Marley Hill

Sunniside is a village in the Metropolitan Borough of Gateshead, which is located around 5.5 miles (9 km) from Newcastle upon Tyne. Prior to the creation of the county of Tyne and Wear in 1974, it was part of Whickham Urban District, which in turn formed a part of County Durham.Sunniside has a busy Front Street, with a collection of pubs, shops, and amenities. The village is surrounded mainly by farmland, with plantations of trees to the east, whilst also neighbouring the villages of Byermoor, Marley Hill and Whickham. The village is mostly housing, with older terraced properties situated near to the shops, and large housing estates built from the 1960s onward radiating from this area. It has a large park to the north of the village, next to Burnthouse Lane. Attractions near to the village include Beamish Museum and Tanfield Railway. The A692 road runs directly through the centre of the village and is used by many transport companies as a direct route to the town of Consett: this road carries some of the heaviest traffic through the borough of Gateshead daily. There have been a lot of private housing developments in the village of Sunniside, between 2017 and 2021, leading to increases in population and traffic. Sunniside has one of the highest rates of community council tax in the country (including London)

The Tanfield Railway is a 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge heritage railway in Gateshead and County Durham, England. Running on part of a former horse-drawn colliery wooden waggonway, later rope & horse, lastly rope & loco railway. It operates preserved industrial steam locomotives. The railway operates a passenger service every Sunday, plus other days, as well as occasional demonstration coal, goods and mixed trains. The line runs 3 miles (4.8 km) between a southern terminus at East Tanfield, Durham, to a northern terminus at Sunniside, Gateshead. Another station, Andrews House, is situated near the Marley Hill engine shed. A halt also serves the historic site of the Causey Arch. The railway claims it is "the world's oldest railway" because it runs on a section dating from 1725, other parts being in use since 1621. The railway is run by three bodies: "Friends of Tanfield Railway", "Tanfield Railway Trust" which owns the railway, the locomotives and rolling stock and "The Tanfield Railway Company" which operates the railway. "The Tanfield Railway Company" is split into four departments; each has a manager and director: Engineering who maintain locomotives, Operations including drivers and guards, Carriage & Waggon who preserve carriages, and Commercial which operates shops, events and the passenger side of operations.

Causey Bank Mires is a Site of Special Scientific Interest in the Derwentside district of County Durham, England. It lies alongside and to the west of the Tanfield Railway, just under 1 km north of the Causey Arch. The site consists of a series of flushes with scrub, surrounded by acid and neutral grassland, a habitat with a restricted distribution in County Durham. A number of locally rare plant species are found in the area, including globe-flower, Trollius europaeus.

Causey is a village in County Durham, in England. It is situated a short distance to the north of Stanley.

Whickham School is a coeducational secondary school and sixth form located in Whickham (near Newcastle upon Tyne) in Tyne and Wear, England.Formerly Whickham Comprehensive School, it opened in 1962 as a replacement for the small, 'all-age' Victorian school in the village centre. A much larger school was required due to the large house-building programme that was taking place. It holds around 1700 pupils between the ages of 11-19 and has 300 members of staff. It offers a range of vocational and traditional qualifications at Key Stage 4 and 5, including GCSE, BTEC and A-Level.

Whickham Football Club are an English football club based in Whickham, Tyne and Wear, playing in the Northern League Division One in the English football league system. They won the FA Vase in 1981. The team plays its home matches at the Glebe Sports Ground, Rose Avenue, Whickham.

Byermoor is a village near Burnopfield and Sunniside in England. The village has a population of around 100 and contains a school (Sacred Heart) and a church. The village sits on the South side of the A692 on a ridge overlooking the Derwent Valley and the nearby village of Burnopfield. It lies just within the County of Tyne and Wear and is the last village on the old turnpike road to Wolsingham before it reaches the border with County Durham. Byermoor colliery occupied the area to the South of the church prior to closure in 1968, along with four terraces built to house its workforce. Nearest to the A692 were Double Row and New Row and beyond these, Pit Row and Furnace Row. The only one of these houses to survive is the former colliery manager's house that stood at the Eastern end of New Row and was considerably larger than the others. One of the colliery's reservoirs stood alongside this, and the site of the reservoir is now occupied by some small industrial units. The access road to these was originally built as access to Double Row and the colliery itself, while just to the South of this, the road that served New Row is still in place, albeit fenced off and overgrown from a couple of yards beyond the junction with the main road. The remaining housing sits to the North of the church and is made up mainly of semi-detached houses (Ravensworth Crescent, Gibside Crescent, Strathmore Crescent and Bowes Crescent) built by Whickham Urban District Council between 1920 and 1922, as well as a row of four houses constructed around the same time by John Bowes & Partners (at the time the owners of the colliery and the Bowes Railway) to house colliery officials. These are accessed via the lane that originally led to High Marley Hill School, and now continues only a short distance from the end of Bowes Crescent, before becoming a footpath leading to the still extant school building. The school was attended by non-catholic children from the village up until its closure in 1960 due to falling pupil numbers, a fate which also befell the nearby Marley Hill Primary School in 2010. The Collieries and associated coke ovens at Byermoor and Marley Hill were the only significant local sources of employment for the inhabitants of the village, with residents now travelling further afield by car or bus for work. Bus services from Consett and Stanley pass through the village on their way to Newcastle, some via the Team Valley and Gateshead town centre, and some via Whickham and the MetroCentre transport interchange, along with a single bus between Rowlands Gill and the Team Valley early on weekday mornings, returning via the same route in the evening. Although the village had a railway for many years, there was never a passenger service, with the only rail traffic being wagons to and from the colliery and coke ovens and coal traffic from other collieries passing through - either North on its way to the staithes at Jarrow, or unwashed coal from the screens at Marley Hill and Blackburn Fell heading South to the washery at the Hobson Pit about a mile away. This through traffic also ceased not long after the closure of the colliery when the Hobson Pit (which had for some time been the only remaining colliery on the line beyond Byermoor) ceased production later the same year.

Tanfield is a former mining village in County Durham, England, near Stanley, and the location of Tanfield Railway, the Causey Arch and Tanfield School.

Whickham is a village in Tyne and Wear, North East England. It is in the Metropolitan Borough of Gateshead. The village is on high ground overlooking the River Tyne and 5 miles (8 km) south-west of Newcastle upon Tyne. It was formerly governed under the historic county of County of Durham.

Beamish Hall is a mid-18th-century country house, now converted to a hotel, which stands in 24 acres (97,000 m2) of grounds near the town of Stanley, County Durham. It is a Grade II* listed building.

Crookgate Bank is a village in County Durham, in England. It is situated to the east of Burnopfield.

Derwenthaugh Coke Works was a coking plant on the River Derwent near Swalwell in Gateshead. The works were built in 1928 on the site of the Crowley's Iron Works, which had at one time been the largest iron works in Europe. The coke works was closed and demolished in the late 1980s, and replaced by Derwenthaugh Park.