Wallsend

Wallsend is an industrial town lying on the north bank of the River Tyne in north-east England, between Newcastle upon Tyne and North Shields. Wallsend is so named because it marked the eastern terminus of Hadrian's Wall, and the town grew on the site of a Roman fort, Segedunum. It became a singificant coal mining centre in the eighteenth century, and in the latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries shipbuilding was a very major industry: the Mauretania was built at Wallsend. The last shipyard, Swan, Hunter & Co., closed in the early twenty-first century.

Famous people from Wallsend

Gordon Sumner (Sting), rock musician. T. Dan Smith (Thomas Daniel Smith), city politician (known as 'Mr. Newcastle', he implemented a major redevelopment of Newcastle city centre and was head of the regional development agency for north-east England, before being gaoled for corruption in the Poulson Affair).