retiredmartin

July 2026. Cramlington. Northumberland.

When you say “Northumberland” these days you think Harry Potter, posh Cambridgeshire families at the beach, and a small island covered in bird muck. But there’s an awful lot of old mining towns before you get there, I can tell you.

I spent ages getting ChatGPT to work out the best way to get by rail from Newcastle to those industrial towns to the north, hoping to use the re-opened Northumberland line to tick a Seaton pub that as it turned out was closed anyway. 77% of my AI enquiries concern buses and trains.

ChatGPT had told me to buy a “Pop” card from the metro to get unlimited travel for a fiver. The metro staff told me I couldn’t and would have to send away for one, which is useless for tourists. They advised I buy a “TNE Day Saver” that would cover Northern Rail to Cramlington. But that was wrong, too.

So it was up early on Tuesday to joing the throngs heading towards Morpeth.

Three young girls back from Uni spoke of going “Back to Crammy”, the only passengers to join me on the platform at ten to nine. A weird tourist guide awaited;

I think it’s a walking route. I knew a straight 12 minutes walk past the town centre would bring me to the new Beer Guide entry. Well, I never saw a town, just a series of retail parks, but on the dot of licensed opening (9) I arrived at John the Clerk of Cramlington.

A small village in the 12th century became a small mining town in the 19th,

and then a New Town in the late 60s.

A growing town of nearly 30,000, astonishingly, which made the Spoons seem rather quiet. More babies than Old Boys in a pleasant old pub with ultra-rare “hand pump with silly name” among the strong beers.

Nothing speaks to the beauty of Northumberland as much as a Freedom Breakfast and 9am pint of Maximus for a fiver in a mining town Spoons.

It was the only pint bought in 22 minutes, and it wasn’t great, a bit rough in fact. I didn’t get much further with that pint than what you see above, so I may have left a quid’s worth of beer*. No, you take it back.

In and out in 22 minutes left me nearly an hour to explore the town, though apparently the best bit was a good half an hour west at Northumberlandia, which looks like it’s best seen from the sky.

The Ordnance Survey extract reveals that the Spoons is in the old village, just past a vast (VAST) indoor shopping centre that I’d missed on the walk.

There’s a surprising amount of cask in that old village, with a delivery of Hobgoblin to the Blagdon Arms,

with a little sticker on the odd looking Plough reminding me I’d been here, ooh, a long time ago.

But probably not when John the Clerk (no relation to the Stockport CAMRA chairman) was around.

Cramlington appears to be seen as a good place to live, despite the lack of history,

and that vast Manor Walks efficient if unexciting shopping centre is as busy as any I’ve seen in the UK this year (quite a contrast with Newton Aycliffe).

Not an empty unit in sight, with Greggs opening up a second shop, barely 10 seconds walk from the first, the queue stretching as far as the eye can see.

*_{Left on the table, too, when there’s all those hanging baskets about.}