Killingworth's documentary history begins in 1242, when the land appears in records held by Roger de Merlay III. For centuries it remained a thin scatter of cottages and farms strung along a road, with Killingworth Moor - 1,800 acres of common land - stretching across the township. From the early 17th century, Newcastle's horse races were held on that moor before transferring to the Town Moor. The 1841 Census counted just 112 souls living in 14 dwellings, two rows of cottages facing each other across the lane. The old stone buildings of those centuries still stand, identifiable today among the infill of later eras. They are the bones beneath the modern town - a reminder that before Killingworth meant locomotives, before it meant a 1960s new town with concrete houses called Garths, it was a small Northumbrian place where almost nothing happened for seven hundred years.

The Killingworth Colliery was owned by Lord Ravensworth, and its Chief Viewer Ralph Dodds had a remarkable eye for talent. He trained or managed locomotive engineer George Stephenson, rack railway inventor John Blenkinsop, and Nicholas Wood, who would succeed him. With Wood's encouragement, Stephenson built Blücher in the workshop behind his house, Dial Cottage, in 1814. The locomotive could haul coal wagons along the wagonway from Killingworth to the Wallsend coal staithes. Blücher itself did not last long. But the knowledge Stephenson took from it carried him to Newcastle, where he would build the Rocket. Meanwhile, in the same colliery, Stephenson was perfecting his miner's safety lamp - the Geordie lamp - which he demonstrated underground in the Killingworth pit a month before Sir Humphry Davy presented his rival design to the Royal Society in London in 1815. In the North-east, miners chose the Geordie.

Killingworth as most people know it today was built in the 1960s on reclaimed pit sites, the spoil heaps levelled and seeded, a fifteen-acre lake created where derelict workings had been. The estates were laid out as cul-de-sacs called Garths, all numbered - though Garths 1 through 3 never existed, and the numbering jumped around oddly: 4, 6, 7, 9. The houses in West Bailey were built of concrete with flat roofs, modernised in the 1990s with pitched roofs and brick sheds. The most radical experiment was Killingworth Towers, the three-tier apartment blocks built in the early 1970s and demolished in 1987. Other estates took their street names from notable battles - Flodden, Agincourt, Culloden, Sedgemoor - or from the Farne Islands. The town now centres on its lakes, where swans and anglers share what was once a colliery.

Killingworth has had its share of screen time. The 1973 BBC sitcom Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? used a house on Agincourt in the Highfields estate as the home of Bob and Thelma Ferris. The architecture series Grundy's Wonders, presented by John Grundy, called the former British Gas Research Centre the best industrial building in the North East. And the Doctor Who episode 'The Mark of the Rani' depicted Killingworth in the 19th century, with the Sixth Doctor pursuing George Stephenson while the Master attempted to hijack the Industrial Revolution. The fiction had a certain rightness to it. If anywhere in Britain was the place the Industrial Revolution could be hijacked, it was here - in the colliery town that had quietly invented the locomotive.