ABSTRACT
Gateshead is situated on the south side of the River Tyne, some ten miles upriver from the North Sea. Between the wars it was at the heart of the heavy industrial region of the north-east of England, which was dominated by the coal, iron, engineering and shipbuilding industries. In Henry Pelling’s Social Geography of British Elections 1885-1910, Gateshead is described simply as ‘an industrial suburb of the largest centre of the [North-East] region, Newcastle’.1 Fogerty’s 1945 survey of the Prospects of the Industrial Areas of Great Britain stated that ‘for all intents and purposes Tyneside is a single industrial unit’, and that it was:
… one integrated community of over 800,000 souls who move freely up and down and across the river. Even the working-class towns of Gateshead and Jarrow are largely dormitory towns, most of their populations working in other towns of Tyneside.2
