Cookson cultists come to the town in their droves. You can do the Cookson trail or even be driven around South Shields on a bus that passes Cookson's birthplace, her former home, the church she attended and then goes on to take in the really exciting stuff for the modern tourist: the locations used in the filming of the highly acclaimed television adaptations of the Cookson novels, like The Fifteen Streets, The Gambling Man, The Dwelling Place, The Tide of Life and The Girl. Then they eat chips on the seafront, then they go on the dodgems and then they're sick. A perfect day out, I'd have thought.
South Shields has a lot of real history as well as the ersatz variety. Zeppelins raided the Tyne in World War One and the town's seafront amusement park was attacked. Not exactly the Ruhr Dam in terms of strategic importance but maybe the Boche thought that taking out the coconut shy would be a devastating blow to Blighty's morale. More seriously, during World War Two South Shields suffered well over 200 air raids from parachute mines and incendiary bombs and 156 people were killed. One direct hit on the marketplace killed more than forty people sheltering in tunnels below the square. These are statistics to remember next time you watch a programme about the Blitz. It will be about London as always and feature Piccadilly Circus in flames and cheery Cockneys making their way to Tube stations. If you trusted the London media you could be forgiven for thinking that the south won the war single-handed and that northern England was as quiet as Switzerland. It wasn't, as the people in South Shields will testify.
South Shields also has the dubious distinction of hosting Britain's first modern race riot. At the time of the First World War, Yemeni sailors from the British protectorate of Aden flocked here at the encouragement of the government to man the merchant fleet left short-handed by local sailors going off to fight. A small community was established in the Holborn area of town, with its cafes and boarding houses ringing with strange Arab accents and music. The Mill Dam area was thronged each day with these exotic new incomers. It was the largest Yemeni community outside of Yemen.
There'd always been some unease in the town about the influx and this grew worse at the end of the war when returning local seamen found Arab sailors had occupied the vacant jobs. The year 1919 saw the first serious street violence and racial unrest with attacks on the Arab boarding houses and cafes. Through the twenties, you can trace the scent of simmering discontent through the letters page of the local paper. It wasn't just their jobs that the local men felt were under threat; one irate correspondent said, 'These Arabs pick the prettiest girls and the ugly ducklings are left for the white man.'
Popular feeling in the town had turned against the Yemenis; rumours had long circulated around the town that the Arabs used bribery to get work on the ships thus 'robbing' white seamen of jobs. On 2 August 1930, South Shields gained national notoriety after the so-called 'Arab Riot' at Mill Dam on the quay. A mob of white seamen began by roaming the waterfront looking for Arabs and foreigners to attack. A large police presence was drafted in as tension mounted. Around noon, four white men were hired for the steamer Etheralda. Ali Hamid, a jobless Yemeni, was heard to shout, 'They work, but there is no work for the black man.'
No one is quite sure if it was this rather mild remark that sparked the resulting trouble but there was soon furious fighting between a group of white seamen and the Arab crowds. Police drew truncheons and charged, only to be met by a hail of stones. Some Arab men drew knives, stabbing four policemen. The riot spilled over into nearby Holborn, injuring dozens of innocent bystanders.
On Monday morning, the public gallery in the Magistrates Court was packed and a crowd of over 1,000 waited outside. Six white men and twenty Arabs were brought from the cells and accused of causing an affray or riot and a collection of knives, sticks, chair legs and other weapons was displayed. All were released on bail of £10 each. With no work and opinion in the town now against them, the Arab community suffered immediately and grievously. Scores were admitted to Harton Workhouse. A hundred innocent Yemenis not implicated in the riots were deported. On 20 November, after a two-day trial at Durham Assizes, all the Arab defendants were given sentences of hard labour, ranging from three to sixteen months. After serving their sentences they too were deported.
These days in South Shields, you'll meet your share of Geordie Ahmeds and Tommy Al-Nazas, little men with thick Tyneside brogues, dark eyes and cinnamon skin. Problematically, South Shields folks are still known in the area as Sand Dancers, a term deriving both from the splendid beaches and an old slur on the Yemeni population. Sand dancing as practised by Wilson, Keppel and Betty was a music-hall amusement act that parodied and caricatured Egyptian and Arab culture and these days describing a South Shields resident as such is rightly considered mildly offensive. Peter Hitchens would call it political correctness gone mad and so I heartily encourage him to get up to South Shields and call someone a Sand Dancer. Then he can have a riot of his own. The sons and daughters of those Yemeni seamen still form a proud enclave in the local community. In the Second World War, 4,000 Tyneside seamen were lost; 800 were Yemeni Arabs.
For many years South Tyneside had the highest unemployment rate in mainland Britain, but between December 2002 and June 2004 unemployment fell by twenty-four per cent, the eighth best performance out of the twenty-three local authorities in north-east England. With the ships and the mines gone, the town today relies largely on service industries, leisure and retail. It's a commuter town too with many residents travelling daily to work in Sunderland, Gateshead and to where eventually all journeys in the Great North will bring you – Nyurcassle upon Tyne. That's the proper pronunciation and the full title. With all due respect to the one under Lyme, the suffix is never necessary.
I felt well disposed towards Newcastle from the moment I booked my hotel room. I was in a hotel myself at the time, actually, a boxy broom cupboard in Kensington courtesy of the BBC. It was the sort of hotel room where you could swing a cat but it would definitely end up concussed, either when it hit the bracket above the wardrobe where the eleven-inch TV was mounted or possibly via a glancing blow to the temple off the trouser press. We had been filming all day, stopping and starting for pneumatic drills, low-flying aircraft, shouting nutters, sirens, Tube trains, the acoustic furniture of London life. The sort of thing Time Out would describe as 'edgy', maybe because it makes you feel so on edge you want to swing a cat in your hotel room.
My shoulders unknotted as I spoke to Kirsty at the Vermont Hotel, Newcastle. She had that warm, slightly concerned, vaguely cheeky Geordie lilt to her voice, and the effect was like an ice-cold bottle of Newcastle Brown rolled damply across the forehead. How wrong was J. B. Priestley? At once, the logic of all those executive relocation decisions became apparent. If you had to hear that your train to Bournemouth had been cancelled or that your overdraft limit had been exceeded, you'd want Kirsty to break it to you. The Samaritans were right as well. In extremis, I reckon Kirsty could get your head out of the gas oven too. 'It's very noisy where you are,' she said, as I struggled to make myself heard above the banshee whoop of a Black Maria heading for Shepherd's Bush. I'm in London, I replied. 'Well, your room's booked, Mr Maconie. So you come up to us and have a nice relaxing time in Nyurcassle.'
I put the receiver down gently. I wanted to check out of Room 1109 of the Hilton Kensington that very moment and, pausing briefly to hand back the plastic key card that had never worked properly, trot through twilit Holland Park, left at Bayswater, through St John's Wood to Islington and onto the Holloway Road, all the time quickening my pace, knowing that I now had the Al, the Great North Road, that legendary ribbon of asphalt beneath my feet; onward through Barnet, Potters Bar, Hatfield, Stevenage and Baldock. As dawn broke over Biggleswade, I would stride the empty miles, my mind fixed only upon Grantham, Newark-on-Trent, Retford, Bawtry, Doncaster, Garforth, Wetherby, Knaresborough, Boroughbridge, Darlington and eventually the fabled Scotch Corner where I would buy a Cup-a-Soup for a passing lorry driver and be delivered at last into silent, sleeping Newcastle and
the Vermont Hotel where I'm sure Kirsty had left a chocolate waiting for me on my pillow.
In the end, I waited a week or two and did it by car. If I'd been coming from London I'd have gone by train, since the East Coast Main Line is one of the few unalloyed public transport triumphs in British history, but I came to Newcastle along Hadrian's Wall which, respect due to the Great North Road, is surely the connoisseur's way. But as Hadrian's Wall is the end of the north and as neat a place to finish my ramblings as an artificial earthwork built by an exiled Italian can be, you'll forgive me if we return there in a while. We are, after all, in a rush to get to Newcastle and Kirsty.
Because of the Jarrow March and When the Boat Comes In and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Terry Collier and maybe even, for those handful who remember it, Harry Enfield's Bugger-All-Money, impoverished Geordie counterpart of Thatcherite plasterer Loadsamoney, because of all these things, Newcastle and poverty go together in the British imagination like Liverpool and thievery or Tunbridge Wells and disgust. But when I Googled for 'Newcastle' and 'poverty', hoping to unearth some relevant statistics, all I found were site after site encouraging Geordies to 'Make Poverty History' in Africa and calling for the cancellation of Third World Debt. The north-east, it seems, is too busy helping the world's unfortunates to stop and consider itself poor.
Why should it? Economic growth in the north-east currently exceeds that of London and the south-east and is higher than the national average. The north-east of England has seen year-on-year reductions in unemployment levels since the turn of the century. Since 2000, unemployment has fallen from 108,000 to 64,000. Joblessness in the region is falling faster than anywhere else in the UK. There will not be another Jarrow March any time soon. It's much more likely that Luton will march north.
Denton Burn, though, looked just as drab and uninviting as the outskirts of Luton or Leicester or Liverpool, its streets crowded with all the characterless and ubiquitous furniture of modern urban Britain, the tanning salons, the badly spelt pizza takeaways and mobile phone shops. It could have been anywhere. It could have been Kentucky or Duluth or even Hyderabad, once you take the Westgate Road into the Asian enclave of Benwell Grove.
Here the shops become more exotic: halal butchers and sari shops with windows that are riots of turquoise and peach. There are scores of video stores. Each is festooned with huge posters of implausibly handsome men and hauntingly beautiful women advertising four-hour films where people launch effortlessly into a song and dance number in between snogging on a yacht and assassinating a drug baron. The accent becomes even more outlandish and wonderful than the original Geordie here, the why-ayes and howays now seasoned with spicy dollops of Farsi, Kurdish and Urdu.
Dropping down into the city this way, you don't really see how handsome it is until you're right in the middle of it. Another advantage of coming here by train is that you arch across the Tyne via one of the famous bridges, of which more soon. We sort of sneak in the back way and end up by the remains of the old wooden castle that burned down – unsurprisingly – and prompted the building of a 'new castle'. True to its name, Newcastle has been building them since 1080.
The Vermont Hotel towers like a Gotham City office-block cut into the quayside and overlooking the wide river. As I'm doing all that vital but quotidian stuff at reception about papers and alarm calls and breakfast, a pretty blonde girl emerges smiling from 'backstage'.
'Ah, so you made it. Welcome to Nyurcassle. Colin will show you to your room, and -' She leans in conspiratorially '- we've upgraded you to a suite.' I think Kirsty may be slightly too good to be true. So do you by now, I imagine. But she isn't.
It's dusk and the view from the room is fabulous. Colin, who runs Kirsty a close second in the helpfulness stakes if not the prettiness, tells us that this is the way to see the riverside and its dazzling new acquisitions, the Baltic and Sage buildings, i.e. by night when the sun goes down over Gateshead and the bars begin to twinkle and the Sage resembles a translucent shell of lambent light rather than, as Colin puts it, 'a load of old mirrors'. He joins me at the window and describes with an outstretched arm a walk that will take in the new glories of the Tyne. But that's for tomorrow. Tonight there are other delights of the Toon to experience. Less sophisticated, less aesthetically pleasing, perhaps. But as strong a current in Newcastle's cultural bloodstream as any arts centre, however translucent.
The Bigg Market isn't that big and it isn't really a market, though you can get fruit and veg here three times a week. 'Bigg' is a type of barley that used to be grown locally and sold in this part of the city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Come to think of it, there's still a hell of a lot of barley sold here in 2006 but mixed with water and hops, fermented and consumed by the pint until the vendee becomes aggressive, morose or nauseous.
The Bigg Market is Newcastle's party quarter, its Reeperbahn, its Golden Mile, its Sunset Strip. It's not much more than a street really and quite pretty in the day but by night and at weekends a gladiatorial arena devoted to orgiastic alcoholic consumption, moral licentiousness and sexual excess. I counted seventeen pubs so you can have a truly brain-scrambling pub crawl without walking more than a hundred yards. On Friday and Saturday, this nondescript little street is awash with premium lagers, Breezers, Archers and Aftershocks as well as blood, urine, vomit and other nameless fluids.
The Rough Guide to England describes the place as 'the largest cattle market in Western Europe'. That seems harsh to me and more than a little insulting to its clientele, however bovine. But I find it hard to get partisan about the Bigg Market. I feel about it a bit like I feel about that other rambunctiously northern playground, Blackpool. I'll defend it to London trendies, whose idea of a good night out is drinking a small bottle of wheat beer in a basement bar modelled ironically on a seventies living room, but I wouldn't want to spend my free time there. Neither does a great deal of Newcastle, preferring to hang out on the Quayside or neighbouring Collingwood Street. But if an unpretentious piss-up – and possibly a fight and a knee-trembler behind SupaSnaps is what you're after – make haste there.
On a cold Thursday in February, it felt distinctly desolate. None of the bars were full and most were showing FA Cup replays on big tellies to prematurely middle-aged men who truly were 'drinking in the last-chance saloon'. The clubby bars with their DJs and little dance floors looked no more appetising, really. The Pig and Whistle boasted 'years of party tradition' but seemed as quiet as Sunderland docks. Another was called Pop World, where a pallid youth with an earring and a phenomenally bad haircut smoked a fag furtively by the bar – perhaps unaware that the pub smoking ban was still a year off – while two blonde girls in black leather hotpants shuffled around with self-conscious and defensive irony to music I couldn't hear. I was outside watching through the window. Which made me even more tragic than them, I guess.
I was outside because I was debating whether to take my gastric system in my own hands and enter the Rupali, the famous curry house run by Mr Abdul Latif, 'The Lord of Harpole'. While I was in Newcastle, a story about cash for peerages rumbled boringly through our media. I found this scandal amazingly unscandalising since, being northern and suspicious, I had naturally assumed all tides and honours were bought and that this was the natural if corrupt order of things. Well, Lord Harpole has a proper heraldic coat of arms above the door and however he got it, I imagine it's as well deserved as the ones acquired by all those toadies and cronies and cattle barons in Westminster. I wonder if he takes his seat.
By the way, my reference to the digestive challenges offered by Mr Latif's fine curry house was not lazy racism. Lord Harpole himself cheerily extols the lacerating properties of his hotter curries and offers free second helpings for anyone asbestos-gulleted enough to finish a first. The Rupali and its fearsome cuisine has become world-famous via the pages of another receptacle of Geordie culture; one which has done its fair share of propagating an image of the city that has made millions snigger but presumably had the north-east development c
orporation choking on their skinny macchiatos.
Viz magazine – a bracingly rude, trivia-obsessed, nostalgic and sometimes very funny parody of classic British comics – began as a crude (in every sense) stapled photocopy sold in local pubs. The first twelve-page issue was written and drawn by Chris and Simon Donald and friends Jim Brown low and Hugo Guthrie and sold for 20p (30p to students), and was soon a word-of-mouth cult initially in the north-east before becoming distributed by Virgin as sales grew.
Then in 1987 the Virgin director responsible for Viz, John Brown, set up his own publishing company to handle the comic and it rocketed in popularity to the extent that it was briefly the best-selling publication in Britain. A rash of unfunny imitations were launched and quickly and happily died. At one point 1.2 million people bought Viz, though that's now down to around 300,000. Viz themselves suggest that this might be because it's not as funny as it used to be.
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