Seaham

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Seaham is a small town in County Durham that grew up around a harbour on the North Sea coast of north-east England. It has a grade I listed small church, St Mary the Virgin, with a late 7th century nave which resembles the church at Escomb in many respects. St Mary the Virgin is regarded as one of the 20 oldest surviving churches in the UK.

Until the early years of the 19th century Seaham was a small 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. 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, but long enough to have been a drain on the Milbanke estate. The area's fortunes changed when the Milbankes sold out to 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, who built a harbour in 1828 to facilitate transport of goods from the industries locally encouraged (the first coal mine was begun in 1845). However, this harbour later proved inadequate to deal with the millions of tonnes of coal being mined from the nearby mines, 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.

In 1928 production started at the last town colliery to be opened, Vane Tempest. Yet by 1992, after years of mine-related deaths and tons of excavated coal, all three pits (Dawdon Colliery, Vane Tempest Colliery and Seaham Colliery - known locally as "the Knack") had closed, a process accelerated by the miners' strike and cheap coal imports from Eastern Europe. The town, however, is slowly recovering, though the limited regeneration is not popular with all sections of the community who would prefer to see more jobs being brought to the area.

Seaham has some of the best beaches in the country and has easy transport links to the eastern side of the country. From 2001 most of the Durham coastline was designated as a ‘heritage coast’ and Seaham beach was entirely restored. In 2002 the Turning the Tide project won, jointly with the Eden Project, the prize for Outstanding Achievement in Regeneration in the annual Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors awards.

Today, the town has a population of around 22,000 and is served by Seaham railway station.

External links

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