Whitley Bay on Screen: Film and TV Locations

Whitley Bay's seafront has a face made for the camera. The white dome of the Spanish City rises above the promenade, St Mary's Lighthouse stands on its tidal island a mile up the coast, and behind them stretches the sweep of Northumberland shoreline that has become the backdrop to one of British television's best-loved crime dramas. If you have watched much television made in the North East, you have almost certainly seen Whitley Bay without realising it.

The Spanish City

The star of the show is the Spanish City, the Grade II listed pleasure dome that opened in 1910 as a concert hall, restaurant and roof garden, with a ballroom added in 1920 and a permanent funfair alongside. Its 180-foot Renaissance frontage and great white dome, once thought to be the second-largest unsupported concrete dome in Britain, make it one of the most recognisable buildings on the whole North East coast.

That silhouette has become a regular fixture in ITV's Vera, the long-running detective series starring Brenda Blethyn as DCI Vera Stanhope. The white dome appears in the background of many of the show's coastal scenes, and the amusement arcades around the seafront featured prominently in the Series 4 episode "Protected". The production spends a great deal of time in Whitley Bay and along this stretch of coast, and the Spanish City is one of its most familiar landmarks.

The building has a place in music history too. Mark Knopfler grew up in the North East, and Dire Straits' "Tunnel of Love" is a semi-autobiographical song built around memories of the fairground here. Knopfler has said the Spanish City was one of the first places he heard rock and roll played really loud, and for a time the song was the fair's unofficial anthem. The fairground has long since closed, but after a major restoration the dome reopened in July 2018 as a home for restaurants and shops.

St Mary's Lighthouse

A mile north along the coast, St Mary's Lighthouse is the other Whitley Bay landmark that keeps turning up on screen. Built in 1898 on a small tidal island reached by a causeway at low tide, the white tower is an unmistakable shape, and it has appeared across several seasons of Vera as the camera follows the detective along the Northumberland coast. Location tours of the series regularly stop here, and it is easy to see why: few backdrops say "North East coast" more instantly than the lighthouse with the tide sweeping in around the causeway.

Vera country

Whitley Bay does not stand alone on screen. Vera is filmed all along this coast and out into the wider county, taking in neighbouring Tynemouth and Cullercoats, the harbour village of Amble further north, and a string of Northumberland beaches, quaysides and moors. The show has done for the North East coast what other dramas have done for the Yorkshire Dales or Oxford, drawing visitors who want to walk the same seafronts and headlands they have watched from the sofa. The Whitley Bay stretch, with its dome and its lighthouse, is one of the most photographed links in that chain.

Seeing it for yourself

The best of it is free and out in the open. Walk the promenade past the Spanish City and up to St Mary's Island, check the tide times before you cross the causeway to the lighthouse, and you will recognise more of the coastline than you expect. Both landmarks are floodlit after dark, which is exactly how the Spanish City appears in some of its most atmospheric screen moments.

For more screen heritage nearby, Alnwick Castle's turn as Hogwarts, Downton Abbey's Brancaster and a Transformers blockbuster is covered in Alnwick on Screen, and Durham Cathedral's roles from Hogwarts to Asgard are set out in Durham on Screen.