South Shields Museum and Art Gallery

South Shields Museum and Art Gallery is the principal museum serving South Tyneside, telling the rich and varied story of this coastal community at the mouth of the River Tyne from prehistoric times to the present day. Managed by South Tyneside Council, the museum combines engaging local and social history galleries with a programme of art exhibitions, and is most famous for its comprehensive celebration of Catherine Cookson — the best-selling novelist who was born in East Jarrow and set many of her novels in the streets and communities of South Tyneside.

The museum's social history collections document the lives of working people in South Tyneside across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with honesty and depth. The shipbuilding and heavy engineering industries that dominated the Tyne for over a century, the mining communities of the inland collieries, the fishing heritage of the river mouth and the commercial life of South Shields town centre are all represented through objects, photographs, documentary records and personal testimonies.

The Catherine Cookson gallery is the museum's most visited section, drawing visitors from across Britain and beyond who have grown up with her novels. Cookson was born Kate McMullen in 1906 in the poverty of Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a domestic servant, and rose to become one of the most widely read novelists in the English language. Her autobiographical writings and her fiction — much of it set in the Tyneside she knew so intimately — offer an extraordinary literary window into the lives of working-class communities in the North East across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The gallery displays personal possessions, photographs, manuscripts and film material that bring her remarkable life story to life.

The art gallery presents a changing programme of contemporary and historic exhibitions alongside a permanent collection of works with local connections. The museum building itself, a handsome late Victorian structure in the heart of South Shields, is a fine example of the civic ambition that characterised the cultural institutions of the industrial North East in the late nineteenth century.

South Shields Museum is free to enter and serves as an important community resource, with a busy events and learning programme that engages local schools, families and adult learners throughout the year.