99 problems, but a beach ain’t one’: Adaptability and longevity oN the South Shields seafront
Caroline Taylor
As a seaside settlement in the North East of England, the South Shields seafront poses a number of questions and challenges regarding considerations of the built environment. Coastal proximity has meant the form and function of constructions at this site of former heavy industry and domestic tourism alike have demanded careful consideration and management. The identity of the area is strongly tied to its maritime roots, which historically have provided prosperity and notoriety, as well as inspiring a unique and proud identity for local community residents. Through economic transition and coastal erosion, the degradation and regeneration of constructions of architecture and infrastructure have therefore had to have been carefully managed with many considerations in mind – producing a landscape of mixed morphology, but upon examination, a more complex story than meets the eye. A combination of anecdotal observation, alongside anthropological theoretical framework, produce a discussion of environmental constructions contextualised in the cultural landscape that combine a number of factors for consideration. Installations such as the Littlehaven walkway highlight the desire to not only create a durable and elemental resistance in the landscape, but also to evoke the sensorial immersion and nostalgic ruminations that the seaside enables. Additionally, the conversion of Gandhi’s Temple into Colman’s Seafood Temple shows the consideration not only of locational economic capitalisation, but a recognition for the importance of preserving, transitioning, and reintegrating local landmarks in line with trends of local cultural perseverance and pride. South Shields encapsulates the complex resulting built environment, when powerful forces of cultural heritage and understanding, environmental elements and erosion, and limiting economic and social factors come to coalesce by the sea.
Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly,
Blow the wind south o'er the bonny blue sea;
Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly,
Blow bonnie breeze, my lover to me.
Northumbrian Traditional Folk Song
This is a passage of one of many maritime songs evoking the divisive power of the sea that any well-versed Geordie, Mackem, or Sandancer would recognise. It speaks in the futile voice of a young woman, evoking the elements to act in her favour, and return to her the lover that has been separated from her by his sailing vocation. By the conclusion of the song, the winds have turned in her favour, yet the reunion of the lovers by the sea remains unfulfilled. Indeed, the song speaks more to a promise of return, longing for a what has been and a hoping for what yet might be, more than an actuality of what remains in the moment. Perhaps, then, it is the perfect verse to be recently emblazoned along the renovated seawall, facing the mouth of the Tyne, alongside Little Haven beach - a romantic evoking of the cooperation of the natural elements, the hopeful promise of the future, whilst simultaneously calling reflectively upon the past.
The Groyne [Image: Caroline Taylor]
The fate of South Shields, a town in the North-East of England, has too seemed uncertain. Located south of the mouth of the River Tyne, there is evidence that the area has been settled since the Stone Age (Hodgson et al, 2001) and has an extensive and colourful history. From a strategic Roman military outpost, and a Viking colony, to a scuffling ground for English and Scottish border contestations, and centre of industrial innovation, South Shields has a significantly distinct heritage that individuals born within the town wish to define themselves aside from their neighbours in Newcastle and Sunderland respectively, only a matter of miles away. Natives of the town go by the ethnonym ‘Sandancer’ (Pearce, 2014)) and are staunchly proud of the name and legacy that has continually tied themselves and their ancestors to the North Sea.
However, despite the longevity of the identity of the area, the unsettled nature of history continues. Once a desirable tourist destination during the British heyday of both the railway and the busman’s holiday, until the mid-20th century, the increased affordability of flights to international destinations meant that the tourist industry in once popular seaside destinations such as South Shields began to dry up (Gale, 2005). Following this, the economic impact of Thatcherism caused the closure of much of the area’s prevalent shipbuilding and metal-working industries, as well as the decline in exports from Port of Tyne resulting from the closure of the coalmines in the area.
In the decades since, much like other former industrial hubs and coastal destinations around England and the wider UK, the town has seen rising unemployment, increased levels of deprivation, economic stalling, and a rise in cynical sentiment towards established government (Lannigan, 1996). Forming part of Labour’s so-called ‘red wall’, the constituency of South Shields, as well as its neighbouring constituencies in the broader South Tyneside area, continue to vote for the party, traditionally believed to protect the interests of blue-collar workers, promote nationalised healthcare and education, as well as economic regeneration and prevention of deprivation and poverty. Though significant right-wing sentiment has been stirred in the town (as with many working class communities around the UK following the 2016 Brexit referendum), the local authority remains under the control of Labour, and has been presented with a significant challenge in recent years - attempting to maintain support within the town, whilst regenerating local infrastructure and promoting economic development, under the majority government control of the Conservative party, promoting austerity and cuts to public spending.
This has culminated in resourceful solutions from both the local government, as well as local community members and businesses alike. An inexhaustible resource for the town has historically been its proximity to the coast, with its award-winning beaches at Sandhaven and Little Haven, miles of National Trust protected nature reserve known as the Leas, as well as a number of parks, performance spaces and recreation areas by the coast. Moreover, in addition to this, the community appreciation for the implications of having such a precious resource so locally accessible cannot be understated, and as was mentioned earlier, the coastal proximity of the town has been integral to how residents conceive of their identity, heritage, and values.
In addition to this, the coastal stretch of the northeast coast of England is one of the most quickly eroded section of coastline in Europe (Rosser et al, 2013), which poses continual challenges to the maintenance of public infrastructure that is coastally adjacent in this area. In addition to tidal action, the forces of the wind, rain, salty moisture, and airborne particulates such as sand continually travel unhindered across the edges of the land, from the beaches and across manmade landscaping such as roads, pathways, and vegetated areas, as well as having been demonstrated to damage surrounding built structures (Cardell et al, 2003) and amenities like signposts, benches, and railings. The resulting impact is that landscapes and structures are degraded at an alarming rate with a high upkeep cost - metal is corroded and becomes unsound, glass is tarnished with salt residue and scratches, vegetated areas are choked with banks of sand, and roads and paths made impassable by drifting dunes. The required intervention by local authorities is continual and high intensity, and until recent years, the few facilities and little infrastructure that were present were dated and poorly damaged, so such intervention was overlooked.
However, resourcefully, in response to this post-industrial degradation, economic downturn, and community disillusionment, an attempt to regenerate the town through the focus upon the significance and prevalence of the coastal seafront has gotten underway.
Figure 1- Map c/o Google Maps; annotations and labels are authors own.
It is upon this coastal regeneration that I intend to focus this study. The implications for South Shields itself are enormous, and involve a number of factors - three of which I intend to focus upon.
1. How the local authorities have integrated community understandings of heritage and identity, and normative conceptions of the ‘British seaside’, in order to orchestrate a rejuvenation of the coastal built environment that engages cultural and historical understandings, sensorial subjectivity and engagement, and practically and financially sustainable longevity.
2. How local businesses have called upon their understanding of the coastal heritage and stereotypes to integrate themselves into a sensorial landscape both of nostalgia and of practical initiative and regeneration in order to present themselves as integral to the landscape.
3. How local and national authorities, and environmental groups/initiatives, have found ways in which to manage the degradation of former industrial sites, integrate them into the landscape whilst simultaneously protecting the ecology, and have engineered forms of ecological protection into the longevity of the built environment.
However, there are more wide-reaching implications of this study. The success or failure of the endeavours seen at the South Shields seafront may also speak to the potential of such initiatives in other former industrial coastal heritage landscapes across north-western Europe. Many such areas are subject to the same material limitations, similar environmental constraints, and an uncertain ecological and economic future, therefore successful endeavours that may alter fates of such communities cannot be understated.
Theoretical Framework
During this study I will draw upon a number of areas within anthropology and the social sciences in which this discussion is fundamentally grounded. Dissecting a landscape such as this into discrete categorisations for analysis poses some challenges - namely, a concern whether considering any of the aspects in isolation from one another will deduct from an accurate consideration of the landscape as a whole. In many cases, the features of this landscape can be interchangeably described as both architectural pieces and as features of infrastructure – in this instance, features are constructed in such a manner that they do not exclusively function as the sum of the parts of their architectural design, nor simply through their functionality as contributing to a broader infrastructural system. Rather, terming one thing as architecture and another infrastructure discretely simplifies the complexity of the relational nature of constructions with one another, in a landscape where perceived rigidity and fluidity of form and boundary of the ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’ are far from absolute (though the terms, in the case of this piece of writing, are employed for the sake of easing discussion). It must also be considered whether an individual subjective assessment of the sensorial experience of the landscape, for example, can be a fair assessment.
That being said, there are a number of aspects of this landscape that require an imposition of subjectivity in order to be efficacious in their intention. For example, the Sandhaven walkway, a curated blend of concrete colours and style that imitate the drifting nature of the adjacent sand dunes (themselves carefully managed through fencing installation and dune grass cultivation), works to form a piece of architecture that appears soft and intermediary to the perceiver, an almost ‘suggested’ border between manmade surfaces and natural topography - but rather functionally forms a resistant boundary against the elements. Ultimately, this form of planning relies on a holistic understanding of the material nature of the built environment - not only upon how their material properties allow them to function, but also how their appearance, perception, and integration persuade subjects to perceive and understand them (Ingold, 2012). This contrast between form, function and perception also epitomises the hylomorphic nature of the built environment along the seafront; infrastructure and construction of morphogenic nature designed to appear dynamic with the elements, but through material virtue, resistant to their force (Trummer, 2009).
Sandhaven Beach [Image: Caroline Taylor]
A further theoretical aspect that must be considered in this case is the role of sensory embodiment as a means of participating in this landscape. Tourist subjects who travel to the coast experience a specific, unique set of sensory experiences, often extreme in broad contrast to one another - the warmth of the sun versus the cold of the wind and the water, and the smell and taste of seaside fare such as ice-cream, fish and chips, candyfloss (sweet, salty; smooth, soft, course and crunchy) and the pungent smell of rotting seaweed and accumulating seafoam, for example (Finneran, 2017). Not only are these experiences known of seaside encounters, but they are also culturally expected, which in some regards has altered the form and function of the built environment. An historical precedent based on a cultural legacy of ‘the British seaside’ has created sets of behaviours, internalised through sensorial embodiment, culminating in economic demand, spurring an architectural response in the form of thematic artistic installations, for example, perpetuating subjects’ standards and reproducing them internally. In short, a cycle of embodied habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) of infinitely divisible dynamic normativity, dialectically communicating between subjects and the built coastal environment.
In a similar manner, understandings of history and identity come into play when dissecting the manner in which the landscape has both been adapted to be managed and preserved. The South Shields seafront in many ways consists of a heritage landscape (Baird & Shackel, 2017) - that is to say, as previously mentioned, many aspects of local identity can be linked to a legacy focussed not only on human action in the area, but also on conceptions and imaginations of the landscape that have enabled such action. As a result, there are a number of built environmental aspects that contribute different aspects of history and forms of identity to the area - the South Pier and Groyne pier as industrial legacy, the North and South Marine parks as Victorian planned leisure grounds, and the mid-20th century amphitheatre complex as an artefact of the performing arts. As a result of this, the nature of the area as a palimpsest must be considered both from a theoretical perspective, and in terms of the architectural and structural curating choices made by local authorities moving into the future. In addition to this, there is also the complex issue of integrating former industrial sites into safe and sustainable aspects of the landscape - a question of how ecological needs can be met in the manner of conserving the environment and industrial history simultaneously (Rivera-Núñez et al, 2021).
Ultimately, common themes connect the theoretical framework for the discussion of this study: an understanding of the nature of materials and the forces of the natural landscape in this case, but moreover, a more general understanding of conceptions and imaginations of identity, heritage, experience, and embodiment through immersion and participation in the construction of the coastal environment. The constructions of this area are designed to elaborate upon and to protect expectations and understandings of significance and experience in this landscape, as a means of capitalising upon its maximum potential as a subjective and temporally contingent realm of self-actualisation for locals and visitors alike. That is to say, a successful regeneration of the seafront would not only culminate in a historically sensitive and ecologically forward-thinking architecture of topography but would also involve curating a location in which a variety of people could situate understandings and expectations of themselves, their community identity, and a broader set of ‘British’ values (Page et al, 2017).
Discussion
In this section I will endeavour to demonstrate through case specific examples the previously mentioned objectives discussed in light of the theoretical framework. It must be noted that, in the spirit of the landscape being a site of sensorial immersion and subjective interpretation, these descriptions for the most part come from my own experience of spending vast quantities of time in this environment over the course of my life. The descriptions and assessments detailed herein come from what I understand to be the meeting of the aforementioned factors for consideration – including discussion of the material nature of constructions, the sensorial immersions of being present in this landscape, and the potential cultural projections and contextualisation given to the landscape as a member of the local community. Individually assessed, the built structures situated at the seafront form a mixed morphology that could be perceived as disjointed without the associated cultural context. However, the imagination of the landscape’s function to be one of heritage and experiential anticipation over coherent aesthetic function creates an entirely different vista.
For example, the construction of the seawall and promenade along the length of Littlehaven beach in 2014 demonstrates an appreciation for the expectation of usage of the environment, as well as environmental limitations, and a desire to evoke cultural understanding artistically but not beyond a limited pallet and materials. The construction features a walkway, constructed of concrete conglomerate, but with the accenting features, including amenities such as benches and sculpture, carved from sandstone, in a variety of forms. Seashells, ship’s sails, and windbreakers accent the promenade, without juxtaposing the colour or texture of the sand adjacent. These resistant materials appear soft and of indefinite form when contextualised like this, subverting their practical function of holding back the tide, whilst simultaneously blending the bordering road and carpark into the sand in a manner that makes them appear neither manmade nor natural.
Coleman’s Seafood Temple [Image: Caroline Taylor]
South Shields Sali [Image: Caroline Taylor]
Local businesses have demonstrated a keenness for the cultural commoditization of the concept of ‘the British seaside experience’, but also an understanding for the area’s maritime and industrial heritage. For example, local purveyor of fish and chips, Colman’s, which was established in 1905, used their status as an award-winning and long-standing establishment to purchase and regenerate the bandstand known as Gandhi’s Temple in 2017. The structure, which had stood derelict for a number of years, housing only public toilets, was still considered an iconic landmark, indicating the end of the Promenade; consequently, the business opted to regenerate and integrate the structure into their new premises ‘Colman’s Seafood Temple’, constructing the remainder of the building to be a glass-panelled imitation of a ship. For diners, the experience inside the restaurant now both integrates the classic architecture of the seafront, but also provides a sensorial immersion of being sea-adjacent (yet protected from the elements), and for onlookers, rejuvenates a beloved derelict landmark into a piece of modern architecture without interrupting the maritime experience. In addition to this, restaurant ‘Platform 33’, has changed hands a number of times (its former name ‘The Rattler’ still persevering amongst locals), yet has not departed from a novelty feature - the situation of the establishment in a collection of railway carriages. In a nod to the industrial history of the area, and despite structural innovations and expansions to the supporting building, the understanding of this as a means of connecting the business with local heritage has made the feature indispensable for successive owners of the business.
Whilst industrial heritage is culturally indispensable, it has proven an ecological challenge to the area. The former Trow quarry, at the southern end of the seafront area has a controversial history of repeated repurposing, which has made it challenging to repurpose into both a safe and coherent section of the environment. Previously, short sighted usage had seen it used as a coastal landfill for hazardous waste (O’Shea et al, 2018), which later became a public danger as a result of coastal erosion. Following management by the local authority in conjunction with the National Trust, who manage the extended clifftop nature reserve known as ‘the Leas’ to the south of the seafront, the quarry has now been integrated into the landscape as a protected dell for bird and plant species that thrive by the coast but are challenged by erosion and exposure. Sightings of Little Owls and Snow Buntings in 2020 have been encouraging to the ecological longevity of the local manmade topography, and softer engineering initiatives to slow coastal erosion, such as the offshore laying of oyster beds, lie within the crossover of understandings of the scope of the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’ coalescing physically to further the constructed landscape as a whole, and its consumption not only by man, but other living species.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the built environment at the South Shields seafront is a mixed vista of architectural and infrastructural forms, which manifest a broader understanding and expression of the history and identity of the area, an understanding for the creative and destructive capacity of the natural environment, and an appreciation of the ecological and cultural implications of the persisting longevity of human constructive expression in the area. This case study falls at a number of academic intersections and could be expanded upon focussing more specifically on a number of aspects. These include acknowledging the need for a holistic and interdisciplinary approach, especially when viewing the implications of this study regarding the fate of South Tyneside as a broader community, the implications of its context within the North-East regarding approaches to economic, tourist, and ecological regeneration, and also as an example of a broader the transitional status and conception of British seaside communities. In addition to this, the future poses further challenges, in the forms of climate change and rising sea levels; technological innovation (and subsequent associated obsolescence); and a continuation in the local cultural and social development, that brings with it a transition of events and customs into history and legacy; which will continue to push the boundaries of what must be achieved via the built environment regarding conservation, adaptation, and community heritage perseverance.
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