Town in Tyne and Wear, England
South Shields
A Syrian man buried his British wife here nearly 1,800 years ago and carved her tombstone in two languages. South Shields has been a gateway for the wider world ever since.
Key information
- County
- Tyne and Wear
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Arbeia Roman fort, the Original lifeboat, Catherine Cookson, Marsden Rock and the Ocean Road curry houses
- What locals are called
- Sand Dancers (a nickname), and more broadly Geordies
- Famous people
- Catherine Cookson, Perrie Edwards, Jade Thirlwall
About South Shields
The Syrian who carved his wife a two-language tombstone
Start with Regina. She was a British woman from the Catuvellauni tribe, freed from slavery and married by a man from Palmyra in Syria called Barates. When she died at around thirty, he set up a tombstone at the Roman fort of Arbeia, now in South Shields. He wrote her epitaph in Latin and again in his own Palmyrene Aramaic, with a final line of grief. It survives, and it is one of the most touching objects from Roman Britain. Arbeia was a supply base at the mouth of the Tyne, and was greatly expanded in the early 200s to feed the emperor Septimius Severus's campaigns in Scotland. Its name is usually read as 'the fort of the Arabs', probably after a unit of boatmen from the Tigris who were stationed there. Today you can walk through a full-scale reconstructed gatehouse, and look into rebuilt barracks and a commander's house.
Why a Tyneside town has its own lifeboat legend
A town on a notoriously dangerous river mouth was bound to take rescue seriously. In 1789 a boat called the Original was built here by Henry Greathead after a wreck in sight of the shore shocked the town. It is often called the first purpose-built lifeboat. The local parish clerk William Wouldhave had designed an unsinkable boat of his own, and the town has argued about who deserves the credit ever since. The tradition carried on. Volunteer life brigades kept watch from the cliffs, and the lifeboat remains part of the town's identity. The name South Shields comes from 'shiels', the huts used by fishermen and salt-makers along the bank. The town grew on those two trades, then on coal, glass and shipbuilding.
Coal, ships and one of Britain's oldest Yemeni communities
Tyne Dock, opened in the 1850s, became one of the great coal-shipping docks of the age. Trains of coal rolled down to it from the Durham pits, and the ships carrying them brought sailors from around the world. Many of those sailors stayed. From the 1890s Yemeni seamen settled in South Shields, and the town's Yemeni community is among the oldest in Britain. Their families have been part of the town for well over a century. That mix of cultures shows up on Ocean Road, a street known across the North East for its curry houses. It sits alongside a long-established fish and chip tradition on the seafront.
The beach, the cave pub and the arch that fell
South Shields has a proper seaside. There are long sands, an old-fashioned amusement strip and the piers at the river mouth. Locals are sometimes nicknamed Sand Dancers, a nod to the beach life that has long defined the place. South along the coast, the cliffs get more dramatic. At Marsden Bay, a miner nicknamed Jack the Blaster blasted out a home in the rock in 1782, which later became the Marsden Grotto pub. Offshore stands Marsden Rock, a sea stack that once had a great arch. The arch collapsed in 1996, and the stack stayed standing as a haunt for seabirds. Nearby is Souter Lighthouse, built in 1871 and the first lighthouse designed to run on alternating-current electricity. Its red-and-white stripes are easy to spot from the clifftop path.
Cookson country, pop stars and a football club that left
Novelist Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock in 1906 into poverty. She went on to become one of Britain's best-selling and most-borrowed authors, and she set many of her books in the streets she knew. There is a Cookson trail through the town, and her Tyneside settings still draw fans. More recently the town produced Perrie Edwards and Jade Thirlwall, two members of the girl group Little Mix. On the football field, the town has an odd claim to fame. The original South Shields club moved across the Tyne to Gateshead in 1930 and became Gateshead AFC. Football returned in the form of today's South Shields FC, known as the Mariners. They won the FA Vase at Wembley in 2017 and have been rising through the non-league pyramid since.
Crossing the Tyne
The ferry from South Shields to North Shields is a short hop that has linked the two banks for centuries. It gives a good view of the piers, the Lawe Top, the lighthouse and the shipping heading for sea. You can see the whole story from the water: the river that made South Shields a port, the Roman fort that watched over its mouth, and the beach where the town goes to unwind.