At Salt Market Social, neighbours, artists and filmmakers gathered for From Our Streets to Our Seas: Tales of Heritage, Memory and Myth — an immersive night of film, animation, music and conversation that paid tribute to North Shields’ past while looking to its creative future.

Part of the North Shields 800 celebrations, the event turned the waterfront venue into a living time capsule — a place where voices, photographs and sounds merged to tell the story of a community shaped by the tides.

The Gannie Brothers’ “Tides”

The evening opened with the premiere of Tides, a new short film by Sam and Anthony Gannie, two North East filmmakers whose work often blurs the line between documentary and poetic realism.

Shot on location around the Tyne, Tides captures what it means to belong to a coastal town in constant motion — where generations have lived by the water, working, waiting and watching the river change. The film threads together fragments of the quay’s daily life — the rhythm of boats, laughter in pubs, gulls circling over warehouses — forming a visual love letter to Shields.

The Gannie brothers are no strangers to telling local stories. Sam, a director, and Anthony, a writer-producer, have worked together on short films including 1AD (2018) and Companion (2017), as well as music videos rooted in Northern identity. Their visual style — quiet, atmospheric, but deeply emotional — has earned them a growing reputation across the region’s film circuit.

Animation Meets Oral History

Following Tides, five new animated shorts lit up the big screen — created by Sheryl Jenkins with sound design by Staithe. Each piece reimagined fragments of local folklore and oral history, using voices and memories gathered from people in North Shields.

The result was a series of small but powerful windows into the town’s identity — a sailor’s tale retold through ink and wave, a grandmother’s song reimagined as motion, a myth transformed into movement. It showed how animation, like storytelling itself, can carry heritage into the future.

Walking Through the Past

Away from the screen, artist Olly Armstrong’s story trail invited visitors to explore the Fish Quay on foot, discovering words, sound and memory embedded in familiar places.

Inside the venue, an exhibition from the AmberSide Collection transformed the walls of Salt Market Social into an impromptu gallery of Shields life. Black-and-white photographs from Amber’s vast documentary archive captured shipyard workers, market traders and families along the Tyne — everyday people whose stories form the backbone of local history.

Among the collection were images by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, the Finnish-born photographer and filmmaker who co-founded Amber Film & Photography Collective in 1968. Her portraits from the Step by Step series — including North Shields, 1980s — offered an intimate glimpse into community life, celebrating ordinary moments with extraordinary care.

About Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen moved to the North East in the late 1960s and co-founded the Amber Collective to document working-class life through film and photography. Her landmark projects Byker and Step by Step are internationally recognised and her archive, the AmberSide Collection, is part of UNESCO’s UK Memory of the World Register. Her work remains a cornerstone of social documentary in Britain.

The Panel: Heritage and Modern Culture

The night closed with a Q&A that brought generations together. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen joined Geoff Kirkwood — better known as Man Power, a North Shields-born musician, DJ and creative producer — to discuss how stories of place continue to shape identity.

Kirkwood, whose work under the Man Power moniker often explores cultural belonging, spoke about how growing up in Shields informs his music and community projects. Sirkka reflected on the endurance of documentary work — how photographs become witnesses when memories fade.

Their conversation, relaxed but resonant, bridged art forms and eras: photography and electronic music, archive and innovation, all united by a shared sense of place.

Pinwheel and Tyneside Cinema: Producing Stories That Matter

Behind the event were Pinwheel, a North East-based creative producing company led by Katy Fuller, and Tyneside Cinema, one of the UK’s oldest independent cinemas. Together, they’ve worked to take film beyond traditional screens — bringing storytelling into public spaces and reconnecting communities with their own heritage.

“This project was about rediscovering what’s already here — the stories that have always been part of North Shields,” said Fuller. “It’s about creating space for people to see their lives reflected and celebrated.”

More Than Nostalgia

What made From Our Streets to Our Seas stand out wasn’t just the quality of the art — it was the atmosphere. Locals chatted over food from MedHeads, music drifted from the stage, and generations mixed easily. It felt like an event built by the town, for the town.

Supported by Historic England, the North East Combined Authority, the Community Foundation and the British Film Institute (BFI), the project celebrated Shields not as a museum piece, but as a living, evolving place — one that continues to inspire creativity.

Looking Forward

As the crowd spilled out into the night, the Quay lights reflected across the Tyne like flickers of memory — reminders that history isn’t something that sits behind us. It flows, changes, and returns, just like the tide.

From Our Streets to Our Seas wasn’t a farewell to the past; it was an invitation to keep telling stories — in film, in song, in conversation — for the next 800 years.

Event + Official Info

Gannie Brothers

Amber / Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

Pinwheel & Tyneside Cinema

Man Power (Geoff Kirkwood)

Additional References

Funding & Supporters

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