I have been asked a few times what's it like where I live. Just thought I would write about what it is like around the area that I live in.
Well as I say on my profile I live in North Shields, a town on the north bank of the river Tyne just east of the city of Newcastle Upon Tyne and just over a mile from the north sea. North Shields is surrounded on three sides by the once busy shipbuilding town of Wallsend which is where Hadrians Wall ended, and hence was named after. Between North Shields and the sea is Tynemouth village now a favourite haunt for surfers, the upmarket suburb of Newcastle I guess you could call it. North of Tynemouth lies the small former fishing village of Cullercoats with the town of Whitley Bay to the north of there.
North Shields is best known for it's connect with the river. It has a ferry terminal where ferries leave for destinations in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. The fish quay was for a long time it's largest employer with over two hundred fishing vessels at it's height at the start of the 20th Century. With fishing in steady decline in the latter part of the 20th Century this is now down to less than fifty vessels.
The area has been inhabited for many centuries. Tynemouth Priory and later Castle have stood by the mouth of the Tyne for nearly a thousand years. Three former Kings of Northumbria were buried on the site in the 7th Century. Just across the Tyne in South Shields lies Arbeia fort which was built by the Romans to supply Hadrians Wall, This has been partially re-built to show what the site would have looked like eighteen hundred years ago.
Newcastle the nearest city which is about seven miles west of my house is the only city north of the river Tyne on the east coast of England. It is now been in existence for over one thousand years. It's modern claim to fame is that it regularly appears in surveys of the worlds top ten party cities! It has turned it's old reputation of a typical grimy northern city to a one of a vibrant, cultural and modern hub of the north east.
I live just to the west of the centre of North Shields in a Victorian terraced villa which was built in 1876 and situated on a slope running down towards the Tyne about 300 yards from it. The area was bombed many times by the Luftwaffe during WWII and my house was damaged by a bomb which fell nearby in 1941 destroying eight other houses.
I have lived in my current house for almost six years and will be sad to leave it once it has been sold. We have restored many of the properties original features such as the plaster coving and ceiling roses which had been virtually lost under over one hundred years of paint. Hopefully this will have been worth it and we will make a tidy profit from spiralling property prices that us in the United Kingdom have had to endure in recent times.
