The film ‘Get Carter’ was on iPlayer and my husband David wanted to watch it, but I decided to do puzzles instead, until the last ten minutes of the film. What that really Blackhall beach? I remembered how waste from the coastal collieries of East Durham was tipped into the sea for economic reasons but I had half forgotten how bad it had been. Then I recalled that my grandmother told me of white sands, the Temperance Hotel at Dene Holme, stalls on the beach selling ice cream and visitors coming by train to visit Horden.
Before tipping into the sea began in 1931, there were already spoil heaps on the cliff edges. Waste was tipped out to sea but the tide washed it back in again. Soon the once golden beaches were a wasteland. Marine animals and plants died. The scene was so bad that it featured as a bleak scene in Alien 3 and was also the setting for a scene in Get Carter.
In the very early days of these colliery villages, posters in the North of England’s major railway stations advertised day trips to Blackhall Rocks and Horden. Trains stopped there then, and one could walk down to the sandy beaches for a day out. However, when reporters from The New Scientist magazine visited the coast in 1981 they wrote that:
“This desecrated landscape is probably the worst example of wasted coastline in England.”
Colliery dumping
The tipping of coal waste had turned the beaches into a moonscape, polluting the blackened sea and killing wildlife. Further up the coast at Dawdon, one thousand lorries a week dumped coal slurry directly onto the beach. At Easington coal waste was tipped directly into the sea. When the tide was out, the waste from this aerial conveyor belt poured onto a heap on the beach. The landscape was so bad that it was featured in the film Alien 3. To add to this pollution there were still direct sewer outfalls along the coast, many of which still discharge untreated sewage into the sea.
The colliery dumping had destroyed several miles of the seabed off this part of the Durham coast. The coast line had turned black. Sealife had been killed off. Fishermen had to travel three miles off shore to avoid this spreading blanket of waste. Fishermen based at Seaham were struggling to land two or three boxes of crabs, and lobsters were a really rare catch. It was so bad that they were going out of business. Pollutants were smothering the sea bed but British Coal would not end dumping as they said that if they did it would increase coal productivity costs and in consequence threaten the jobs of more than 5,000 men. The Board insisted that pit closures could only be avoided if finance was available to cover the cost of transporting waste inland.
Turning the tide
Pits closed with disastrous consequences that ripped the hearts out of mining communities. Work done on some inland spoil heaps continued, some being levelled whilst others were landscaped. Part of Shotton’s pit heap, so maligned by JB Priestley, became a small airfield. Murton’s spoil heap now resembles a grassy mound situated to the side of a thriving retail park. Ludworth’s spoil heap is now a small wooded area.
To renovate the coastline a project named ‘Turning the Tide’ was set up. To fund this work significant grants came from the European Union through
the European Regional Development Fund, the lottery-funded Millennium Commission gave a large grant of £4.5mn. There was a lot of work to be done so a large amount of money was needed.
The Durham coastline has 92% of the total area of para-maritime magnesium limestone grassland habitat in Britain. The National Trust purchased much of the land on the coastal strip and converted it 225 hectares for the creation of habitat. There are now two sites of Special Scientific Interest and Natural Nature Reserves.
To achieve this between 1997 and 2002 the £10mn project removed spoil and debris from the beaches. The tide has removed some waste but parts of the beach will never be restored. Horden cliffs suffer from clay landslides, so the beaches in Horden will never be as once they were. Playing in mud is not the same as playing in sand.
However, the large spoil heaps on the edge of the cliffs, have completely disappeared and are now replaced by a grassland habitat scattered with numerous wildflowers. Looking over the cliffs, a clean sea now splashes onto the rocks. Instead of the lunar landscape, there are now paths leading through wildlife meadows, ponds for wildlife, cliffs views with seating and artwork.
licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license
This area is now designated as Durham Heritage Coast. The path is described in the National Trust book as:
“Between Seaham and Horden (there are) rocky headlands, sheltered bays, rare magnesium limestone grasslands and wild-life-rich wooded valleys characterise this coastline, part of Durham’s Heritage Coast. The ‘black beaches’ of the coal-mining days have been cleaned up; clifftop paths look over a revitalised coastal landscape you can now explore.”
There are those who dislike wind-turbines, but would one rather have those fluttering and dancing in the breeze or blackened demonic waves crashing onto dark satanic beaches.
Thank you Get Carter for reminding me.
