River Tyne
— — the river the bridges learned to count by.
Not only on a wall.
“The river that cuts north-east England in two. Two headwaters off the Pennines, North Tyne and South Tyne, meet at Hexham and run east as one through Newcastle and Gateshead before opening to the North Sea at Tynemouth. Seven bridges stitch the city quayside together, with the Tyne Bridge holding the middle. Coal and shipbuilding shaped the banks for two centuries; the water is cleaner now, and salmon have come back.
River Tyne, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The River Tyne forms at Warden Rock near Hexham in Northumberland, where the North Tyne, draining the Kielder Forest and reservoir, meets the South Tyne, rising on Cross Fell in the North Pennines. From the confluence it runs roughly 100 kilometres east through Hexham, Wylam, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Gateshead, then between North and South Shields to the North Sea at Tynemouth. The full catchment, including both headwaters, covers about 2,936 square kilometres. The Port of Tyne at the mouth remains an active deep-water port.
The Newcastle–Gateshead quayside carries seven bridges across a short bend of the river. The Tyne Bridge of 1928, designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson with the same arch geometry as the Sydney Harbour Bridge that followed it, is the silhouette most people picture. Robert Stephenson's High Level Bridge of 1849 was the world's first major two-deck rail-and-road bridge. The Swing Bridge of 1876 still pivots on Lord Armstrong's hydraulic machinery, and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge of 2001 tilts open like an eyelid for river traffic.
By the mid-twentieth century, the Tyne through Newcastle was effectively dead from sewage and shipyard discharge. Improvements at the Howdon treatment works, opened in 1980 and extended through the 1990s, transformed the estuary. Atlantic salmon and sea trout returned in significant numbers and the river is now among the best salmon rivers in England by rod catch. Above Hexham the upper reaches run through Hadrian's Wall country and Northumberland National Park, with the Kielder Water reservoir on the North Tyne the largest artificial lake in northern Europe by capacity.