Coast (2005) s01e10 Episode Script

Berwick to Whitby

This programme contains archive footage of seal hunting which some viewers may find upsetting.
The border between Scotland and England.
Little marks it now, but for hundreds of years it was hotly disputed - the scene of bloody battles and countless violent skirmishes.
For centuries more, this north-east coast has played a defining role in shaping the island nation we are today.
Travelling with me on this journey are our usual group of experts.
Alice Roberts joins a team rebuilding Britain's earliest house, about 5,000 years older than the Pyramids.
Neil Oliver unravels a story of racial tension in one of our historic ports.
Miranda Krestovnikoff discovers how our seals are recovering from being hunted almost to extinction.
I get the chance to explore some of the most controversial ships on our coast.
It's been an amazing journey so far, but there's still so much more to discover.
This is the story of Coast.
This leg of our journey takes us from Berwick-upon-Tweed south to Whitby.
It's a 120-mile journey that crosses four major rivers and two distinct identities.
The unspoilt north, once the seat of power in England, and the industrial south, once the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution.
Now though, the drama that has been played out in the north-east over thousands of years is rather overlooked.
Welcome to a forgotten coast.
This is Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Only a stone's throw from the Scottish border, this fortress town marks the beginning of the next leg of our journey.
Berwick is now the northernmost town in England.
In many ways, it's overshadowed by its nearest neighbour, Edinburgh, just 50 miles away.
Today, it's a pretty market town, but don't be fooled by its unassuming charm.
The picture-book serenity of Berwick-upon-Tweed belies its violent past.
The key to that past is its location.
The River Tweed is a natural border between two countries, England and Scotland.
Berwick has this incredibly strategic location right at the mouth of the Tweed.
It was constantly fought over by the two countries.
In 30 years, it changed hands 13 times and for a very good reason.
Before Edward I captured it for England in 1296, Berwick was the richest and most important port in Scotland.
Facing east, it was ideally placed for Scotland's trade with northern Europe, exporting wool, grain and salmon.
In return, traders from Germany, Flanders and the Baltic States made Berwick a thriving cosmopolitan centre.
That prosperity made it a hugely desirable prize.
Caught in a fierce battle between Englishman and Scot, there were times when blood and ash fell here more frequently than rain.
Even after the so-called Perpetual Peace of 1502, which found Berwick back in English hands, the Scots still eyed it jealously.
To secure Berwick once and for all for England, Elizabeth I built these massive ramparts.
They were the single most expensive project of her reign and they cost a whopping ï¿¡128,000.
More money was spent here than on defending the realm against the Spanish Armada.
Berwick had to be impregnable.
Elizabeth hired the finest military engineers from Italy.
Behind these stone-clad walls is compacted earth intended to absorb the impact of cannon-fire.
The complicated three-dimensional geometry of the ramparts is the result of cutting-edge renaissance mathematics.
These defences serve as a reminder of just how important Berwick once was.
The Queen was prepared to spend fortunes defending a town whose strategic significance has now been forgotten.
Just 11 miles further down the coast is the tidal island of Lindisfarne.
Long before the English and Scots did battle, another war raged, not for land but for the very soul of the Northumbrian people.
1,600 years ago, as the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain, our Christian beliefs went with it.
The forces of paganism again ruled Britain.
But here on the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne, two monks were among the first to fight back.
It's impossible not to be affected by the other-worldly atmosphere of this place.
Twice every 24 hours, its doors are slammed shut, not by man, but by the forces of nature.
Somehow, because of the tides, Lindisfarne now feels very remote, yet when Irish monk Aidan, eventually to become St Aidan, came here, isolation is not what he wanted at all.
The monks who arrived here to establish a site in AD 635 didn't come because it was a sanctuary.
Aidan and his followers were on a mission to transform Northumbria and beyond.
Lindisfarne was their launch-pad to convert thousands of pagan English to Christianity.
Canon Kate Tristram has written extensively about the first monks on Lindisfarne.
Aidan chose this island.
From his point of view, it was a perfect choice.
It could not have been better.
He didn't want to be remote.
He wanted to meet as many people as possible, and at low tide, people could do what they do now.
Although there was no causeway, there were hard ridges of sand.
They could come walking or riding their horses.
In those days, everybody who could travel by sea did so.
It was safer.
The mainland was thickly wooded.
The woods had dangerous wild animals in them, wolves and boars and things, and dangerous wild people! It was safer if you could to coast down the coast in your little boats.
So we must imagine the sea out there absolutely full of little boats, all floating into the harbour at high tide.
This island was on the edge of a superhighway.
Absolutely.
It could be approached from either direction.
Lindisfarne's ideal position served Aidan and his monks well.
Travelling on foot all over Northumbria, they worked tirelessly to convert the local pagans.
Between them, they converted a lot of England.
St Aidan set up this base as a missionary training college.
He found English boys and he trained them in his own missionary methods.
Then, when they grew up, they were sent out.
They went across the north of England, across the Midlands, and some to the deep south.
St Wilfred, who converted the last English kingdom to be converted, which was Sussex, was a boy trained here.
According to legend, even in death Aidan was a potent force.
The vision of his body rising to heaven is said to have inspired his most famous successor, Cuthbert, a local lad who continued Aidan's work.
Recognised as a saint after his death, what was to become the most illuminated gospel in Britain was created for St Cuthbert's shrine.
This is a facsimile copy of the Lindisfarne gospels.
The 1,300-year-old original is lying in a vault in the British library.
It's one of England's greatest national treasures.
The work of just one monk, the gospels are a much venerated religious relic.
Leafing through this copy, you get a real feel for the scribe who sat here on Lindisfarne creating this remarkable book.
It's an astonishing work of dedication.
The imagery used throughout the gospels draws from diverse influences on the Church at that time.
It was seen as a powerful unifying statement then, and 1,700 years later it's a reminder that the two saints of Lindisfarne were pivotal in bring Christianity in England back from the brink.
That the gospels survived at all, though, is a minor miracle.
In just over 100 years after Cuthbert's death, Lindisfarne was one of the first places in the country to be attacked by Vikings.
Walking along this deserted beach today beside an empty sea, you'd never think there had been a time when this tiny island had been so well-connected and so influential that it played a starring role in rejuvenating a Christian England that we know today.
Lindisfarne's influence is far-reaching, but St Aidan and his monks didn't achieve their goal alone.
They had friends in high places.
Aside from the obvious, practical support was provided by the local ruler, King Oswald.
Back on the mainland is his home, Bamburgh, now one of the most famous castles in Britain.
But as Mark Horton discovers, very little of Oswald's castle remains.
This is one of the most iconic places on Britain's coastline - the great Norman castle of Bamburgh - but we're also in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria.
This castle was at its most powerful before there was even an England.
During the time of the Anglo Saxons, Angleland, as it was then known, was divided up into seven major kingdoms, of which Northumbria was the most powerful.
The 6th-century kings of Northumbria chose this rock to be their capital.
And what a rock! The huge basalt crag that Bamburgh Castle stands on was chosen for its commanding position.
Connected to the sea by a natural harbour, it was visible along the coast for miles.
For the last two years, Graham Young has been exploring beneath its magnificent facade.
Graham, I can look around and see all these lumps of masonry, but presumably these are Norman or later? Yes.
The majority of the standing structure is the last 1,000 years.
So where's the Saxon? Well, under the ground.
We know it's here because it's written about in documentary evidence.
We've been excavating.
We have a number of Anglo-Saxon features at this level.
There are pits and post-holes and so forth.
The evidence is that when we stop seeing pottery, we're getting back into the first millennium AD.
Our prime dating evidence is the absence of things.
What about this wall? I presume it's a wall? It is.
It's a rubble foundation to what is a massive timber structure, probably part of the gate complex.
The first documentary evidence of a fortress here is in the year 547 and Graham's find may well date back to that time.
The reason that there's so little of that Anglo-Saxon fortress left is that after pillaging Lindisfarne, the Vikings hit Bamburgh.
In the year 993, the original fortress was razed to the ground.
But it wasn't a ruin for long.
William the Conqueror's forces arrived in England in 1066, and within 50 years, they had made Bamburgh Castle great again.
That it's in such good condition today, nearly 1,000 years later, is not quite as surprising as it first appears.
This may seem to be the quintessential mediaeval castle, but the only really genuine bit is this Norman keep.
Most of the rest was rebuilt by the 19th-century industrialist, Lord Armstrong, as a fairytale castle, and that's this castle's secret.
Because, despite its outward appearance, Bamburgh was last used in anger over 500 years ago.
Attacked during the War of the Roses, it soon fell into ruins and has never regained its powerful status.
Its final abandonment by James I reflects the decline in this area's fortunes at the beginning of the 17th century as the political importance of the border regions ebbed away.
Just 2.
5 miles off the coast at Bamburgh lie the Farne Islands, between 15 and more than 20 of them depending on the tide.
Rugged, exposed and formidably bleak, for centuries these islands have been home to our largest native mammal - the grey seal.
Our zoologist has joined the wardens in their annual assessment of the health of the local seal population.
Our job is to monitor the birth and death rates of the seals.
The British coastline used to be home to hundreds of thousands of grey seals.
But we've been hunting them for centuries.
A hundred years ago, there were as few as 500 individuals surviving around our coastline.
In 1914, Parliament passed the Grey Seals Protection Act - the first ever legislation to protect a mammal in this country.
Hunting seals for their fur was outlawed.
But many blamed the recovering seal population for the collapse in local fish stocks.
Parliament legislated again and hunting grey seals was allowed.
It continued right into the 1980s until a public outcry once again put a stop to the killing.
Since then, the number of seals has been closely monitored.
You can see how easy it is to get close to one of them.
They don't run away.
Easy pickings for the hunters, unfortunately.
They're almost pathetic, these animals.
I can almost come within a foot.
It's not bothered if the adult is away at sea.
Does it not make your job easier when you're marking them? It does.
This is quite a good one.
It's real easy.
However, in the middle of the islands where a lot of females haul out, that's where the problems start.
David and his team mark the newborn pups with a coloured dye, so they know which ones they've counted and then they can estimate the number of seals on the islands.
And that doesn't harm the seal pup? Not at all.
Before the mother comes back, we'll just retreat.
The pups only keep their white fur for about 21 days before shedding it and gaining their pristine adult coat, free of David's dye.
After we've done our work, it's good to see it's not had much effect on them.
Then you can enjoy them for what they are.
Beautiful.
David has recorded 367 pups so far this year.
And with hundreds left to count, he estimates that the Farne Islands may be home to 3,800 grey seals.
Counting them on land is one thing, but I want to see them at their best, and there's only one way to do that.
Look, there's one! On land, they seem cumbersome, but here they're like another animal.
They shoot through the water like a bullet.
Look at that face with those big eyes He feeds down in the depths - about 50 metres.
The light doesn't penetrate very much.
There was one tugging at my feet! It's using its whiskers to investigate.
They are so inquisitive.
I think they are just playing with us.
The conservation of seals is a great success story for the UK coast.
Protection has seen the population recover from near-extinction.
Now our shores are home to nearly half the world's population of grey seals.
How magical is that? About ten miles due south of the seals on the Farne Islands is the ruin of a castle that didn't get a Victorian makeover.
Built in the 14th century, Dunstanburgh was an extravagant construction, designed to remind locals and nobles alike of Camelot.
Today, its crumbling presence still towers above the almost deserted harbour at Craster.
The fishermen may have left, but one business is still thriving.
Alan Robson is carrying on his family's tradition - smoking kippers - like his father and his grandfather before him.
This herring yard of ours was built in 1856.
It's been a tradition for small villages to smoke fish to last out the winter.
We hadn't the transport we have now.
How long have you worked here? Since I left school.
Many years ago.
I did National Service.
And then straight back into the business.
This was a very particular area - very rich in herring.
The herring came in to spawn and just before the herring spawned, they were at their best.
They had a high oil content.
What happened to them? Just after the war, it was over-fished.
And when we joined the Common Market, they banned herring fishing in this area and most of the boats had to find something else to do.
So they never got back to it.
So where do you get your herrings from? Unfortunately, most of it's from Norway, Iceland.
We get the herring, defrost them then they go on to a machine which splits the herring and it cleans them.
And then from there they go to the smoke house.
They are put up into the racks above.
One chap hands them up and the other one is there hanging on to the racks.
They are traditionally smoked with white-wood shavings and oak sawdust.
We don't use chemicals to colour.
They literally strike a match and light the woodchips? Yes.
As it burns onto the sawdust you get the smoke.
It takes about three hours for the fires to burn.
You renew them, then possibly after three sets of fires, the kippers are ready to come out.
They go in as herring and come out as kippers.
And how does the process you use differ from your grandfather's? No way at all, except the machine for splitting the herring.
The girls used to split them by hand.
Now the machine splits them.
But everything else is done the same way.
Long before people were smoking fish, or building castles here, there's evidence that Howick, 1.
5 miles from Craster, is where we as people started building homes.
Two years ago, a rambler stumbled over some fragments of flint sticking out of the cliff edge.
That discovery led a team of archaeologists to unearth the remains of a wooden house.
Painstaking work led them to believe they were the remains of a Stone Age settlement.
Now the same archaeologists, joined by Alice Roberts, are back to test their theory and recreate what they believe is Britain's first house.
This project is something really special to me - the chance to recreate a Stone Age structure on its original site from 10,000 years ago.
Discovering how to build the house should give us an insight into an ancient world, which is otherwise hard to imagine.
After more than two years of research, Dr Clive Waddington believes that this house will change our understanding of how Stone Age hunter-gatherers lived.
This is the earliest evidence we have of a dwelling structure in this part of Britain.
It's the earliest evidence of people here.
Why are you recreating it? It's giving us a chance to understand what we excavated and put that into practice to see what it was like as a built structure and whether it works.
So we're testing our interpretation of the excavated evidence.
So how do you know the structure was like this? When we were excavating, we found charred circles in the ground where the posts had stood.
And on the outside of the hut, just round the edge, we found these stake holes which were angled towards the apex of the roof.
We can measure from the angles of those stake holes what the pitch was.
They were around 65 degrees, which made for a really steep roof.
I'm beginning to see how the house might have been constructed, but I don't have a picture of what the area around the house was like.
By extracting core samples from the soil, it's possible to get remarkably detailed information about the environmental conditions from thousands of years.
So you take it out a metre at a time? We try to.
The upper parts of the core are quite stiff, so we might not get a metre in one go.
Think of this like a time machine.
The deeper down we go, the further back in time we travel.
We might see some evidence of Victorian engineering here.
This is a Victorian path? It could be.
By analysing the plant remains, pollen and tiny organisms contained within the layers of sediment, we can build up a detailed picture of how the landscape has changed over thousands of years.
We're definitely in the water table.
That's a big piece of very old wood.
Abut 6,000 years old? Looks quite fresh.
It does! It's amazing.
The sediment at 10 metres reveals that about 10,000 years ago, the vegetation in this area was recovering from the Ice Age.
Using information from the core samples, and from his excavation, Clive has built a picture of the world our Stone Age ancestors lived in.
We reckon the sea was up to 15 metres lower than it is today.
So it was about 1km further out.
So would our hut have been visible in the same way it is today? I think so because the land would have shelved off gradually.
The line of hills would have been the first hills you'd have seen approaching from the sea.
On top of that would have been the hut, which would have been visible from a distance out.
Why do you think they chose this area? There are many reasons, but the key to it was that it was on the cusp of several environmental zones.
So out to sea you have the marine life, which attracts birds.
But you also have the shore with shellfish and basking seals.
And then inland amongst that woodland, you'd have a large number of different animals.
Like a natural larder for hunter-gatherers.
I'm building up a picture of what this place must have been like 10,000 years ago, how sophisticated the construction of the house is and the teamwork involved in building it.
There's this idea of Stone Age people being pretty backward, living in caves - Flintstones.
They are people and no less intelligent than we are.
It was just a different technology.
They might have been more ingenious, living on the edge.
There's all these skills we've lost.
Making the string.
This is a really robust construction and stands in stark contrast to the traditional idea of Mesolithic people building only temporary and relatively flimsy shelters, like the one found at Goatscrag ten miles inland.
Archaeological excavations have shown that in the Mesolithic people used this rock shelter as a temporary camp.
But the thing which brings me closest to these people is the art.
Their images of animals are pretty crude, but it does, for me, just strip away that 10,000 years.
It's wonderful.
Despite the worsening weather, the house is really coming together and although the archaeological evidence isn't clear on what the roof was made of, this spider's web of birch twigs and hazel is so strong that it's likely it was designed to support something heavy, like turf.
Finally, the weather turned against us, but we'd come so far there was no stopping us now.
With the build complete, Clive has one more piece of evidence that points to this being a permanent dwelling for Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
We found a series of hearths in the centre of the building and there was a succession of them, the latest ones at the top and earliest ones at the bottom, and we found hazelnuts inside each of these hearths.
Hazelnuts only live for one year so we did all our carbon dates on hazelnuts and they've allowed us to date the different phases of occupation and how long the hut was occupied for.
So how long was it occupied? The hut was occupied for somewhere in the region of 200 years.
Several generations - many lifetimes, in fact.
And it's that that makes this house so special.
The proof that it was occupied for over 200 years has forced people to revise their theories about our Stone Age ancestors 10,000 years ago.
Rather than being nomadic, as was previously believed, these people were building complex houses like this one and calling them home.
South of Howick, the nature of the coast begins to change.
It doesn't look like it, but this beautiful stretch of Druridge Bay marks the beginning of the heart and soul of our industrial heritage.
For the next 45 miles along to Hartlepool, industry and engineering shaped the face of this coast.
Just out there, some 80 metres below the sea bed, is a tunnel that used to be part of a coal mine that stretched for eight miles out to sea.
On a quiet day, the miners could hear ships passing overhead.
That mine's closed, as are the deep pits that fuelled the industrial boom of the north-east coast.
Coal fuelled the factories, the steel works, the trains, the shipyards and the ships.
Coal brought prosperity and pride to all the great cities of the north-east.
And that coal was created 300 million years ago.
Back then, it would have looked a little different around here.
For a start, we'd have been on the equator and all this would have been tropical rain forest.
Over 300 million years, the continents moved.
The trees fell and were transformed by the immense heat and pressure of geological forces.
And the result is this.
Out there, the coal seams rise right up the sea bed where the incredible pounding and sucking of the water breaks the coal up and washes it ashore, here for the taking.
This whole stretch of coast thrived on the coal.
For well over 150 years, jobs were plentiful and places like Whitley Bay grew into bustling holiday destinations for the local miners.
Today, it's surviving without the coal, as the stag and hen party capital of the north-east.
But while the black stuff was coming out of the ground, everywhere along this coast had a role to play.
The River Tyne was a major artery for transporting coal to the rest of England and out to Europe.
This stretch of water has seen centuries of passing traffic.
800 years ago, small boats from here were coasting down to the Thames laden with coal for the capital.
By 1900, South Shields - over the mouth of the Tyne there - had become a booming port.
Like prosperous ports everywhere, it was a multicultural melting pot.
Historian Neil Oliver takes a trip back in time to uncover one of the largely forgotten stories of this historic port.
When you come to a new place, one of the best ways to find out what's going on is the local paper.
The same with history.
The archives of the local rag are time capsules for attitudes and events.
This is an extract from the South Shields Gazette from 16th April 1913.
"The suggestion which has come from more than one prosecution recently heard by magistrates "that an Arab colony is materialising in our midst, "in Holborn, to be precise, "is exciting some attention, and not undeservedly so.
" British ports attracted seamen of many nationalities from right across the Empire, but many of the Arabs in South Shields came from Aden, an important port in the Middle Eastern country of Yemen.
Aden was occupied by the British in 1839, and 30 years later, with the opening of the Suez Canal, became a vital staging post on the journey between the UK and India.
From as early as 1894, there are records of a few Yemeni seamen living in South Shields, but they didn't come in numbers until the First World War.
Drawn by incentives from the Government, they were encouraged to South Shields to make up for the chronic lack of local men, who were away, fighting in the trenches.
Between 1914 and 1918, the population of Yemenis rose from a few dozen to over 3,000.
After the war, Mill Dam was the epicentre of a sailor's onshore life.
Norman Ahmed's father was one of the thousands of Yemenis who came here every day.
Norman, can you give me a sense of what this place was like then? Yes.
It would be thriving.
Here at the federation office, where men were signing on and paying off, there was Frankie the note cracker, who used to cash your advance note, and he took two shillings in the pound.
He must have had a load! He must have been a very rich man.
But we never had any reason to go to him.
Being in the Arab community, we used to borrow off each other rather than go that way.
It was a busy, lively thoroughfare.
The river full of ships, you know? It seems oh so dead now.
Oh so dead.
This is a picture of my father and my mam when they were married.
Wow! How dapper is he! Yes, he was very dapper.
And they're married there? Yes.
They don't look old enough! Despite being encouraged here by the Government, many of the Arab seamen struggled for somewhere to live.
The local boarding house owners often refused them lodging so they began to open up their own in an area close to Mill Dam called Holborn.
These aren't really the parts of town that people get sentimental about so it's not surprising that the streets and houses in the photographs have just about all gone.
But in 1918 these streets were full of life.
For local men returning from the war, it was a shock to discover Arabs taking their jobs, but that wasn't the worst of it.
You can track the simmering discontent through the letters pages in the local papers.
There are some heartfelt grudges coming to the fore.
Look at this.
"The Arabs can always be relied upon to pick the prettiest girls, "the ugly ducklings being left for the white man.
" "Also, an Arab can get a job where a white man has not a look-in.
"They refuse to sell themselves so cheaply.
" Those tensions surfaced in February 1919, when white and Arab sailors clashed.
As Britain slid towards the Great Depression, jobs became scarce and relationships between the two communities began to disintegrate.
But it was on the 2nd of August 1930 that it all kicked off right here.
Jim Slater was here 75 years ago, as a reporter for the South Shields Gazette.
He's 94 now but remembers clearly the events of the day.
I went down there at about half past nine, a Saturday, mark you, bank holiday.
And by the time I got there I was stopped.
They wouldn't let me in, until I showed my NUJ card, then they said, "No further than the post office.
" At that time, it hadn't quite started as it was going to do.
The powder keg was ignited when two white sailors were given jobs on one of the few ships still working.
The sailors were offered a police escort through the threatening crowd, but one of the men refused.
This particular man, he was quite a burly individual, a big six-footer and well-built, and he wasn't going to have any police protection.
He would go where he wanted to go as he had a right to do and he was no doubt pushed and shoved and he would try to shove his way through and a shove started a blow and a blow started a fight and then it just escalated.
There was no hesitation by the police.
They had their batons out and then they started to run and they all ran away, and all I could see was the bodies lying down - Arabs, as well as police.
I was shattered, to put it mildly.
I never expected that.
But when I saw them - when I saw the aftermath, I was both horrified and disgusted that it should have happened.
Four policemen were stabbed and many more people, both white and Arab, were injured.
Only ten days later, six white men and 20 Yemeni sailors found themselves in court, charged with affray and causing a riot.
15 of the Yemeni men were sentenced to deportation after serving time in prison.
The Mill Dam riots have been described as Britain's first race riot, but, as always, things are not exactly as the headlines suggest.
By 1930, there were too many sailors here and not enough jobs.
In any community, that was a situation that had to come to a head.
This isn't just a story about race.
I think this is a story about poverty and desperation and the ends that people will go to if they're driven hard enough.
The ill feeling generated by the riot could have spelt the end for the Arab community in South Shields, but many had made their home here, married local women and begun to have children.
Today, the children of those first seamen live here with their children and the traditions and cultures that they brought with them survive.
The bit which I rather like as a conclusion is the fact that when war was declared, the last war, they went to the sea and sailed in the same ships as the British men, taking the same risks and dying, unfortunately, the same death.
From the mouth of the Tyne, it's just eight miles south to Sunderland and its river, the Wear.
This river was once lined with shipyards.
In 1834, the yards on the Wear produced nearly as many ships as all the other shipyards in Britain put together.
Sunderland was the largest shipbuilding town in the world.
The yards in Sunderland went from strength to strength, producing one and a half million tonnes of shipping for the Second World War.
Shipbuilding was the lifeblood of Sunderland's prosperity and defined the very identity of the town and its people.
Generations of families worked here at Doxford Pallion.
It's not until you walk around a derelict shipyard that you get a real sense of the loss.
There's more than economics and jobs to shipbuilding.
It's been part of our culture for thousands of years.
As islanders, we no longer have the wherewithal to build our own vessels, to leave our own shores.
By the 1950s, orders for ships were falling as competitors abroad built faster and cheaper.
Using mass-production techniques, Japanese and Korean yards turned out ships by their hundreds, while Sunderland was still crafting bespoke but expensive one-offs.
And that lack of competitiveness told.
During the '60s and '70s, Sunderland's shipyards closed one by one.
This is where 600 years of shipbuilding on the Wear ended on the 12th December 1988.
On that night, the last ship built in Sunderland was launched from here .
.
a modest ferry for Superflex November.
Today, nobody builds ships on the banks of the Wear.
Most of the ships built here on that final decade have joined a growing fleet of vessels that are reaching the end of their working lives.
Now, the issue facing this coast and others like it around the world is not shipbuilding but ship-breaking.
Sounds simple enough.
Use a disused shipbuilding infrastructure to offer a lifeline to local heavy industry.
Just 20 miles south of Sunderland in Hartlepool, people are beginning to discover how difficult ship-breaking can be.
Sailing into the Tees Estuary, the sight of four rusting American warships is absolutely startling.
With the image of this area's triumphant shipbuilding past still clear in my mind, it's sobering to be confronted by ships at the end of their life.
These four are just the tip of the iceberg.
Four thousand miles away on the James River in Virginia, there are more than 60 in the Cold War ghost fleet, just rusting away.
The ghost ships were towed into Hartlepool on a tide of protest.
There were and still are environmental concerns about the impact of breaking ships on this part of the coast.
Environmental campaigners need only point to ship-breaking operations in the developing world to show how disastrous they can be.
Globally, 600 ships are broken every year - 90% of them in Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, India and Turkey, and often without any consideration for the environment or to workers doing the breaking.
By 2010, it's estimated that the number of ships needing to be scrapped every year will rise to 3,000.
Many people, me included, believe that breaking ships in docks like Hartlepool was a much better option than dumping our rusting fleets on somebody else's beaches.
In July 2003, Able UK won the contract to decommission 13 of the American ghost fleet, and the first four arrived in Hartlepool four months later, but work on them never began.
Mired in legal wranglings, their fate now rests on an environmental impact assessment from the government.
What a mess! To think that this rust bucket was once part of one of the world's elite navies.
Even though I've heard a lot about these ships, nothing has prepared me for what it feels like to be aboard these rotting hulks.
Able UK won the contract from the US marine administration by proposing a method of dismantling and recycling the ships in a specially-constructed dry dock.
Once you got them here, why do you think various environmental groups disagreed? We don't honestly know.
People say, "It's terrible what Greenpeace are doing to you, Peter.
" And they're not.
Greenpeace have been supportive.
What providing the type of facility and the type of ship-breaking methods that Greenpeace want to see undertaken.
Friends Of The Earth is the only one that has been opposed to this.
Friends Of The Earth maintain that these ships and the other nine that Able UK are contracted to dismantle here are toxic.
They shouldn't be called toxic ships.
It's a misuse of the terminology regarding these ships.
There is potentially hazardous waste on these ships.
This insulation could contain asbestos.
We take tests and if there's asbestos found, then we treat this area as asbestos.
Have you used this technique before, remove asbestos from a confined area? Yeah, I've been doing asbestos for over 30 years.
'But Friends Of The Earth are more concerned about a group of chemicals called PCBs.
'Now banned, they're known to be carcinogenic.
' A lot of the cable that's been used that's caused concern with PCBs is this cable over here.
See the larger cable? People calculate the total weight of all these cables, say 150 tonne, and they've said there's 150 tonne of PCBs on this ship.
That's totally wrong.
'PCBs were used as an insulator in power cables, 'but only make up a small percentage of their total weight.
'These ships do, however, contain huge quantities of old engine oil, 'a serious and well-understood threat to the environment.
' This is a typical type of machinery and motors that has oil in them - there's engine oil in them.
That oil's removed before we do the decommissioning in the dry dock.
If there was a spillage, it's in a contained area.
We just mop it up.
'Peter confidently talks about dismantling these ships in the dry dock, 'but even that's controversial.
' The dry dock hasn't been built yet.
It doesn't even have planning permission.
The situation is complicated by the location.
The ghost ships and the dry docks that Able UK want to build are right next to the Seal Sands Site of Special Scientific Interest.
It is an amazing jewel in the crown.
It is surrounded by industry that has cleaned up a lot over the past 10-12 years.
The River Tees is now cleaner than it has been for decades.
It's an important site for feeding birds, especially at winter time - very large populations of knot and plover and redshanks.
It's important in terms of some of the invertebrates within the mud.
And, of course, it's famous for the seals.
What would the effect be on this estuary of ship-breaking? There would be a number of effects.
The most important one is the company wants to dredge the river to bring in big ships for scrapping.
That dredging could completely destroy the wildlife site.
If you dredge the river, the mudflats can collapse.
The mud will slip into the river, be dredged out, and there would be no feeding ground for the birds.
Sending their naval ships to be broken in the UK - weren't the British and Americans trying to do the right thing? Well, they were doing the right thing by not sending them to the developing world to get trashed.
But doing the proper right thing would be for America to deal with them in their own shipyards.
The only thing that Friends of the Earth and Able agree on is these ships should be broken up safely under strict environmental controls.
After two years of fighting, positions have become entrenched.
Able UK are very clear where they stand.
If we don't get permission to do them here, which would be a shame for the area, cos there's potential for jobs for the next 30 years, but if we didn't get them here, then we would do the same techniques in another dry dock somewhere else in the world.
It seems that there's no perfect solution to this problem.
Ships, in ever-increasing numbers, will have to be broken up.
Whichever way the environmental impact assessment goes, some will lose out.
But, as in the decision to stop shipbuilding here in the first place, it's the coast that will feel the impact for generations after the decision is made.
While much of this coast is struggling to come to terms with its industrial legacy, just seven miles from Hartlepool, the beach at Redcar is alive with activity.
And although it's as far as I can imagine from Maui, Bondai or even Newquay, it's becoming a Mecca for a new sport that's sweeping the coast.
I'm a kite surfer.
22, south-westerly, perfect.
It's the fastest-growing watersport since it started in France, then came to the UK.
Redcar's a really good spot to kite-surf, cos it's got big, wide empty beaches, no groynes.
It's pretty windy most of the time, we're in summer here and we've got 25mph winds, which is quite unusual.
The water is getting good - it used to be polluted from the River Tees, but it's improving all the time.
We're getting porpoises and fish jumping around now, which is good to see.
You can get speeds up to 40mph, jumps up to 50-60ft.
It can be quite scary, but you hang there for quite a long time, so you've got time to plan your landing.
But it's just being out on the sea, you don't need a motor boat or anything to pull you along.
You're just using the power of the wind.
No pollution involved.
There's a big fraternity now of surfers and kiters up here, and it's growing.
It's an oasis among industrial Teesside.
In the last few miles of this journey, the coast changes again.
Leaving the heavy industry behind, and moving back to nature.
From Saltburn-by-the-Sea, almost through to the end of this leg, spectacular Jurassic cliffs mark where the North Yorkshire moors meet the sea.
And it's at Whitby where this leg of my journey ends.
These whale jaw bones recall the fact Whitby was one of the country's most important whaling ports.
Today, that's not something that many might want to celebrate.
Nevertheless, like Dracula, Captain Cook, and the spectacular Gothic abbey, it'll be forever part of Whitby's amazing history.
As I travel these last 120 miles down the north-east of England, what struck me, even above the natural beauty of this coast, is how many really significant events have happened here.
And strangely, how many of them have faded from our collective memory.
The wars that shaped the United Kingdom and the violent riots that changed it .
.
the first ever human settlement on our shores .
.
and even the world-beating industrial heritage seem largely forgotten outside this part of the country.
Perhaps the reason is that Britain started to look in the other direction as our horizons broadened beyond Europe towards America, it was the west coast that was best placed to open up the New World.
But don't dismiss the east coast yet.
The next leg of this journey takes us from Robin Hood's Bay to the Wash, a coast of innovation.
It's the home of Britain's oldest sea-going boats and one of the nation's favourite comfort foods.
It's the birthplace of our chemical industry.
It's also where the British seaside holiday was invented.
I've had my eyes opened wide by the north-east coast of England.
Once visited, never forgotten.
And I'll tell you what these chips are the best I've tasted on the entire journey.

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