The town of Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, England sits in a picturesque section of the North Sea coastline in this northeast area of the country. It currently enjoys a population of around 35,000 people, and was once a full-on vacation destination for many people in the United Kingdom until the 1980s.
Today, Whitley Bay is more of a bedroom community and commuter town for the nearby city of Newcastle upon Tyne, though the area’s golden sandy beach is still an attraction for tourists and residents alike. It combines a modern sensibility with a respect for traditions and the history which runs all through the region.
The town itself has a rich and varied history, as a matter of fact. There is mention of Whitley Bay in the historical record as far back as the year 1100, when King Henry I conferred it on a local religious priory as part of their property holdings. The town since then, through the centuries, has seen its fortunes rise and fall, much as other communities in the region did.
Whitley Bay was able to avoid the most hurtful aspects of the decline of the local coal mining industry, though, because of its emergence as a seaside resort of some note in the 19th century. As was said earlier, it maintained this reputation up through the year all the way to the 1980s. Local rail lines, first established in 1882, helped the town attract holiday goers and vacationers from Newcastle.
Tyne and Wear, the northeast England metropolitan county in which Whitley Bay resides, enjoys a current population of around 1.1 million people, ranking it 13th in population size in all of England. It came into being in 1974 as a result of the English government’s reordering of counties, undertaken by order of the Local Government Act of 1972. There are dozens of places of interest scattered throughout the county, including a portion of Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman Era fortification erected to keep out invading tribes from the Scottish north.
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Easy Commuter Rail Access at Villebois
