As a documentary filmmaker in the North East, I spend as much time walking as I do filming. I walk at least four miles a day, mostly around Bensham and the wider Gateshead area where I live now, and I am slowly working through a project to walk every street in Bensham, and eventually across Gateshead as a whole. Before that I lived in Newcastle for a long time, and I have already covered most of the streets in the city centre on foot.

This is not really about exercise, or not only about that. It is how I get to know a place before I ever bring a camera to it, and I suspect it is a habit most documentary filmmakers share, even if they do not always call it research. When a project takes me somewhere specific in the North East, I will always visit beforehand and read as much as I can about its history and the people connected to it. By the time I turn up to film, I already have some sense of what the place has been, not just what it looks like now.

The walk that prompted this piece was not tied to any particular project. It was exploration for its own sake, along a stretch of the Newcastle Quayside I know well, but wanted to look at properly rather than just pass through. That is often how it works. Most of my walking has nothing to do with a specific commission. It is just a habit, and the understanding it builds tends to surface later, when I do need it.

Why a Documentary Filmmaker in the North East Walks First

Understanding these transitions matters to how I work as a documentary filmmaker in the North East. The North East has changed so much in the last fifty years, and there are still people and buildings that belonged to the old industrial Newcastle and Gateshead, standing alongside everything that has replaced them. Finding those traces and understanding the transition between one version of a place and the next is something I find genuinely fascinating, and it shapes which details I notice and which questions I ask once I am filming.

On this particular walk, what struck me most was the calm of the river. The Tyne was once the reason these two cities existed at all, alive with shipbuilding and industry and constant movement, and now it mostly just sits there, quiet, working through its own rhythm regardless of what is happening on the banks. One thing I love watching is the moment the tide turns and the whole river appears to reverse direction. I filmed that happening while working on ~Flow, the tidal sculpture piece on the Quayside, and it is still one of my favourite things to notice on the water, whether I have a camera with me or not.

A Boat at the End of Its Life

Further along the Quayside that day, I came across a rusting boat moored near the BALTIC, faded blue and white, clearly at the end of its working life. It had once belonged to River Escapes, a company that ran sightseeing cruises along the Tyne for years before closing down. By the time I walked past again in June 2025, the boat had deteriorated considerably, part of its upper deck had collapsed, and the paintwork was almost gone.

When I went back more recently it had disappeared from its mooring altogether. I do not know where it was taken, but it was clearly nearing the very end.

There is a small footnote worth adding here. A new company, Tyne Cruises, launched sightseeing trips on the river in August 2026 aboard a refurbished boat called the Canny Lass, sailing from Newcastle City Marina near the Tyne Bridge. It is a reminder that the river’s story does not simply end when one chapter closes. Something else usually starts up again, on the same water, in roughly the same place.

None of this necessarily ends up on camera in any direct way. But the accumulated knowledge, the walking, the noticing, the small facts picked up along the way, is part of what I bring with me into every project across the North East. A documentary filmmaker in the North East who only ever arrives on the day of the shoot misses most of what a place is actually telling you. Walking first is how I try not to.

It also shapes how I scout locations for specific jobs, not just general walking, something I wrote about in Location Scouting Advice: Seeing a Place From Every Angle You Can, using Dunston Staithes as the example.