John North: The Front that looks like a backside

Some of that Hartlepudlian suburb is pretty spectacularly horrible, not least the part by perverse inversion called The Front and resembling civilisation's backside.

Time stopped 50 years ago along there, hijacked by a meretricious miasma of amusement arcades with names like Golden Sands, The Talk of the Town and Las Vegas (which promises "hours of pleasure".)

There is a shop selling beach balls and bubble mixture, another which offers bon-bons, black bullets and coconut macaroons. The environment is so unremittingly grim, so litter strewn and so sordidly besmirched, that the Eating Owt column last September felt obliged to recall Sir John Betjeman's poem about kindly bombs falling upon Slough.

Were they to fall upon The Front in Seaton Carew, that column indignantly suggested, it might be nigh on impossible to notice the difference.

Now, however, Hartlepool Borough Council, supported by the Seaton Carew Regeneration Action Group, has a strategy, a grand plan and a 17 word vision - "To develop Seaton Carew as a centre for tourism and leisure distinguished by quality, diversity and sustainability."

Those tempted just to kick sand in the face of such rose tinted revivalism should remember what's happened to Hartlepool - or better still, take a day return.

"Hartlepool has begun to benefit from significant levels of investment and renewal," says the strategy. Now they're looking for Seaton Carew to jump on the magic roundabout, though the observant will have noticed that an acronym for the Regeneration Group is SCRAG, as in the least favoured end of the joint.

As in Seaton Carew.

"It's a rather unfortunate name, it wasn't me who thought of it," says Matt King, senior planning officer with the council's planning and regeneration department.

We went on Tuesday, when the weather couldn't decide what to do with itself. Notices forbade alcohol in public places, dogs on the beach between May and September - until 1994 the water board was damn near pumping raw sewage onto it - and riding horses "or other animals" on the sands.

Someone's planning elephant rides?

Once there was a large fairground, dominated (memory suggests) by a rather splendid roller coaster. The key piece in the regeneration game is an attempt to attract a major developer to the abandoned site - perhaps a Wet and Wild, says Matt, or a Sea Life Centre.

"It would certainly help kick-start the rest," he suggests.

Nearby is a vastly depressing bus station cum seaside shelter cum toilet block dominated by a remarkably ugly little tower. It's a listed building and not even on the death list.

"It would benefit from a lick of white paint," says Matt.

A few black plastic bags blow along the beach, an illiterate dog forgets that it's May and simply adds to the mess. There are two in the Seaton Hotel, two more in the Marine.

Rather disconcertingly, the Longscar Suite offers to "cater for all your private functions" but appears, in any case, to be long closed. Someone's airing an ice cream parlour, optimism crystallised in a 50p cornet.

"The tourism strategy is vital to the future of Seaton Carew," says the exhibition in the library.

Matt King, who lives in Newton Aycliffe and is as honest as he is engaging, first visited Seaton as a seven-year-old. His memory suggests it's not changed much.

"At our public consultations there were some old hands who said they'd heard it all before, that they kept having these meetings and nothing seemed to be done, but hopefully this time there's funding available."

The view from the beach is fine, he says, so long as it's towards Hartlepool Headland. In the other direction it takes in the steel works, though the sulphuric acid plant has gone.

"Certainly The Front is pretty scruffy to say the least, but with the right kind of development, Seaton Carew can compete with any other North-East seaside location," insists Matt.

"At the moment there isn't a great deal to do except quite a nice walk along the promenade, though I suppose a one-armed bandit fan would be in his element.

"I think it's unlikely, as with most English coastal resorts, that people would want to come for a week, but why not for a weekend or for two or three days?"

There have been questionnaires and public meetings. The exhibition is in Seaton Carew library until tomorrow, moves to Hartlepool Central Library thereafter.

Among the proposals is "Blue flag" status for the beach, a wider range of attractions - the draft strategy describes them as "traditional but limited" - major environmental improvements, raising profile and enhancing image.

Neither bomb nor bulldozer has so far been considered.

Inevitably there is also municipal mumbo-jumbo like optimum opportunities, realistic strategic priorities and, get this, the Tees Valley Vision Spatial Strategy. Someone also suggested a tram service linking Hartlepool Marina with the town's beach resort.

"Blue sky thinking," says Matt though the cloud on that particular horizon is that there are several factories in the way.

He hopes that things will visibly start to happen before the end of the year and to see major changes by 2008.

Comparatively easy after Hartlepool? "Well, you'd like to think so," he says, carefully - some meat on the SCRAG end at last.

WHAT about the Workers' Education Association, formed exactly 100 years ago with 2/6d in the kitty and still commendably hard at it?

In the Co Durham branch area alone, the number of courses and the numbers studying them have increased five-fold in the past decade. "Energy and enterprise," says county organiser Victor Cadaxa, invited to explain.

The centenary will be marked with a garden party on Saturday, May 24, at Redhills in Durham, the historic NUM headquarters where the WEA is now also based.

Dr David Jenkins, former Bishop of Durham and once a WEA tutor, will talk of his affection for the organisation, ex-Westoe Colliery electrician Jim Perry offers guided tours of Redhills, Jon-Jack Dolan, another former Durham miner, will demonstrate circus skills.

Jon-Jack also leads a circus skills course, one of many not necessarily envisaged when Albert Mansbridge - carpenter's son and one time clerk in the Co-op tea department - had his great idea in 1903.

"I think Jon-Jack's gone a bit modern by calling himself that," says Victor, and there may not have been too many Jon-Jacks down the pit.

Courses are now available for all the family, gainfully or otherwise employed. More than half are aimed at specific community groups, mainly in the daytime. Others, says Victor, concentrate on "deprived areas like Shildon."

There is, he concedes, a popular image that the workers' class is now increasingly middle class as well. "It's certainly not the case around here."

The garden party, including many craft demonstrations, is from 11am-3pm.

OUR note a couple of weeks back on the ATS girls - among wartime's unsung heroines - stirred memories for Stan Coates in Guisborough.

His sister, Joan, was 17 when she enlisted in 1942, with the mother-knows-best proviso that they didn't put her into her civilian job as a bakeress.

"Mother felt Joan's health would be better served if she were in the fresh air," says Stan; the military felt differently and employed her in the cookhouse at Fenham Barracks in Newcastle.

Stan, then just 11, still remembers the angry train journey from Redcar East to Newcastle and his mother marching in to see the CO. "How she had the nerve I'll never know. It's a wonder she wasn't shot," he says.

It worked, nonetheless. For the rest of the war Joan became a predictor operator for Royal Artillery anti-aircraft gunners, including a spell at Whitby where the billets were at the bottom of the 199 steps and the guns on the cliffs at the top.

It may help explain why she's still so fit at 78, says Stan - and why she remembers the ATS as the happiest days of her life.

CAUTIOUSLY, for fear of putting a foot in it, we noted in reporting Bindy Lambton's death (John North, February 27) that her father had taken size 24 shoes.

We have now heard from Ned Lambton, Bindy and Lord Lambton's son.. "You were right to think that something wasn't correct," says Ned, from Biddick Hall, near Chester-le-Street.

The outsize claim had first appeared in the Daily Telegraph's obituary, chiefly compiled by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, husband of Lucinda Lambton - Ned's sister.

In asking his wife about her mother, says Ned, Perry had recalled that her grandfather had very big feet.

Lucinda ("who admits to having been worse for wear at the time") immediately replied that they were size 24.

The reason, suggests Ned, is that their mother was much given to exaggeration as they were growing up.

"It is not always easy for us, years later, to distinguish what was plausible and what was an obvious, and in this case rather pointless, fabrication.

"I suppose the idea is in some way amusing, nonetheless."