Coal Staiths of the River Tyne
January 18th, 2026 | Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen & Peter Roberts
Today, Dunston Staiths is often encountered as a quiet place. A long wooden structure over the Tyne, now associated with heritage and memory. It is easy to experience it without a clear sense of the work that once took place there.
In the early 1970s, the Staiths were still operating.
In 1973, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen was photographing the Staiths at Dunston and at Whitehill Point while coal was still being loaded onto ships. The Staiths were busy and noisy places. Men worked across multiple levels of the structure as coal moved down chutes and into the holds below.
In the new short film Coal Staiths of the River Tyne, made by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts, Sirkka-Liisa reflects on that time. The film brings together her photographs from 1973 with contemporary footage of the Staiths today, placing the working past alongside the present-day structure.
Looking back, Sirkka-Liisa describes what it was like to be on the Staiths when they were still in use:
"“It was still a totally working staiths on all levels… incredibly busy, incredibly noisy. I could be almost like a fly on the wall and just see what it was all about. There were teams of men working… teemers on the top and trimmers on the bottom; the ships being loaded with coal; chutes of coal just shooting down; and all these coal holes that were not protected in any way. If I had not kept one eye on the ground and the other eye on the camera, I could have been down a coal hole into the clay bed below. And these things did happen.”"
Seen alongside the stillness of the Staiths today, the film makes visible the scale of the structure and the conditions of work it supported. The size of the place, the coordination involved, and the physical risk built into the job come back into view. The film brings the Staiths back into view as a working place, shaped by labour, risk, and routine, as it was lived at the time.
Coal Staiths of the River Tyne was commissioned by Tyne Derwent Way, with thanks to the UK Government, North East Combined Authority, and Historic England.