About England's North East
What's the site about ?
England's North East is a website about history, culture, identity and places to visit in the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham including the town and city regions of Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland, North and South Tyneside and the Tees Valley towns of Stockton-on-Tees, Hartlepool and Darlington. Historically these regions formed part of the old Kingdom of Northumbria known as Bernicia located north of the River Tees. This site also heads south across the River Tees into the Middlesbrough area that has strong industrial and cultural links to the rest of the region.
How to use the site
Along the top bar we find the regional links for Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, County Durham and Tees Valley each with its own drop-down menu. Here you'll find links to different geographical localities within those areas. Another way to find your way around is to use the link to the clickable North East map which can be found through the link at the top right of the page. Simply find your locality on the map and click. Alternatively you can use one of the Google search boxes such as this one here. There is a search box on each page and this will only search the England's North East site.
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History theme links can be found on the navigation panel to the left and are concerned with the history of the region as a whole. They include the roots of the region section that deals with the origins of people, place-names and dialect, an industry section with an introduction to the industry of the region and the year-by-year Roman, Saxon, Norman, Tudor, Nineteenth and Twentieth century links that make up the history of the region in a year-by-year timeline . There are also some additional feature pages within these sections to complement the timeline. These include an number of additional sections dealing with industry in the nineteenth century pages.
Our World to this : Origins and history of the website
The England's North East website is the latest reincarnation of the North East England History Pages which started life back in 1993 on the Compuserve Our World free web space pages. The site was developed by me from a series of books that I had written and published in the early part of that decade under the guise of North Pennine Publishing. Not that many people were producing homepages back in those days and my site had a rather long and cumbersome web address that included the server's fixed prefix. I often struggled to remember the address of my own website. Despite this limitation it was quickly picked up by the popular search engines of the time with the history and dialect sections of the site seeming to generate rather a lot of interest.
A little later I moved the site to Freeserve for a time and then to talktalk where it was located for a number of years as northeastengland.talktalk.net. In July 2009 I decided it was about time the site moved out and found a home all of its own. It needed its very own domain with some freedom and leg room to expand and so in August 2009 englandsnortheast.co.uk was born.
Mind you, the free pages had served us well. According to Alexa, the web information company my old site at northeastengland.talktalk.net accounted for a staggering 19.1% of all the talktalk.net traffic, taking the site-traffic Bronze, only just behind talktalk.net itself (20%) with the talktalk.net mail server (30.4%) taking the Gold (Source: Alexa.com July 2009) . I think the site's success and popularity is a measure of the passion and interest people have in the North East region. Sadly we say a fond farewell to the Yorkshire history pages which were an integral part of the old North East site. Yorkshire really warranted its own site but the good news is that the Yorkshire pages will appear very soon on their own dedicated pages.
We aim to keep adding more history-rich content to all sections of the sites in the coming months and years and who knows we may expand beyond. Stay tuned, as they say.
You can find out more about me and my publications by reading here.
Once again enjoy the site.
David Simpson
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