Introduction to Blyth
Blyth is a coastal town and civil parish situated in South East Northumberland, England. It lies on the coast, to the south of the River Blyth and in the northern reaches of North East England, approximately 13 miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne. The coastal setup, calm Blyth Estuary, and sand dunes have for centuries provided a reliable and accessible landing point on a generally hostile coastline, essential for the fishing industry and later for a successful port. The small fishing village was long ago absorbed into the town as it expanded, and Blyth remains an important location for shipping, in addition to its strong link with the now defunct coal mining industry. Today, Blyth is one of the North East’s busiest ports and is set to be one of the main locations of the UK renewables industry, with land still being developed at the port and along the estuary, further inland.
Blyth’s position and function as the main town for the general area means that Blyth has a strong identity, folklore, heritage, and local culture, expressed in what is known and talked about by local people. Even the known date of the Blyth cup predates mention of the port. Although Blyth has a strong visible and cultural link with the River Blyth, its near town center and overall position were shaped as much by other factors, including the sea and sand dunes. The calm water of the river made the area around the port capable of accommodating ships and being reached by solid road, but the accumulations of sand at the river’s mouth restricted it to be an external rural path until it was bypassed in 1748. That settlement site being inland and relict led to the loss of impedance from the tide, the presence of which is a reason for larger breaks in development in general, which show in maps.
Early Settlement and Development
Blyth’s recorded history goes back a millennium and a half, but archaeological evidence suggests that people could have lived in the Blyth area for more than double that length of time. Tools and pottery dating from the seventeenth century BCE have been found on tidal flats in Blyth Harbour, and Blyth itself is not an unlikely location for a settlement from Britain’s prehistory. However, no proof of such a settlement has been found. By the second millennium BCE, the land was well enough drained for comfortable living, and farming had started. Then, as economic conditions settled, people began to create permanent wattle and daub structures on the land. In every field, woven fences and ploughing tools have been discovered, as well as the remains of round homes with central hearths. In the next period, between c. 1100 BCE and the Roman invasion, the locals simplified their house designs and reduced the number of common items they made, implying increasing specialization in the regional economy. Towards the end of the Iron Age, this region would have been a mix of farming, hunting, and gathering, as well as a bit of trade in local produce. Blyth itself probably started to develop into a community during the Anglo-Saxon period, between 500 and 1066. By the first century AD, the population of the immediate landscape is estimated to have been around 5,000; over the next five or six centuries, this had expanded to more than eight million. A range of explanations have been offered to account for this increase, notably climatic factors and better land management techniques. The use of the plough intensified until people began to turn to the sea as they sought out new land to replace the impoverished old. Blyth was then thought to have been a small fishing hamlet and an entry place for pilgrims en route to the shrine of Our Lady of Jesmond. Moreover, rather than selling the people of Blyth from his coalfield, as earlier thought, a blockage in the 1330s forced people who traded in the eastern monasteries to bring their produce to Blyth for permitting before it could be exported. This helped to build the necessary infrastructure at Blyth, such as the quayside. Other reasons for the expansion of the Blyth area have been advanced which are more pragmatic than climatic.
Maritime Heritage and Industry
Blyth once had many of the trappings of a typical north-east English coastal town: a shipbuilding industry, a pumping station to keep out the sea, and a name that can only be pronounced by a native. The conventional view of the town is accurate—whether looking at the development of the town during the late eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution, or the increasing vitality of the shipbuilding industry in the early twentieth century—but the town’s wider connections to the sea over many centuries have been overlooked. This text considers the links between Blyth and the sea from earliest times to the present day, with a sharply defined concentration on the three centuries between the 1760s and the 1960s. Blyth’s maritime past is looked at through the shipping and shipbuilding industries rather than the town’s coalmines which, while sharing the same port, did not have the same economic, social, or environmental effects.
To say that Blyth boomed would be something of an understatement. The Industrial Revolution modernized its port and increased its size, scope, and diversity of its maritime operations. Its ships were known in ports all around the world; the Percy, Wansbeck, and Blyth coal—as well as the town’s splendidly efficient coal wagons—were just as popular. The railway enhanced Blyth’s status as a port and only began to surpass it after the First World War. One hundred horses, sixteenth-century survivors of raids by pirates from Dunkirk, and the history and operation of the wooden pier are, at present, largely ignored in the town’s history. These aspects of Blyth’s maritime heritage deserve to be better recorded, conserved, and remembered for future generations.
Modern Blyth and Future Prospects
Blyth has undergone a series of dramatic transformations in the last few decades. The closure of Bates Colliery in 1986 – which had been a source of employment in the town for nearly five centuries – led to an unemployment rate in the town of over 70%. The town was left to deal with physical, economic, and emotional neglect, managing the difficulties to reach an industrial nirvana era in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century – and on into and after the First and Second World Wars. Government support for the town was at “arms length” with the regeneration emphasis on economic sustainability. Blyth currently struggles with an unemployment rate higher than the national average caused by the defunct industries, but the arrival of new ones in the North East has significantly dropped it. National Statistics reveal that Blyth has localities in the forty percent of the most deprived areas in England, with low skills and low educational achievement. Meadowell estate is routinely named as the 4th or 5th worst estate to live in Britain. Since then, Blyth has hosted various events that promoted and celebrated Blyth nationally, worked to masterplan the waterfront with imaginative buildings and uses, initiated a new venture into marine research and renewable energy – drawing on its skilled workforce and investment in mega infrastructure – and is seeking to develop the first sustainable ecology business park in England. There is anxiety as to whether this might lead to local employment in the downturn of this particular sector. However, little employment resulted from the much larger owners having larger scale wind testing the demise of oil tanking on the land involved. Community members despair that Blyth is not prepared for this white heat of technology revolution, not only of wind and bio-energy that it helped stimulate but also modern materialization engineering and nanotechnology, nor even to the commercial freneticism of a global wood market in which it is now a major player. They say that the borough and the new development will fall apart because workers, new technologies, and their products are isolated from each other with the program-driven hindsight town planning mentality. We disagree. Blyth expects better of itself and the knowledge economy’s harsh market capitalism. The vision is only a part of a much more sophisticated interdisciplinary program to empower the poor and the excluded of Blyth.
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