Seaham Beach
Local highlightThe Durham beach people comb for sea glass, frosted pebbles of old bottle glass tumbled smooth by the North Sea
Come here with your eyes on the ground rather than the horizon. Seaham sits on the County Durham coast just south of Sunderland, a mix of sand and shingle backed by low cliffs, and its claim to fame is sea glass. A Victorian glassworks once stood above the shore and tipped its waste and broken bottles into the sea; decades of waves have rolled the fragments into smooth, frosted pebbles in greens, browns, blues and the occasional rarer colour, and collectors comb the tideline for them after a big storm. The stretch of coast north and south is protected as the Durham Coast (County Durham, SSSI), a rare bit of magnesian-limestone shore, and the King Charles III England Coast Path runs right along the top. If you want more of the same story, Nose’s Point and Blast Beach a little way south is where the coal-blackened beach from the film Alien 3 was filmed, now cleaned up.
