What the World Heritage Bid means to me

It would be a lie fo me to say that I know both churches involved in the bid as well as each other. All I can say is that I know there are many people from Sunderland who can talk just as much about St Peter's, Wearmouth as I can about St Paul's, Jarrow. I've visited St Peter's about five times, but only been inside once -it's been closed all other times, or I must just always be there on a Monday. Like every tourist, I was amazed by the cormorant carvings on the porchway, and the red tint of the tower inside, made by the iron content being burnt -by the Vikings, or William the Conqueror, I was told. I also had the strange experience of being handed two bent coat hangers inside two empty bic byros, and being told to walk up the central aisle...I'll leave that up to the reader to try out themselves when they visit. In short, it's an incredible place, and one I hope to discover more about very soon.

St Paul's however, has been the still, silent, dominant 'presence' in all of my life - as has the entire area between the top of High Street and Jarrow Slake /Slacks../ Jarrow's Lake.. I can't remember first visiting, but the list of other memories is endless: the deepest snow I ever saw, piled up against the old Church bank wall in the 70s, a school sports day in Charlie's park circa 1981, Steve Cram's wedding when my father, who had just bought a great camera, pretended he was with the press and got his face on National T.V, Princess Diana's visit to unveil the window.
However, for all of this, I never really knew the church any deeper than it being something that stood there, down from the swings, further down from the posh house with the carving of the horse's head and the model of the church centuries ago, and ringed all around by the oil tanks which stood where Bede's World is now. What were all those ruined bits just outside, and why did it get so quiet inside in the small part at the back? And why did you always see people there who you'd never see around Jarrow Shopping Centre, or ever again, for that matter?

What I did know, though - like everyone else my age - was almost every minute detail of the site. Ask anyone about the particular 'quirks' of the place, and they'll instantly know what I mean - the room with the 'shelves' in it, the blocked doorway high up in the wall, the really high part that some people call 'the chimney pot' and others have been known to try to climb, that hole in the wall that kids always jump through. All of these parts make a person think that there are stories being told here, and that they're very old ones that have to be discovered, if you can take the time to.

The first time I started to understand the area was in 1991, when me and other South Tyneside Colllege luvvies put on a acting/music event called 'Jarrow Hallmarks' in...where else? A few of the people from that course are members of this walk's Facebook group (Brad Tighe, Tony Wilson, Brian Morton, Victoria Smith and Dee Pianogirl) , and this performance involved DeePianogirl -Donna - playing Isabella Drewett, walking around followed by the rest of us playing music of the time. This co-incided with my discovery of old ordnance survey maps , which showed just how much of the town had been demolished since 1960. From this, it was a small step, taken over a few years, to ask what had happened further back in time, and find myself inundated with words like 'Biscop' 'Ceolfrid' and 'Amiatinus'.

The ruins of the old church began to make sense, and strangely, I'd often turn away from the ruined part, because I discovered that the 'small part at the back' was older than it all.

The facts spoke for themselves: Wearmouth and Jarrow were built 400 years before the Battle of Hastings; that's about 500 years before Durham Cathedral, or Oxford University. At the time, London was a ruined, largely-deserted old Roman settlement , and there was no such place as Newcastle. More than this, there were the other aspects - easter, stained glass, the dedication stone, gravity, BC/AD, the first book of English History. There isn't space here to go on about what all of these things mean: there's just enough to say that anyone reading this should find out more about them themselves, because -quite frankly - they'll amaze anyone, and if that person is from Jarrow or Sunderland, will make them very proud, too.

I was beginning to realise that it was a hugely different world back then, and the fact that so many steps attributable to Wear/Jar remain of interest/influence today can't help but make a person aware that these are two very special places indeed.

Since that time, I've been away, and have tried to get the point across to everyone- with varying degrees of success. From what I've seen, this area is too often viewed purely in economic terms, from the perspective of the last fifty years, and the conclusion is always reached is that it's the bottom of the league. But, if anyone, here or elsewhere, takes a second to view this area, centred on St Peter's and Paul's and other places like Lindisfarne and Durham, in CULTURAL terms, everything changes. In a blink, this area is instantly kicked straight to the top of the Premier League. It's not Man Utd or Chelsea - that'll always be London, but instead of being Accrington Stanley, it becomes at least West Ham, Everton, or Aston Villa.

And that's why I'm doing this walk: I think most people in Britain would react to these facts by saying either 'Really? I didn't know that.' or 'So what? I don't care', and I'd like, in some little way, to try and make sure there are more of the former than the latter.