Chester-le-Street

The men and women of the Chester-le-Street Amateur Cine Society take a leisurely inventory of their home town at the end of the 60s. Highlights include a snapshot of the men of the Model Engineering Society at Riverside Park, so enthralled in their miniature world of superbly crafted steam engines, the kids barely get a look in. The grounds of the ‘baronial looking’ Lumley Castle also play host to a children’s pageant, disabled archery and angling on the River Wear.

This eclectic compilation of footage chronicles a town that was once both a centre of trade and pilgrimage. The signs of modern life arise beside the older fabric of Chester-le-Street. The concrete AI motorway bridge is built over the Wear as trains continue to cross the magnificent railway viaduct over Chester Burn; the spire of the blackened St Mary and St Cuthbert Church rises behind a new leisure centre, where young girls and boys try out the dance grooves and haircuts of the 60s era and sip Pepsi Cola. The pageant pictured in the film, in one sequence performing the arrival of the body of St Cuthbert, may have formed part of the Septecentenary of the Parish Church 1267-1967, an event held in 1967.