South Shields on Screen: Film and TV Locations

South Shields has given the screen one of Britain's best-loved storytellers and lent its coast, its old streets and its Roman fort to productions large and small. The town's biggest contribution is Catherine Cookson, born here in 1906, whose novels of hard Tyneside lives were turned into a run of hugely popular television dramas. Add the moody Marsden cliffs that have become a fixture of ITV's Vera, and South Shields earns a firm place on any North East screen tour.

Catherine Cookson's Tyneside

Catherine Cookson was born on 20 June 1906 at 5 Leam Lane in Tyne Dock, and grew up in nearby East Jarrow. The poverty and pit-and-shipyard world of her childhood became the raw material for more than a hundred novels, and from 1989 the producer Ray Marshall brought a long series of them to the screen, many made with Tyne Tees and Yorkshire Television and shot in the North East.

The first was Catherine Cookson's The Fifteen Streets, broadcast in 1989 and starring a young Sean Bean and Owen Teale. It was nominated for an International Emmy, and it filmed on location across the region: Marsden Grotto on the South Shields coast, Beamish in County Durham, Blyth Harbour and streets in Heaton. The dramas that followed drew on the same landscape and the same themes. The Black Velvet Gown (1991), with Janet McTeer and Bob Peck, won the International Emmy for best drama. The Cinder Path arrived in 1994, and The Gambling Man, starring Robson Green, in 1995. Together they made Cookson's name a byword for Sunday-night period drama through the 1990s.

You can pick up her story in the town itself. South Shields Museum and Art Gallery on Ocean Road holds a Catherine Cookson gallery, with a recreation of the kind of kitchen she grew up in and displays on her life and work, a good place to start before following the wider Cookson trail around Tyne Dock and East Jarrow.

Vera on the coast

The most-filmed corner of South Tyneside in recent years belongs to Vera, the ITV detective drama starring Brenda Blethyn as DCI Vera Stanhope. The show has made a signature of the North East's windswept coast, and Marsden has featured more than once, its sea stacks and cliffs standing in for the bleak crime scenes the series loves. Cast and crew have also been spotted filming at South Shields Town Hall and at houses in Whitburn, just up the coast, across the show's long run.

That same stretch of coast, from Marsden Rock to the sands below Souter Lighthouse, is a large part of why South Shields looks so good on screen. It is dramatic, changeable and unmistakably North East, and it is all within a short drive of the town centre.

The Roman fort and the seafront

For period productions, Arbeia Roman Fort on the Lawe Top offers a rare full-scale reconstruction of a Roman gateway and barracks, a ready-made backdrop for anything reaching back to Hadrian's Wall. The seafront itself, with Ocean Road, the parks and the piers, has provided locations for local films, documentaries and adverts drawn to its faded-elegance charm. The Customs House at Mill Dam, meanwhile, keeps the screen tradition alive from the other side, screening independent and mainstream cinema and staging its own celebrated stage version of The Fifteen Streets.

Broadening out across the North East

South Shields sits at the heart of a region that punches well above its weight on screen. Along the coast, Vera regularly uses Tynemouth, Whitley Bay and St Mary's Lighthouse. Inland, Durham Cathedral has doubled for Hogwarts and for the Asgardian palace in Avengers: Endgame, and Alnwick Castle is famous the world over as the setting for Harry Potter's first flying lesson. If the on-screen North East interests you, our guides to Alnwick on screen and to Durham's film and TV locations are well worth a read.

Wherever you start, the pull is the same: an authentic landscape of coast, cathedral, castle and honest old streets that filmmakers have never had to dress up much. In South Shields, the star turn is a novelist's memory of home, and the coast that keeps drawing the cameras back.