Everybody seems to come and once they move in, they just stay
I was born in the house where we are now, so that’s 87 years ago, so we’ve been there quite a while, that’s Tudor Avenue. My mother said, you’ll always have a house here, so you can come down and see your friends and that’s exactly what I do.
It was about 1963, I got a job teaching skiing in Scotland. So, I used to go skiing in the winter and then back here every summertime and get a job in Newcastle and then back north again for the next ski season.
I started skiing in the Cheviots when the Cheviots used to get snow every winter. We belonged to the Northumbrian Ski Club and we used to just go up there on the bus at weekends and stay in the youth hostel in Wooler and just look for patches of snow if there wasn’t a lot of snow. And we just all formed a great friendship from then onwards and, what’s left of us, we still keep in touch. Quite a few moved North as well, because when we ran out of snow here, then we used to go up to the Cairngorms and get the rest of the season up there.
[Interviewer When you came back, what kind of work would you do just in the summer?]Secretarial, I just used to go to the agency in Newcastle and you could get a job the very next day. So, it was quite easy in those days just to get Work.
We’ve still got one original in the street [Tudor Avenue]. We used to have another one, but everybody seems to come and once they move in, they just stay. It’s nice, it’s a nice street.
All the lovely department stores when I was a child and just lovely shops and it’s just all gone. It’s just not the same anymore. No, it used to be nice, in fact, we did not go to Newcastle very often for shopping because everything was here in North Shields.
The Exchange, North Shields
I’ll still say I’m going home when I come here, yes. It’s just I feel I’ve never really been away from the place, even though I’ve been up North. And with my mum always being here, I used to come back within the month, every time. So, it’s backwards and forwards a lot. Sometimes we come on the train and sometimes we drive, it just depends.
We enjoy going to the Saville Exchange, I think that’s a big plus. Or just having a walk on the Fish Quay or something like that, just walking along to Tynemouth, it’s so lovely.
When I was a child, it was all, real old property and all going right down to the river. That all got cleared away, which is a big improvement really, because it was very derelict, some of the properties, and it must have been hard living there. But no, that’s all improved, it’s much nicer.
I hope all the shops will reopen and really start flourishing again because it’s sad to see them the way they are just now. The transport hub, we imagined there’d be more buses coming and going through there. Because quite often you can come in, get off the bus there, but to go back, it doesn’t come through there. And I think that’s probably quite confusing for people if they’re not used to North Shields. There’s no indication of where to get the bus back. You just think you’d get on where you got off if you wanted to go back again. But it’s a good idea, having it so close to the metro, that’s a good idea, but needs to have more bus routes coming through, I think.
Margaret was interviewed in 2025 as part of the North Shields Voices project.