Saltwell Park is about five minutes from my front door in Bensham, and I probably walk through it three or four times a week. As a Gateshead heritage filmmaker, most of what ends up in front of a camera starts on a walk like this one, long before any filming happens.

The short clip above is from an afternoon last June, filmed with a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 rather than anything more elaborate. It’s a small part of a longer habit, walking the park in different seasons and different light, mostly without any particular project in mind, though a fair amount of what I notice on these walks eventually finds its way into something else.

The last time I was here on a proper shoot, rather than just walking through, was to film the South Korean artist Misung Kim, whose work I later used in a series of projections for Rekindle, a light festival in Amble produced by Dry Water Arts. It’s a reminder that footage from a place like this doesn’t always end up in something obviously about that place.

Saltwell Park: Where This Gateshead Heritage Filmmaker Starts

Saltwell Park opened to the public in 1876 and was known almost immediately as the People’s Park. It was designed by Edward Kemp, who had worked under Joseph Paxton at Birkenhead Park, itself one of the models for Central Park in New York. The land had belonged to William Wailes, a Newcastle stained glass manufacturer whose home, Saltwell Towers, still stands near the centre of the park and is now Grade II listed. The boating lake, added around 1880, is usually where I end up filming, partly because the light off the water changes so much through the day, and partly because it’s rarely empty, families feeding the ducks, people walking dogs, the odd heron working the edges of the reeds.

A Few Streets Over: Bensham Grove

A short walk from the park is Bensham Grove, a Grade II listed house that was home to the Spence Watson family, a Quaker family, for most of the nineteenth century. Robert Spence Watson, who lived there until his death in 1911, helped found what later became Newcastle University and was a significant figure in Liberal politics across the North East. The house hosted visitors including William Morris and Arthur Conan Doyle, and Frederick Douglass spoke there during one of his visits to England.

As a Gateshead heritage filmmaker, I rely on sources like the dedicated Spence Watson Archive Project, which goes into all this in far more detail than I can here, and it’s worth a look if any of this interests you. It’s easy to walk past Bensham Grove without knowing any of this, which is part of what interests me about it. Gateshead has this pattern of ordinary-looking buildings and green spaces that turn out to carry a lot more history than their surroundings suggest.

After the Spence Watsons, Bensham Grove became an educational settlement and later a community centre, a role it still has today. It was restored with Heritage Lottery Fund support a few years ago, and it’s still used for adult education and community activities rather than being kept behind glass or turned into a museum piece. That continuity, an old building still doing something close to its original job, is often more interesting to film than a heritage site that’s stopped being used.

For shots like these, I use a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 on the end of a long pole, which I’ve taken to calling the R.L.S Technology (Really Long Stick). It gets me above eye level without the noise, cost or paperwork that comes with flying a drone in a busy public park, which matters in a place as well used as Saltwell Park.

Prism Coffee, just inside the park gates, has become a regular stop too, somewhere to sit with a coffee and make notes before or after filming, in whatever the weather happens to be doing that day.

None of this is unusual for a Gateshead heritage filmmaker working close to home. Most of what I notice on these walks doesn’t end up in any specific film, but it sits somewhere in the background of how I approach heritage work more generally, the sense that a place’s history is often closer than it looks, sometimes only a park bench or a garden wall away. It’s part of why I’d rather spend an afternoon walking somewhere I already know well than assume there’s nothing left to find there.