Its a different world

Friday afternoon found us heading up the A1 to a small ex-mining village just north of Newcastle-u-Tyne, 100 miles north of Leeds but a journey that always takes us 70 years back in time.

Seaton Delaval was once a small village, built to house the workers at its own coal mine, owned in its entirety by the pit owner - but why should I relate the history of the place when someone has already done a good enough job, with pictures, right here.

Its where my wifes family are from, its where most of the wider family still are although her numerous brothers and sisters have all moved away now, but her relations still number in the hundreds and her family tree is virtually impossible to draw as within five minutes the lines between the generations start to cross each other with annoying regularity, uncles become cousins, grandparents become uncles and the whole diagram ends up looking like something that a primary school kid has scribbled on his first go with a crayon and paper.

In the last forty years the village has expanded its boundaries, new housing estates have grown and in theory a new generation of young people should have flushed out the old pit village folk, villages like Delaval should by now have morphed into homogeneous commuter residential belts with only the crossroads at the centre showing any vestige of the past.

But Delaval is not like that, despite the village now being several times its original size it still retains its mining village community and identity, and nowhere is the demonstrated better than in the Seaton Terrace Working Mens Club, "The Terrace".

When I moved to Delaval in 1981 The Terrace was still the most important building in the village, along with the Co-op store in the centre ("The Store"), it was the one place where you could always guarantee that you'd meet any single person at least once a day if you were prepared to wait there long enough for them, being a member of The Terrace was simply a requirement if you wanted to exist in Delaval as a bone-fide resident.

And so of course I joined, and being attached to my wifes family, everyone knew me - Suzannes father was one of the committeemen at the Terrace and was a well known figure in the community and so by default and with my connection to their family, everyone knew me too - I knew no-one and spent most of my time talking to people who knew everything about me whilst I couldn't even recall their name.

I never went into The Terrace without it being almost full of the same faces, Friday and Saturday nights were the busiest and on a Saturday if you weren't in the place early (pre-7pm) then you simply wouldn't get in.

Its not like that now.

The consensus of opinion on Friday night amongst those who have known The Terrace all of their lives was "this place is dying" and whilst I don't know the financial details of the place its easy to see how they can draw that conclusion.

We were at one my wifes remaining aunts 70th birthday party which, as tradition dictates, was held in the upstairs concert room with a DJ to provide the predictable blend of records and a buffet meal consisting of sandwiches and home made pies.

Sadly the upstairs concert room, which at a guess could hold three to four hundred souls (and did every saturday night), is now only used for private functions such as the one on Friday, no club-organised saturday night entertainment is held there now, in common with many other working mens clubs the cost of providing a "turn" (or even two) grew prohibitively expensive in the 1990's and now the members use the downstairs lounge simply to buy cheap beer and talk.

The one room in the place which is still well populated is "The Bar".

The Bar is the haven for the menfolk, until legislation prevented its enforcement it was a condition of joining the club that women were not allowed in The Bar and whilst its not now legally possible to prevent them, few women venture in there and the ones who do are liable to verbal abuse or ignorance of their presence, its still a mens domain in there.

And therein lies the only remaining lifeblood of The Terrace, if it wasn't for the influx of young village youth into The Bar in preference for the local pubs of the area then The Terrace would have died on its arse years ago, but the tradition still stands where a man of the village will take his son to The Terrace and "join him" as a member on his 18th birthday and from that date onwards the young man will use The Bar as an extension to his own home.

On Friday evening I sat in isolation with my pint of orange (yes I was the driver) and just observed from the back of the conert room.

On Friday night there were 150 or so souls in there, I recognised many of the faces, I am related by marriage to many of the faces in there but at least half of the faces that I recognised were not the same people that I knew, they are the offspring of those people.

The older folk that I used to drunkenly bump into every weekend are now either dead or locked up in a home somewhere but their spirit lives on in their sons and daughters who have exactly the same routine as their parents had, shop at the Co-op, booze at The Terrace, its un-nerving to see the next generation continuing in exactly the same mode as their parents when all over the country other offspring are eager to break away from their parental influences, its like a living museum, you couldn't control it any better if it was The Truman Show.

And there lies the secret of a real community village - continuity.

Its why New Towns never quite manage to build a real feeling of "being", its why the residents of new housing estates often speak of them as "soul less", its because you could build a whole new replica Seaton Delaval just up the road but if you populated it with new people drafted in from outside then none of them would bring their history with them, non of the younger generation would go the the village club simply because its what their father and grandfather did and its where their father brought them to play snooker or fly pigeons when they were young .

You cannot build tradition, you cannot construct a soul, there is no price that you can pay to create a new settlement that people will instantly feel a connection to even if they are not aware of or do not understand what that connection is, pit villages like Delaval have that commodity, sometimes its the only thing they have, but its priceless none the less.