Filming the Gateshead riverside in 2018, I captured a landscape shot I had almost forgotten — a slow take of the Ovoline Lubricants building on the south bank of the River Tyne. The clip is only a minute or so long, but it stopped me when I came across it recently. The building is gone now, cleared to make way for new development along this stretch of the river. What remains is the footage.

The shot shows a cluster of pale blue industrial buildings arranged in an almost rhythmic line along the water’s edge. Tall cylindrical storage tanks stand to the left of the frame, painted white but stained with age. The tide is pushing upstream, causing subtle changes in the flow and gentle swirls against the quay wall. Trees rise behind the buildings, softening the scene slightly — a hint of how nature and industry have sat alongside each other along this river for generations.

Ovoline was a familiar landmark for anyone travelling along the Tyne, by boat or on foot along the Newcastle bank. The long warehouse roofs and distinctive white walls with red and blue striping were recognisable from the water. The site’s roots go back into the mid-20th century, part of the patchwork of smaller industries that once filled Gateshead’s riverside — particularly around the area historically known as Pipewellgate and South Shore Road — supporting sectors from shipping and marine engineering to local manufacturing.

Places like this weren’t necessarily beautiful in the traditional sense. But they were woven into the character of the river. They spoke of the industries that built the city’s identity and of the people who worked along these banks. One of the things I keep coming back to in my own practice is how footage captured without any particular intention at the time can become significant later — not because the subject was dramatic, but because it was there, and now it isn’t.

The Ovoline site has since been cleared, part of the ongoing transformation of this stretch of Gateshead riverbank into mixed-use residential and commercial development. The modern riverside corridor that began with the Glasshouse and BALTIC continues to extend westward. That process has brought real things to the area, but it has also erased a lot of the texture that made the riverside feel like a working river rather than a leisure destination.

Filming the Gateshead riverside over the years has given me a record of places that no longer exist in the same form. The River Tyne carries a lot of history in a short stretch. Going back through older footage is one way of staying close to that — a reminder that documentary filming doesn’t have to be commissioned or purposeful to be worth doing. Sometimes a quiet shot of an industrial building at the edge of a rising tide is exactly what it needs to be.

Filming the Gateshead Riverside: Related Work

This kind of footage sits alongside a broader interest in place, memory and the documentary value of filming the Gateshead riverside and other locations before they change. Much of my heritage work involves a similar kind of attention — staying close to buildings, objects and landscapes that carry history in their surfaces.

The Faith Museum documentary involved filming a major heritage transformation at Auckland Castle, watching new interpretation take shape inside historic spaces. The Holy Island oral history film gathered stories from people whose relationship to a particular place ran deep, long before any camera arrived. Both feel connected to what drew me to point a camera at the Ovoline Lubricants building in 2018 — a sense that some things are worth recording simply because they exist, and because they won’t always.

You can browse more of my landscape and heritage work in the films archive.