Can Big Tech save Northumberland? Don’t expect a second coal boom

Blyth Power Station dominated my horizons as a kid. Quite literally, in fact, as I could see it from my bedroom window in the old pit village of New Hartley. It seems hard to believe now, but at bedtime my parents would encourage me — as if I was a child in a Soviet propaganda film — to say “night, night power station”.

As schoolchildren, we were taken to visit the plant’s Moonraker-style control room — an attempt to steer our aspirations towards coal-fired power generation. But even then, I felt the same sort of ennui that Bart Simpson did when he visited the Springfield Box Factory. For this was the early Nineties, and Blyth was not doing well. Still reeling from the closure of the local colliery, the town was on the slide to becoming a byword for chronic unemployment and post-industrial despair.

It is therefore startling to find that Blyth has a starring role in President Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK. This week, American tech giants, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Google and OpenAI, pledged to invest billions of pounds to build AI infrastructure across the UK. A new AI “growth zone” in the North East has been announced, which will include a huge data centre on the site of the defunct Blyth power station, backed by US investment firm Blackstone.

It’s not the first time foreign potentates have looked to south-east Northumberland: Prince Louis-Napoleon descended the shaft at Seghill Colliery in 1856, and a few decades later the Shah of Iran made an excursion to Cragside to purchase military hardware from Lord Armstrong. They all beat a path here because North East England had long been a great locus of industrial modernity. The coal trade had turned Northumberland and Durham into the Saudi Arabia of carboniferous capitalism, which birthed great innovations in locomotive power, and even in information technology. For the man who laid the first transatlantic cable, Sir Daniel Gooch, came from Bedlington, and there is a direct line of descent from the message he sent from the SS Great Eastern to the Foreign Office in 1866 — “Perfect communication established between England and America; God grant it will be a lasting source of benefit to our country” — to the American social media giants that have added so much to the gaiety of our nation.

Blyth itself was the quintessential Victorian boomtown. After the local gentry backed the wrong horse during the first Jacobite Rebellion in 1715, their lands were forfeited for treason, and then snaffled by the enterprising Ridley family of merchant adventurers from Newcastle. Generations of Ridleys then steadily built up their mining interests in the district — the present Viscount Ridley still retains commercial interests in the town.

By the Thirties, the Ridleys’ fiefdom of Blyth (formerly Blythmouth) was the biggest coal exporting port in Europe. My grandfather, who was born there in 1924, filled my head with stories of the sheer vitality and even glamour of the place in his childhood. Its streets were numbered, just like Manhattan’s, and downtown Blyth was packed with glistening modern cinemas like the Roxy, Essoldo, or the Wallaw, which lives on as a spectacular Art Deco Wetherspoons. The town was an important naval base in both world wars, as well as being the birthplace of the Royal Navy’s first ever aircraft carrier — HMS Ark Royal.

All of this energy blessed the town with a raucous plebeian culture, and a pride in the contribution that its hardworking pitmen and shipwrights made to local and national prosperity. It is perhaps fitting, then, that the town’s football team is called Blyth Spartans, and that the main stand at Croft Park bears a laconic line from Plutarch: “The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy, but where are they.” As a schoolboy, me and my pals certainly recognised a formidable severity in the footballers of Blyth’s Ridley High, a school so tough (as the old gag went) that it should have had its own coroner.

This defiant outlook may have helped to sustain Blyth over what has been a difficult last century. Like everywhere in the North East of England, it was hammered by the double punch of the First World War, in which the men of Blyth fought bravely and died for their country in huge numbers, and then the economic retrenchment and depression of the Twenties and Thirties.

The Forties provided a glimmer optimism, with its wave of nationalisation, yet from the Sixties onwards Blyth’s former prosperity was leeching away — the loss of the town’s railway station to Dr. Beeching’s axe was a particularly bitter blow. The Eighties were almost fatal. The Miners’ Strike was the first political event that I can vaguely remember, maybe because 1984 was both the year I started school and the year my grandfather retired after nearly four decades underground at Bates Colliery at Blyth — one of those dangerous “wet pits” whose seams ran out for miles under the North Sea.

The final closure of Bates a few years later had profound psychological as much as economic consequences. As I have written elsewhere, coal mining wasn’t like any other job: with its intense dangers and camaraderie, it was closer to active service than any civilian profession. In Blyth, coal mining had an almost sacral quality. Seamus Heaney’s uncle was a pitman in Blyth, and the way he describes the leftovers of household fuel in the poem “Slack”, which he dedicated to his uncle, could be an apt depiction of a town hopefully waiting for better news:

It lay there, slumped and waiting
To dampen down and lengthen out

The fire, a check on mammon
And in its own way
Keeper of the flame

Glad tidings have been a long time coming, and the folk of Blyth have already endured one false dawn. In 2021 there was much excitement when Britishvolt announced ambitious plans to build a vast electric battery “gigafactory”’ on the site of the old power station, promising thousands of jobs. Many local people thought this sounded too good to be true — and it was: Britishvolt collapsed in 2023, and with it their plans for Blyth.

It’s tempting to be cynical, but the news that Blyth will now be the site of a vast AI data centre is probably the most exciting thing to happen in the area since 1978, when Blyth Spartans reached the fifth round of the FA Cup. There has certainly been scepticism over claims that 4,000 jobs will be created. We need to accept that capital-intensive data centres won’t create as many jobs as the collieries and shipyards that preceded them, but I think locals like me have long recognised that Blyth needs a vibe shift. Mining data rather than coal is one way forward and might encourage the rest of the country to think differently about the region.

And with the old Northumberland Line reopening too, connecting Blyth to Tyneside, maybe things are looking up for the town. I argued after Newcastle United won their first domestic trophy in 70 years back in March that the man of the match, Blyth’s own Dan Burn, deserved a colossal Christ-the-Redeemer-style statue on Blyth Pier; but in the end, he had to make do with his first England cap and the Freedom of Northumberland. Yet perhaps a more significant structure has since arrived in the town. The Market Pavilion Cinema opened in August with a “people powered parade” centred around a life-sized replica of George Stephenson’s Rocket — the Newcastle-built locomotive that went on to change the world. Reports of the event convey a confidence that felt unfamiliar. Years of disappointment about the region’s fortunes have shaped in me a Gramscian pessimism of the intellect alongside an optimism of the will, but with the possibility of an exciting future dawning after decades of hardship, it would be wise not to underestimate the will of Blyth.

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