm that had deposited about half a ton of fine east coast sand on the site could not disguise its charm.
Seaton was intermittently busy on that freezing Saturday. For instance, whilst the pub was empty and the level of optimism in opening up the deserted rock and candy shop was admirable, the fish and chip gaffs were rammed. I couldn’t get a seat in the first two I tried (and believe me it was not a day for take-aways). The third was also doing a roaring trade, but the patrons found me a cosy table away from the draughty door and served up a fine plate of crispy battered haddock and chunky chips.
I'd exhausted the town's quirky charms and it was time to trudge inland through the snow to the railway station. It’s construction, incidentally, had been responsible for the town’s second wave of tourism growth in the 19th Century. On the way I passed a packed café, but felt that its chintzy, antique-shop feel would not be to the liking of my 60p-cup-of-tea cyclist pal.
If petrochemicals, shipbuilding and engineering dominated Hartlepool and Teesside to the south, the coast and hinterland heading north was, all about coal-mining. The train rattled through settlements with names synonymous with pit-life: Easington Colliery, Peterlee and Blackhall. In keeping with the uneasy juxtaposition of heavy industry and natural beauty, this coastline had been designated as the Durham Heritage Coast in 2001.
I jumped off at Seaham, walked down through the town and then south along the coastal footpath. Even in the savage wind and snow, the shallow bays viewed from those headlands carved from yellow Magnesian Limestone were breathtaking. In the distance, the elegant, striped lighthouse on the sea wall at Seaham harbour, from whence I had come, was taking a fierce pounding.
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| Credit: Posterazzi |
Valleys – known here as denes – split the cliffs down to the coast and provided ideal conditions for woodland. Today, the path through them was treacherous. On the cliff tops it was difficult to pick out the route under the snow and I starting taking a few false steps.
Half of Britain’s magnesian limestone is wrapped up in these East Durham cliffs. In Summer the unique geology supports diverse grasslands and rare flora. That felt a long way off. Indeed I barely lasted an hour on that exposed coast. I was chilled to my very core, deaf from the screaming wind and headachy from its constant pounding. Even on a visit to Iceland to see the famous Gullfoss waterfalls, I couldn’t recall being so cold. Whinge, whinge, whinge.
Refuge was easily found in the tearooms of Seaham. The town had undergone a remarkable recovery since the decline of coalmining. As evidenced by the café I was occupying on the promenade and the recently opened shopping complex at the other end of town built on former spoil heaps. New housing estates had been built on former colliery sites. Workers commuted to Sunderland and Newcastle and have triggered significant house price rises for the first time in generations.
For all that, the town remained incredibly proud of its industrial heritage. So it should. Memorials, sculptures and information boards were dotted around the town. The magnificent harbour with its concentric sea walls and series of lock gates was itself a testament to the ambition of the area, seeing successive expansions to cope with the amount of coal being shipped out. A new town grew up around the harbour to serve the coalmining industry, sponsored by the 3rd Earl of Londonderry. The track I had followed from the station in to town used to be a narrow gauge railway line ferrying minerals and goods to and from the harbour.
The first pit opened in 1845 and the last in 1928. The latter, evocatively named Vane Tempest after the Ear’s wife, followed a rich seam of coal more than a mile out under the North Sea. At its height the colliery employed almost 2,000 workers. The town’s last pit closed in 1993. Beaches were covered in thick grey-black debris for years. The local term is ‘minestone’ – an accretion of colliery grease, sludge, coal and rock waste that spilled out directly on to the coast. But now, the water quality of the sea is almost back to the level of other areas in the UK.
Seaham fell into an inevitably steep economic and social decline during the late 80’s and 90’s. A town with its heart, soul and purpose ripped out. The current regeneration draws lessons from the successes of other pit towns such as nearby Peterlee.
Not everywhere has been this fortunate though. Horden is 10 miles south of Seaham. The colliery here closed in 1987. Whilst the environmental clean-up has been successful, the social and economic toll has been harder to shake. Over 500,000 tons of spoil were removed from the beach and costal hinterland to create rolling grasslands and reed banks. The area is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Just back from the coastline, Horden itself continues to suffer endemic crime, chronic poverty and widespread drug abuse.
The former pit village is one of the most deprived areas in Britain. The regeneration trick seen in Peterlee and Seaham is not working there. Not yet anyway. An article in The Guardian in 2017 ran an interview with the manager of a newly opened community hub who said that malnourished families were turning up at the centre and some people arrived having not spoken to another person for days or even weeks. She said, “Children are born into deprivation and high unemployment: people feel forgotten about”.
Nevertheless, the hub appeared to be bringing people together and restoring a certain sense of civic pride. There were proposals to invest in a £30m local industrial and commercial space to foster business growth. Writing this in 2025, it still remains to be seen whether these are the seeds of long-term change.
If nothing else, Horden’s problems emphasised the uneven and sometimes static pace of recovery from seismic economic and social damage on Durham’s east coast. Environmental recovery has forged ahead on many parts of the coastline, but this is a complex landscape still in transition and where the connections between industry and beauty run deep.
I had the option of extending my trip overnight in Sunderland. By the time I got there, the weather was still aggressively hostile. With reports of train delays and road closures still rife, I decided to draw stumps and head home. I reckon I could claim a points victory over the Beast.
This rambling coastal circuit blog project is almost home. The very last outing I want to mention, and only briefly, serves almost as a postscript to the Durham narrative above.
In February half-term, 2022, I was in the Durham/North Yorkshire borderlands, formerly known as Cleveland. I’d had an excellent day in Saltburn exploring the wide streets, tidy houses and themed public buildings of this planned resort built, by those ambitious Victorians. Henry Pease, a Quaker and industrialist had driven the development of Saltburn-by-the-Sea, a new resort swallowing up an existing hamlet. The fantastic pier, iconic cliff lift, bold Zetland Hotel, and expansive valley gardens still bear testament to his visionary zeal. The planned elements of the town are clear to see. It struck me that this resort, south of Redcar and north of Whitby was the physical reality of the flawed designs, which were ultimately abandoned, that London businessman Charles Robinson began constructing at Ravenscar, just a few miles on the other side of Whitby.
And now I think how clever I am that the description of that project appeared in chapter 1 of these ramblings, published way back in April 2021. And here I am, describing Saltburn in the very final edition. How I wish I could say that this was always going to be the elegant literary wrap up of this series. A planning metaphor to complete the circle. How I wish I could pretend that this hadn’t just been dreamt up sat here in my living room scribbling away on the laptop, trying to work out how to finish the series.
Saltburn also provided a new culinary experience. The specials blackboard of the beachside Ship Inn was crammed with every flavour of parmo you could wish for. Middlesbrough’s bid for food immortality (for the uninitiated, this is a crispy-fried chicken breast butterfly, slathered in hot white béchamel sauce and a thick slurry of melting parmesan cheese) was augmented by curry, peri-peri, chilli, barbecue, tex-mex and sundry other specialist sauce options. Absolutely stunning. I waddled up the hill to my bougie, boutique hotel with its period furniture, chintzy accessories and feature walls, thinking I had made some intriguing memories.
Next morning, I awoke to news on the telly box of Russian tanks lumbering towards Kyiv. Putin had invaded Ukraine. An unexpected and unwanted memory to take away with me. In a judderingly literal interpretation of this chapter’s theme, that particular ‘Beast from The East’ is still grinding bits of Ukraine into dust and dry blood.
It doesn’t seem right to end these coastal ramblings on such a sour note. So instead, I’m benchmarking all the positive recollections captured in this time-slip clockwise circumnavigation:
- The myriad two-bob, hackneyed descriptions of coastal views, seascapes and mountains.
- Vivid pictures of surprising, beautiful, isolated, rejuvenated and by turns crumbling, embattled, disappeared, over-rated towns, villages, monuments, dwellings and ruins.
- The fervent opinions on outstanding, disgusting, classy and crumby (take your pick) pitstops in pubs, restaurants, take-aways, hotels, b&bs, campsites and caravan parks.
- The thrill (and sometimes spill) of solitary trips, the comfort of holidays with the extended family, the adventures and explorations shared with Mrs A.
- The acquaintance and conversation with randomers gathered at bus-stops, on trains, over vittles, and around harbours, bays and beaches…
- …and all those sky-filling, heart stopping, spirit-lifting sunsets.
I can feel a top-ten list coming on. Lists of lists, probably.
It’s been a blast. Thank you for your company.
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