Pier Parade, South Shields - 0191 424 7788 Sea Road, South Shields - 0191 455 7411 tourism@southtyneside.gov.uk

Jarrow - a busy town on the banks of the River Tyne to the west of South Shields.

The town is linked to the north bank of the Tyne by the Tyne Tunnel and the pedestrian also runs under the river from Jarrow.

Founded as a Roman fort in the 1st century AD, Jarrow is one of the most historic towns in the North-East.

In AD681 a small Anglo-Saxon monastery dedicated to St Paul was established here by a Northumbrian nobleman, Benedict Biscop. The monastery was a twin to the monastery of St Peter's Monkwearmouth that Biscop founded in AD674.

Overlooking the River Don (a muddy tributary of the River Tyne) St Paul's was a great centre of English learning. It was also home of the Venerable Bede AD673 - 735, the first English historian, whose works included 'The Ecclesiastical History of the English People'.

When the monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII the Saxon basilica became the parish church. Today this forms the chancel of St Paul's. Much of the church's dressed stone came from abandoned Roman buildings. One of St Paul's three splayed windows contains Saxon glass, the oldest glass in Western Europe. Inside the building, cemented to the wall of the tower, is the original stone slab (with a Latin inscription) recording the dedication of the church in AD685.

Not far from St Paul's stands Bede's World, a new museum illustrating the extraordinary world of the Venerable Bede. Considered to be the 'candle' of the Dark Ages, Bede gave an invaluable insight into the life of the monastery in the later 7th and early 8th centuries. The complex, run by English Heritage, has exhibitions on Bede's life, the monastery at Jarrow and early Northumbrian history.

Jarrow remained a small town until the 19th century, when coal mining, steelmaking and shipbuilding developed rapidly in the area.

Palmers Shipyard, established in 1852, employed around 80% of the town's population and Jarrow soon became world-famous as a great shipbuilding town. However, during the Great Depression of the early 1930s, Palmers Shipyard was forced to close.

The terrible poverty and hardship caused by the closure led to the famous 'Jarrow Crusade'. On 5th October 1936 a small group of 200 men from Jarrow began a 300 mile march to London to present a petition to Parliament. This demanded the creation of new jobs to elleviate the extreme deprivation in the town and other similarly affected areas across the country.

After 25 days the marchers arrived in London. The Labour MP for Jarrow, Ellen Wilkinson, handed the petition of 12,000 signatures into Parliament but Stanley Baldwin (the Prime Minister) refused to see any of the marcher's representatives. The march captured imagination of the British public and media but achieved little at the time. Conditions did not improve in the town until the outbreak of World War II brought sufficient employment to relieve the poverty. A plaque on the Town Hall commemorates the march and a new life-sized bronze sculpture immortalising the Jarrow Crusade, known as the 'Spirit of Jarrow', stands in the Viking Shopping Centre.