is a small town in
County Durham that grew up around a
Harbour on the
North Sea coast of north-east
England . It has a
Grade I Listed small church, St Mary the Virgin, with a late
7th Century nave which resembles the church at
Escomb in many respects. St Mary the Virgin is regarded as one of the 20 oldest surviving churches in the UK.
Until the early years of the
19th Century Seaham was a small farming community whose only claim to fame was that the local landowner's daughter,
Anne Isabella Milbanke , was married at Seaham Hall to
Lord Byron on
2 January 1815 . Byron began writing his ''Hebrew Melodies'' at Seaham and they were published in April 1815.
It would seem that Byron was bored in wintry Seaham, though the sea enthralled him. As he wrote in a letter to a friend:
:"Upon this dreary coast we have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks; and I have this day dined upon fish, which probably dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam."
The marriage was short-lived, but long enough to have been a drain on the Milbanke estate. The area's fortunes changed when the Milbankes sold out to
3rd Marquess Of Londonderry , who built a harbour in
1828 to facilitate transport of goods from the industries locally encouraged (the first coal mine was begun in 1845). However, this harbour later proved inadequate to deal with the millions of tonnes of
Coal being mined from the nearby mines, and the
6th Marquess commissioned engineers
Patrick Meik and
Charles Meik to reclaim land and extend and deepen the dock. It was officially opened in
1905 .
In 1928 production started at the last town colliery to be opened, Vane Tempest. Yet by 1992, after years of mine-related deaths and tons of excavated coal, all three pits (Dawdon Colliery, Vane Tempest Colliery and Seaham Colliery - known locally as "the Knack") had closed, a process accelerated by the miners' strike and cheap coal imports from Eastern Europe. The town, however, is slowly recovering, though the limited regeneration is not popular with all sections of the community who would prefer to see more jobs being brought to the area.
Seaham has some of the best beaches in the country and has easy transport links to the eastern side of the country. From 2001 most of the Durham coastline was designated as a ‘heritage coast’ and Seaham beach was entirely restored. In
2002 the Turning the Tide project won, jointly with the
Eden Project , the prize for Outstanding Achievement in Regeneration in the annual
Royal Institute Of Chartered Surveyors awards.
Today, the town has a population of around 22,000 and is served by
Seaham Railway Station .
