About the film

This classics documentary film begins with a painting. In a gallery in North Shields hangs a curious oil by local artist Victor Noble Rainbird — better known for portraits of Tyne fishermen and women — showing Greek temple builders stripped to the waist under a Mediterranean sun. It is an unexpected image, and it raises an unexpected question: why is there such a deep fascination with classical antiquity here in the North East of England?

Presented by Professor Edith Hall, one of the UK’s leading classicists and a professor at Durham University, the film traces that question across Tyneside, Wearside and County Durham. It is a journey through coal and culture, myth and memory — finding ancient Greece and Rome woven into the fabric of northern life in ways that are surprising, moving and entirely unelitist.

What the film explores

Just outside Washington, on the site of an old colliery, the Penshaw Monument rises from the landscape — a full-scale replica of a Greek temple, built in the 1840s to honour politician Jack Lambton. Its design deliberately echoes the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, placing ideas of democracy and enlightenment in the coalfields of County Durham. When Sunderland AFC designed their crest for the opening of the Stadium of Light in 1997, Penshaw Monument appeared in the top corner alongside the Latin motto Consectatio Excellentiae — in pursuit of excellence.

The region’s mining communities played their own part in the classical story. Pitmen excavating around Lanchester and along Hadrian’s Wall uncovered Roman altars, artefacts and inscriptions across the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of which are now held by the Great North Museum in Newcastle. One miners’ union banner depicted a Roman soldier standing beside a modern miner — two labourers linked across centuries by shared strength and purpose. The classical world was not remote from working life here. It was part of it.

The film also looks at the creative tradition that grew from this inheritance. Poet Tony Harrison, long based in Newcastle, drew on Greek myth and form throughout his writing. Lee Hall, who grew up in the city, found early inspiration in Greek vases in local museum collections. The People’s Theatre, founded in 1911 by working men including Newcastle United footballer Colin Veitch, staged Euripides’ The Trojan Women as one of its earliest major productions — a fact noted by JB Priestley during his tour for English Journey. Classical tragedy was community theatre here, not a preserve of the educated few.

Approach

The film was shot over three days in February 2024, moving between locations across the region — from the Great North Museum and the Lit and Phil in Newcastle to Penshaw Monument and sites along Hadrian’s Wall. Working with Professor Hall meant following the argument as it developed through conversation and place, filming the connections as they emerged rather than illustrating a predetermined script.

Durham University’s Advocating Classics Education project runs throughout the film as a contemporary thread — working to make classical subjects accessible in schools across the region, particularly in communities where Latin and Greek have not traditionally been taught. A new PGCE in Classics is part of that effort. Professor Hall puts it plainly in the film: these stories of love, war, gods and democracy belong to everyone. The film tries to show what that actually looks like in the North East.

From North Shields to Penshaw, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Lit and Phil — the North East reveals itself as a landscape where the classical world is not only remembered, but reimagined.