Graythorp, my village

Graythorp was built in the 1920s to house the workforce for William Gray and Company’s ship repair dock situated at the mouth of the river Tees in the north-east of England. The village had 76 houses and a population of some 250 people. It was designed as a garden village: each house had a front and rear garden in which most families grew vegetables, especially during the war years. The village had three shops: a Co-op, a newsagent and a fish-and-chip shop. Also, there was a school with three classrooms, and a church and village hall.

The village was surrounded mainly by hawthorn bushes and scrub land. To the north were the allotments; to the south was the main road between Seaton Carew and Port Clarence, to the east was the railway line to Seaton Snooks **have you got this right? It looks to me that the existing railway line is to the west of the village.** and to the west was Greenabella farm.

The shipyard was to the south of the village on the other side of the main road. Not all of the men from the village worked there. My father, for example, was employed as a police constable at the Hartlepool Steel Works during the war where he worked very long hours.

The land next to the railway line once housed RAF personnel who manned the radar station. This became obsolete when the USA built the early warning system for ballistic missiles at RAF Fylingdales on the North Yorkshire Moors as part of the joint UK–USA surveillance of the Russians during the Cold War. The RAF buildings were then used to make a small industrial estate, which is still in use today. With this encroachment of industry, combined with the loss of jobs when Gray’s sold the shipyard in 1963, people gradually move away from Graythorp. The village finally ceased to exist when oil was discovered under the North Sea and Graythorp was chosen as a site for large oil storage tanks. All the houses were demolished and all that remains of the village itself now are the streets.