From mining and shipyards to wind power and other renewable energy, the Northumberland port of Blyth is changing. One encouraging sign of its regeneration is the town’s new Market Pavilion, a cinema and arts building that hosted a wide-ranging poetry reading on Saturday night.

Northern Lines heard three poets and writers – Jake Morris-Campbell, Theresa Muñoz, and John Challis – who were introduced and later interviewed by Newcastle University’s James Annesley, and who gave different takes on the poetry of place.

Jake Morris-Campbell, who was born and bred in South Shields and currently lives in Shropshire, read his ‘A189 hymn’ that lists local landmarks. He also read from Between the Salt and the Ash, his remarkable prose account, published earlier this year, of a north-east pilgrimage he made from Holy Island to Durham, keeping close to the coast.   

Calling in at the post-industrial community of Cambois – pronounced Cammus – just north of Blyth, he came across a winding wheel memorial to the village’s pit (pictured below) that was itself already semi-derelict: “Left in a dilapidated state, flaking paint and surrounded by overgrown bushes, it’s no real tribute to the work that went on here.”

But there are already signs of regeneration in the area, including a former miners’ welfare hall repurposed as a community arts building by an enterprising couple. For better or worse, a huge AI data centre is also coming, to dominate the local horizon.

Theresa Muñoz is the creative director of Newcastle Poetry Festival, although there has been no festival this year, due to budget constraints at the university. She offered a wider perspective, with poems set in Edinburgh about Muriel Spark and the school that inspired The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and fur traders who brought Indigenous women back to Orkney from the New World.  

John Challis is from the south, and came to the north-east at the age of 25. He has done most of his writing here: “It unlocked something in me.”

Over the years he has found himself delivering poetry workshops at Blyth library, and serving as poet in residence at the romantically ruined, Vanbrugh-designed, fire-ravaged Seaton Delaval Hall.

He has also written a poem about Blyth’s lost, buried river, The Gut, with some of his words embedded in the ground, although architects told him the poem would have to be shortened to fit. The final poem he read, ‘North’, included these lines: “Go far enough, and you’ll find yourself back where you began … what matters most is keeping north, and keeping north inside.”

In an interesting Q&A that followed, involving the small but enthusiastic audience, Jake Morris-Campbell admitted that “one of the worst aspects of the north-east” was “a looking- inwardness”. But he was more positive about “the particularity of accents that he felt were getting stronger, rather than disappearing. He saw this as “a cultural renaissance … the democratising of people’s voices”.

Earlier in the day I had been to watch Blyth Spartans, a famous football club that has fallen on hard times, and, along with Blyth Town, are currently propping up the Northern Premier League (East). The Spartans, who have another new manager, lost again. But the crowd, who had come along in larger numbers than usual, didn’t turn on them at the final whistle.  

The evening’s poetry event, part of a series over several months to celebrate the opening of the Market Pavilion, provided a more upbeat mood. Newcastle and other north-east universities plan to offer new educational opportunities in Blyth, in the form of high education science and technology qualifications up to PhD level. Next year we are promised a Blyth Festival of Energy, with performances, workshops, exhibitions, talks, and films. There is even a new railway station on the outskirts of the town, after Blyth lost its passenger railway link in the 1960s. The winds of change, indeed.

 

Mining memorial at Cambois, Northumberland Photographs: Greg Freeman