Muhammad Ali came to South Shields in 1977 to have his marriage blessed at a small mosque on Laygate. The mosque sits in a town that has been worth coming to for nearly two thousand years - the Romans built a supply fort here in AD 160 and called it Arbeia, garrisoning it with Tigris bargemen from what is now Iraq, Iberian infantry, and Syrian archers. Eighteen centuries later, South Shields became the first town in Britain with a settled Muslim community, mostly Yemeni sailors who came ashore at the end of the nineteenth century. The Roman archers and the Yemeni firemen never met, but they walked the same coastal earth on their way to it.
The Romans built their fort on the south bank of the Tyne mouth around AD 160 and rebuilt it more grandly around AD 208, when Emperor Septimius Severus turned it into a vast granary depot to supply troops campaigning north of Hadrian's Wall. The garrison reads like a map of empire: the Numerus Barcariorum Tigrisiensium, bargemen recruited from the Tigris in modern Iraq; cohorts of infantry from Iberia and Gaul; Syrian archers and spearmen far from home. The fort was abandoned in the fourth century as Rome contracted, but its stones did not disappear. Today the reconstructed gatehouse and barracks form part of the Hadrian's Wall World Heritage Site - a place where children climb the same stairs Syrian soldiers climbed seventeen hundred years ago.
After the Romans left, the site is thought to have been a royal residence of King Osric of Deira, where Bede records that Oswin gave land to St Hilda for a monastery; St Hilda's church still stands on the spot. In the ninth century, Viking longships raided the coast. One, according to local folklore, was wrecked at Herd Sands trying to land. Other Viking ships have actually been uncovered nearby. The current town was founded in 1245 as a fishing port - the name South Shields comes from 'schele' or 'shield,' a small dwelling used by fishermen. Salt-panning followed, then in 1644 the Scots Covenanters seized the town and its Royalist fortifications during the long Civil War siege of Newcastle. A nine-pounder cannon dredged from the Tyne in 1864 is thought to date from that fighting.
The nineteenth century turned South Shields from a village of fishermen and salters into an industrial town. The population leapt from 12,000 in 1801 to 75,000 by the 1860s - migrants from Ireland, Scotland, rural Durham, and Northumberland came for work in the coal mines, glassworks, and the shipyards of John Readhead and Sons. The growth outpaced the sanitation; cholera broke out, and the Victorian Cleadon Water Tower was built in 1860 to supply clean water. The Tyne Improvement Commission began dredging the river in the 1850s and built the massive North and South Piers to keep the channel clear. South Shields shipbuilders launched vessels that crossed every ocean. During the First World War, German Zeppelins bombed the town; during the Second, the Luftwaffe came back repeatedly. Innocent residents died in a market-place bomb shelter and were commemorated in a cobblestone Union Jack, before the bodies were controversially exhumed and reburied elsewhere.
Yemeni sailors began settling in South Shields in the 1890s, working the engine rooms of British steamships. In 1909, the first Arab Seamen's Boarding House opened in the Holborn district. By the end of the First World War, the Yemeni population had grown to over 3,000, and roughly one in four South Shields merchant seamen lost at sea was Yemeni. Disputes over jobs led to riots in 1919 and 1930, called at the time the 'Arab Riots' - moments of violence that the town's Yemeni residents endured rather than caused. Many Yemeni sailors married local women, and over time the community became, in many ways, the model of British Muslim integration. The Al-Azhar Mosque at Laygate, founded in the 1930s, was one of the earliest mosques in Britain. When Muhammad Ali came in 1977 to have his marriage blessed there, he was visiting a community that had been Muslim, British, and South Shields for longer than living memory.
The last shipbuilder, John Readhead and Sons, closed in 1984. The last colliery, Westoe, shut in 1993. The Yemeni population shrank as coal-fired ships disappeared and sailors found other work. South Tyneside had the highest unemployment rate in mainland Britain for years. But South Shields has six miles of coastline and three miles of river frontage, dramatic Magnesian limestone cliffs at Marsden Bay where one of Britain's largest seabird colonies nests, and the National Trust-owned Souter Lighthouse. The Customs House theatre, the Word library, the rebuilt Haven and Dunes centres - tourism has become an industry of its own. Catherine Cookson, the South Shields novelist whose books sold tens of millions of copies, drew her settings from the Westoe streets. The town that the Romans, the Vikings, the Geordies, and the Yemenis all reshaped is still becoming what comes next.
South Shields sits at 54.995 degrees N, 1.430 degrees W on a peninsula where the Tyne meets the North Sea. Newcastle International (EGNT) is 11 nautical miles west. From the air, the giant North and South Piers at the river mouth are unmistakable, with the town spreading south along a coastline of beaches and limestone cliffs. The reconstructed Roman fort of Arbeia is just inland from the Lawe Top, and the Souter Lighthouse stands prominently 2 nautical miles south at Marsden Bay. The Cleadon Water Tower on Cleadon Hills is visible from many miles inland. Best viewed at 2,000-3,500 feet AGL.