Hebburn

A shipbuilding town

Hebburn grew through the 19th century around its riverside shipyards, chief among them Hawthorn Leslie & Co., formed from a merger of two established Tyneside engineering firms and responsible for building warships, ocean liners and merchant vessels for well over a century. Like its neighbours along the Tyne, Hebburn's fortunes rose and fell with the shipbuilding trade, and the yards here finally closed in the later 20th century as the industry contracted across the whole river.

A close community

What survived the closure of the yards was a strong sense of local identity, still visible in Hebburn's tightly packed terraces and its reputation — half-affectionate, half-teasing — among neighbouring towns for a fierce loyalty to the place. That reputation reached a national audience through Hebburn, a BBC sitcom first broadcast in 2012, which turned the town's warmth, humour and family life into a genuine cult favourite.

Hebburn today

Modern Hebburn is a residential town within South Tyneside, connected to the rest of Tyneside by Hebburn Metro station, with the old shipyard sites gradually giving way to new riverside development along the Tyne it once helped build ships for.