Seaham

For the town of the same name in New South Wales, Australia, see Seaham, New South Wales.

Seaham
Seaham's Marina
Seaham Location within County Durham
Population	20,172 [1]
OS grid reference	NZ426496
Civil parish	Seaham [2]
Unitary authority	County Durham
Ceremonial county	County Durham
Region	North East
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	SEAHAM
Postcode district	SR7
Dialling code	0191
Police	Durham
Fire	County Durham and Darlington
Ambulance	North East
UK Parliament	Easington

Seaham Harbour

George Elmy Lifeboat Memorial

Seaham (/ˈsiːəm/ SEE-əm^[3]) is a seaside town in County Durham, England. Located on the Durham Coast, Seaham is situated 6 miles (10 kilometres) south of Sunderland and 13 miles (21 km) east of Durham. The town grew from the late 19th century onwards as a result of investments in its harbour and coal mines. The town is twinned with the German town of Gerlingen.

History

The original village of Seaham has all but vanished; it lay between St Mary's Church and Seaham Hall (i.e. somewhat to the north of the current town centre).^[4] The parish church, St Mary the Virgin, has a late 7th century. The Anglian nave resembles the church at Escomb in many respects.^[5]

Until the early years of the 19th century, Seaham was a small rural agricultural farming community whose only claim to fame was that the local landowner's daughter, Anne Isabella Milbanke, was married at Seaham Hall to Lord Byron, on 2 January 1815.^[6] Byron began writing his Hebrew Melodies at Seaham and they were published in April 1815. It would seem that Byron was bored in wintry Seaham, though the sea enthralled him. As he wrote in a letter to a friend:

Upon this dreary coast we have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks; and I have this day dined upon fish, which probably dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam.

The marriage was short-lived, producing as its only child the mathematician Ada Lovelace, but it was long enough to have been a drain on the Milbanke estate. The area's fortunes changed when the Milbankes sold out in 1821 to the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry,^[7] who built a harbour, in 1828, to facilitate transport of goods from locally encouraged industries (the first coal mine was begun in 1845). However, this harbour later proved inadequate to deal with the millions of tonnes of coal and the 6th Marquess commissioned engineers Patrick Meik and Charles Meik to reclaim land and extend and deepen the dock. It was officially opened in 1905. The harbour is of particular interest because it consists of a series of interconnecting locks, rather than the more typical two wall construction.

As early as 1823, the 3rd Marquess had approached the architect John Dobson with a view to his drawing up plans for a town to be built around the harbour. Dobson did so, but the planned approach foundered for lack of funds, and the town instead grew in a more piecemeal fashion.^[8] To begin with, the town was itself called Seaham Harbour (to differentiate it from the ancient village); in time, though, the settlement as a whole came to be known as Seaham.

In 1853 John Candlish built the Londonderry Bottleworks in the town. It was the largest glass bottle works in Britain and survived until 1921. Candlish went on to become mayor and, in 1868, Liberal MP for Sunderland. Waste glass from the bottleworks was dumped at sea and is now washed up as glass pebbles, known as sea glass, on local beaches.^[9][10][11]

In 1928, production started at the last town colliery to be opened, Vane Tempest. By 1992, however, all three pits (Dawdon Colliery, Vane Tempest Colliery and Seaham Colliery – known locally as "the Knack") had closed, a process accelerated by the British miners' strike. The pit closures hit the local economy extremely hard.

Seaham Colliery suffered an underground explosion in 1880 which resulted in the loss of over 160 lives,^[12] including surface workers and rescuers.

Many local families were affected by the tragic loss of eight men and one boy in the 'Seaham Lifeboat Disaster', when the RNLI lifeboat, the George Elmy, foundered on 17 November 1962. To commemorate the event, the new coast road was named George Elmy Lifeboat Way.^[13]

Governance and politics

An electoral ward with the same name exists. The population of this ward taken at the 2011 census was 8419.^[1]

Seaham is part of the Easington parliament constituency and is currently represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom by Labour Member of Parliament, Grahame Morris, who has served since the 2010 general election.

Education

The coast at almost the northernmost point of Seaham, looking towards Sunderland

Church Street, Seaham town centre

Seaham has one secondary school, without a sixth-form, called Seaham High School (before 2016 known as Seaham School of Technology).^[14]

Sport

Seaham's main football team is Seaham Red Star F.C., formerly Seaham Colliery Welfare Red Star, located near Seaham's Red Star park. The club plays in Northern League Division One.

Seaham has two cricket clubs, Seaham Harbour Cricket club, and Seaham Park Cricket Club. Both senior teams play in the North East Premier League

In the 2019-20 rugby season, Seaham RUFC were promoted from Durham/Northumberland 3 into Durham/Northumberland 2.

Media coverage

The final scene of the 1971 film, Get Carter, was shot at Blackhall Rocks beach, which is down the coast from Seaham.^[15][16]

The rich mining history of the town was highlighted in the 2000 film Billy Elliot, which was set during the 1984–85 UK miners' strike in the fictional County Durham town of Everington but which displayed characteristics particular to East Durham pit communities such as Seaham and Easington Colliery. Both towns feature as locations in the film, notably Dawdon Miners' Club, into which Elliot's dad runs when he learns his son has won an audition at dance school. Elliot's "angry dance" scene takes place in Dawdon between Embleton Street and Stavordale Street West.

The opening scene in Alien 3 (1992) was filmed on Blast Beach, at Dawdon.^[17] The town has also served as a location for the BAFTA nominated film Life For Ruth (1962) starring Janet Munro and Patrick McGoohan.^[18]

The town appeared in the BBC Three sitcom Live!Girls! present Dogtown which premiered on the channel in autumn 2006. According to the Sunderland Echo (11 February 1999), scenes from Saving Private Ryan (1998) were also going to be filmed in Seaham, but government intervention moved production elsewhere.

According to Tom McNee's 1992 portrait of the town The Changing Face of Seaham: 1928–1992, St. John's parish church was used as the setting of a 1985 service recorded for BBC Radio 3. Also, a two-part Channel 4 documentary profiled the town in 1991.

Landmarks

To the south, beside the road to Dalton-le-Dale, are the remains of Dalden Tower, comprising the ruins of a 16th-century tower and fragments of later buildings.

The harbour itself may be said to be the principal landmark of the nineteenth-century town; though the Londonderry Institute in Tempest Road (1853-5 by Thomas Oliver) with its monumental Greek-style portico^[19] provides something of a glimpse of the Marquess's original vision for the town. Of a slightly later date, the former Londonderry Offices on the sea front once served as headquarters for the mining and other businesses of the Londonderry family. A statue of the 6th Marquess stands in the forecourt. Also dating from an early stage in the town's development is the town-centre church of St John, Seaham Harbour (1835–40). For the very much older St Mary's, Seaham, and its neighbour Seaham Hall, see above.

For just over a hundred years the harbour was towered over by a 58 ft (18 m) lighthouse on Red Acre Point, immediately to the north, designed by William Chapman. Erected in 1835, it displayed a fixed white light above a revolving red light (an unusual configuration, provided so as to distinguish it from the north pier light at Sunderland);^[20] both lights were displayed from the same tower, the upper being 100 feet (30 m) and the lower 54 feet (16 m) above mean sea level.^[21] The lighthouse was gas-lit, with an arrangement of third-order catadioptric lenses provided by Chance Brothers & Co.^[20] It was decommissioned in 1905, when the harbour was expanded and the current black-and-white striped pier-head light was constructed. Red Acre lighthouse was left standing, however, to serve as a daymark, until 1940 when the whole structure was swiftly demolished in case it should serve to assist enemy navigators.^[22]

A steel statue, 1101 (locally also known as Tommy) by local artist Ray Lonsdale, commemorating World War One and initially erected temporarily for three months, was the subject of a local fund-raising drive in 2014 to retain it on the town's seafront.^[23]

• 
  Dalden Tower, in nearby Dalden Dene
• 
  Lighthouse on the harbour breakwater
• 
  The former Londonderry Offices
• 
  Artwork on the site of Vane Tempest Colliery
• 
  St John's Church, in the town centre
• 
  Seaham Hall, viewed from the south
• 
  Tommy statue

Notable people

Between 1929 and 1935, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Seaham (the defunct constituency which covered the area now renamed Easington) was Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. Easington constituency has only ever returned Labour candidates to Parliament,^[24] and at the 2010 General Election, Labour candidate Grahame Morris was elected with a majority of 14,982^[25] votes.

Seaham has also produced several able footballers, some of whom have gone on to play for the local team, Sunderland, such as Richie Pitt and Gary Rowell. Terry Fenwick and Brian Marwood played for England, with the latter, on retirement from football, working as a commentator for Sky Sports. Paul Gascoigne also lived in Seaham in the late 1990s, while playing for Middlesbrough.

Other notable residents include:

• Baritone Sir Thomas Allen was born in Seaham in 1944
• Martin Brammer, musician
• Bob Fox, musician
• Elizabeth Sterling Haynes (born in Seaham in 1897), Canadian theatre activist
• Janie Jones, singer
• William McNally, Victoria Cross winner
• Ian Pattison, cricketer
• Agony aunt and author Denise Robertson lived in the town for many years
• Alex Russell, former professional footballer
• Peter Willey, Northamptonshire and England cricketer, went to Seaham Secondary School

Freedom of the Town

The following people and military units have received the Freedom of the Town of Seaham.

Military Units

• The 4th Regiment Royal Artillery: 23 July 2022.^[26][27]

See also

• Seaton Sluice
• South Shields
• Seaburn
• Seaton Carew
• Saltburn

References

1. "Area: Seaham (Parish) Key Figures for 2011 Census: Key Statistics". Office for National Statistics. Retrieved 20 July 2015.
2. "Home Page - Seaham Town Council". Seaham.gov.uk. Retrieved 15 May 2018.
3. "Great Places Commission – creating a new identity in Seaham, County Durham". YouTube. 11 December 2018. Retrieved 19 January 2024.
4. Pevsner, N., The Buildings of England: County Durham, Penguin Books, London, 1953/1983.
5. Ryder, Peter F. "Detailed description and history of the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Seaham" (PDF). The Diocese of Durham.
6. "People from the past". Heritage Coast.
7. Hyde, H Montgomery (1979). The Londonderrys A Family Portrait. Hamish Hamilton.
8. "Seaham Harbour 1828 - 1851". Seaham Town Council. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
9. "Candish's Londonderry Bottleworks (Built 1853 - Demolished 1921) - Seaham (seah0195)". Durham County Council. 11 February 2010. Archived from the original on 14 October 2011. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
10. "The Bottleworks history". East Durham History. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
11. Rushby, Kevin (2 June 2022). "Spooky shipwrecks and singing sands: 10 of the UK's weirdest beaches". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
12. "Seaham Colliery Disaster of 1880 | Durham Records Online Library".
13. "The George Elmey Lifeboat Lifeboat Restoration Project - Remember the Heroes". Seaham.org.uk. 17 November 1962. Retrieved 28 June 2014.
14. "New name for rebuilt £14million school". Retrieved 6 March 2018.
15. Gillilan, Lesley. "8 Reasons To Move To Seaham, Durham | Coast Magazine". www.coastmagazine.co.uk. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
16. "Can you remember where these films were shot in the North East?". www.sunderlandecho.com. 10 November 2017. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
17. "Alien3 film locations". The Worldwide Guide To Movie Locations. Retrieved 11 November 2016.
18. "Life for Lynn".
19. "The Londonderry Institute, Seaham, Durham | Educational Images | Historic England".
20. "Lighthouse management : the report of the Royal Commissioners on Lights, Buoys, and Beacons, 1861, examined and refuted Vol. 2". 1861. p. 358.
21. Norie, J. W. (1846). New and Extensive Sailing Directions for the Navigation of the North Sea. London: Charles Wilson. p. vi.
22. Jones, Robin (2014). Lighthouses of the North East Coast. Wellington, Somerset: Halsgrove.
23. "Seaham Tommy 1101: Town raises funds to buy sculpture". BBC News - Tyne & Wear. BBC. 26 July 2014. Retrieved 1 September 2014.
24. "Constituency profile: Easington". The Guardinan. Archived from the original on 28 May 2014. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
25. "Election 2010 – Easington". BBC News. BBC. Retrieved 19 April 2013.
26. Havery, Gavin (18 July 2022). "Freedom of Seaham for 4th Regiment Royal Artillery". The Northern Echo. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
27. Larman, Connor (24 July 2022). "WATCH: Parade held as regiment receives Freedom of Seaham award". The Northern Echo. Retrieved 25 July 2022.

External links

• Seaham Marina Independent Information Website
• The history of Seaham and surrounding towns and villages, Great picture archive
• BBC Wear – Seaham stories and pictures
• Seaham council
• Seaham history project
• A brief history of Seaham
• Children in the Mines
• Seaham colliery
• Seaham Colliery Disaster
• Flickr Group, Images of Seaham
• History of Seaham Hall
• Seaham Harbour Online
• Seaham Lifeboat Disaster
• Tide times for Seaham from BBC, Easytide, and Tide Times
• The George Elmy Disaster.
• http://www.dawdoncollieryremembered.uk/