Sunday Star-Times

A tunnel of love to take the waters

Mark Knopfler’s haunting song lyrics are the backdrop to a special corner of England, writes Rob McFarland.

- The writer was a guest of Visit Britain.

Growing up with a Dire Straitslov­ing stepdad, I became intimately familiar with the songs and lyrics of Mark Knopfler. One track, in particular, always stood out – a haunting eight-minute love song, Tunnel of Love, which describes a fleeting encounter at a funfair called the Spanish City.

It was only decades later I discovered it’s a real place, in the English seaside town of Whitley Bay, 17 kilometres northeast of Newcastle upon Tyne. So, during a recent trip to Newcastle, I decided to take a stroll down memory lane and visit the place that inspired Knopfler to write such a heartfelt, poignant ballad.

There’s a metro line from Newcastle to Whitley Bay, but on the advice of locals I disembark two stops before at Tynemouth, a seaside town south of Whitley, so I can walk the 5km heritage coastal trail between the two.

Arriving in Tynemouth’s ornate Victorian train station on an overcast, blustery day, I brace myself for that special melancholy that descends on seaside resorts in inclement weather. Instead, I find an unexpected­ly charming town with a delightful village green and a prosperous, bunting-clad high street lined with boutiques and upmarket eateries.

Thanks to its position at the mouth of the River Tyne, the town has been an important strategic base for centuries.

Standing guard on the headland is Tynemouth Priory, an imposing 13thcentur­y castle that’s the burial place for several Northumbri­a kings. Throw in three glorious swathes of sandy beach and you can understand why, last year, the Sunday Times declared Tynemouth one of the best places to live in northern England.

I head north, skirting the impressive 1.6km Long Sands Beach which, despite the weather, is dotted with paddleboar­ders and surfers.

The locals are a legendaril­y hardy bunch and I pass many in T-shirts and shorts while I’m swaddled in multiple layers.

After a quick coffee stop in the quirky Surf Cafe (A+ for eclectic surf-inspired decor; B- for the latte), I round a headland and descend into Cullercoat­s Bay, a sandy cove that also gets a mention in Tunnel of Love.

Along the way, informatio­n panels show the region in its 1920s heyday, when the high society would flock to the coast to ‘‘take the waters’’ and stay at the opulent Grand Hotel – a dramatic Victorian pile on Tynemouth’s seafront.

By contrast, Whitley Bay doesn’t have Tynemouth’s quaint village feel and its beach isn’t as big or as inviting. But it does have the Spanish City – a two-storey, dazzling-white entertainm­ent complex with a soaring dome that initially opened as a concert hall and tearoom in 1910.

A permanent funfair was added later and the facility was popular until the 1990s when it fell into disrepair and was eventually closed. After a laborious sevenyear, £10 million restoratio­n, it finally reopened last July with an elegant tearoom, a Champagne bar and a finedining restaurant with sweeping views over the bay.

On this grey, overcast day, the neighbouri­ng funfair looks decidedly unromantic. However, if I close my eyes, I can just about imagine the neon and the noise and the teenage exuberance of a balmy summer’s night in the 1960s. A local lad meets a captivatin­g young woman and they spend a magical evening together without ever learning each other’s names.

Twenty years later, he writes a song about it: ‘‘Girl it looks so pretty to me, like it always did/Like the Spanish City to me, when we were kids.’’

 ??  ?? Saddle Rocks at low tide in Cullercoat­s Bay, a sandy cove that was immortalis­ed in Dire Straits’ Tunnel of Love.
Saddle Rocks at low tide in Cullercoat­s Bay, a sandy cove that was immortalis­ed in Dire Straits’ Tunnel of Love.

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