Dunston Staithes is a fifteen-minute walk from my house in Gateshead, and that’s the side I usually film it from: alongside it, from the riverbank, since you can’t actually walk the jetty itself except on the open days the Tyne & Wear Building Preservation Trust run a few times a year. This particular clip is from the Newcastle side instead, along the same stretch of riverside I’d walked with musician Martin Green while filming Aeons for the Great Exhibition of the North. Neither side is the right one. That’s really the point.

The clouds were moving low and slow that afternoon, thick without much shape to them. The water and the mudbanks caught what light there was and reflected it back, brighter than the sky above them. I stood there a while, camera running, working out which way the light was actually going to fall.

Location Scouting Advice: Knowing the Angles Before You Need Them

I once read an interview with a photographer who shot musicians for a living, people who rarely gave him more than a few minutes between soundchecks and interviews. His solution was to arrive at the hotel early and walk the streets in a rough circle around it, working out where the light was good and what each spot actually offered. By the time they came down to reception, he already knew exactly where he was taking them. The scouting happened before the job started, not during it.

That’s really what walks like this one are for. I don’t need a reason to go and look at a place I already think I know from a different angle. Aeons worked on a similar principle in a different sense, filming Martin on this same stretch of riverbank meant listening to the Tyne rather than looking at it, which is its own kind of scouting. Most of what I notice on these walks won’t end up in anything. But when a job does eventually turn up on this stretch of river, I’ll already know which bank suits which shot, rather than working it out on the day.

Some of that is straightforward enough to note down: which bank catches the evening light, roughly what time the tide clears the mudflats enough to be useful in a shot, where you can actually get a clean line to the structure without scaffolding or fencing getting in the way. None of it needs writing down properly, just walking often enough that it sticks.

What Dunston Staithes Actually Is

Dunston Staithes was built by the North Eastern Railway Company, the first pile driven in August 1890 and the structure opened without much ceremony in October 1893, just a handful of officials from the mineral traffic department there to watch the first steamer loaded. A second, smaller staithes was added alongside the first in 1903, giving six loading berths in total so ships could be worked at any state of the tide. At its busiest, in the 1920s, around 140,000 tons of coal a week were loaded from it onto ships bound for London, Scotland and Scandinavia, coal that had come down by rail from the Durham coalfield. The structure itself runs to 526 metres, built almost entirely from pitch pine, and is thought to be one of the largest timber structures in Europe. It closed as a working staithes in 1977, sat unused for over a decade, was restored by Gateshead Council for the 1990 National Garden Festival, and has survived more than one arson attack since, most recently in 2020. It’s still, in places, being repaired, work that the Trust and its volunteer group, Staiths Friends, largely fund through those same open days.

That’s the real location scouting advice here, more than anything specific to Dunston Staithes. It’s about having already looked from more than one angle, so that when it matters you’re choosing between options rather than seeing the place for the first time. I keep clips like this on a separate account, @newcastle_gateshead_landscapes, mostly so I don’t forget what I’ve already seen.

This kind of walking is central to a lot of my North East work more generally, not just location scouting for jobs already booked, as I wrote about in How Walking Shapes My Work as a Documentary Filmmaker in the North East.