Amble is a town on the North Sea coast of Northumberland, England, at the mouth of the River Coquet; Coquet Island is visible from its beaches and harbour. In 2021, the parish of Amble by the Sea had a population of 5,860.
Toponymy There are two suggested origins of the place-name Amble. One theory suggests a Goidelic origin from Am Béal, meaning "tidal inlet", and is attributed to the historical presence of Irish missionaries in the area who spoke that language despite most of the local population not doing so. An earlier theory, originating with Eilert Ekwall, is an Old English origin of Amma/Anna bile, meaning "Amma's/Anna's headland".; Bethany Fox, 'The P-Celtic Place-Names of North-East England and South-East Scotland', The Heroic Age, 10 (2007), http://www.heroicage.org/issues/10/fox.html (appendix at http://www.heroicage.org/issues/10/fox-appendix.html).
There are sources indicating that the name and variants thereof – such as Ambell and Ambhill – may have been in use as long ago as 1203 AD. Northumberland was not recorded in the Domesday Book.
History Various urns, cists, flint spearheads and other evidence of ancient burials were found near to Amble in the 1880s and 1890s. Some of those remains showed signs of cremation.
Outcrops of coal had been found along the coastline between the River Coquet and the River Tyne at least as long ago as the reign of Elizabeth I, when unsuccessful attempts had been made to extract and transport it in an economic manner. A failed proposal to use Amble as a port for the shipment of locally sourced coal and salt is recorded in 1618, although this failure did not discourage William Hewitt from making the then rare decision to reserve for himself the rights to the coal when he sold the townships of Amble and Hauxley in 1630. A significant factor in the failure of all the early attempts, when compared to the success of ventures in the valleys of the Tyne and the Wear, was that of economies of scale. Those more successful areas at that time had plentiful easily accessed reserves which encouraged investment and the sharing of fixed costs such as harbour facilities, buildings and machinery among a large number of enterprises.
The early situation changed as the operators in the valleys exhausted the cheaply extracted ores and found themselves having to mine deeper and also further away from the rivers that were used for transport, thus increasing their costs per unit of coal mined. Some coal was probably being shipped from previously uneconomic places such as Amble and Blyth by the end of the seventeenth century, and it was certainly being extracted at Amble by that time.
Amble grew in the nineteenth century as collieries were opened; and the newly built railway links to the Northumberland coalfields made the town a centre for the sea transport and export of coal. Prior to the development of the harbour, the town was "little more than a hamlet", according to the architectural guides originally compiled by Nikolaus Pevsner. The principal local mineworkings were those at Broomhill and at Radcliffe.
The harbour at Amble was the smallest of those that served the coalfields of Northumberland and Durham. It was originally under the control of the Dukes of Northumberland until, in 1837, a port authority – the Warkworth Harbour Commission – was created to supervise improvements. Following consultations with various engineers, the proposals submitted by John Rennie in 1838 were accepted. These included the construction of breakwaters to the north and the south, which were eventually completed in 1849 at a total cost of £116,000. The larger northern breakwater, which was originally in length, was extended in the early part of the 20th century but suffered from the undermining effects of the tide and required shoring with slag brought in from the ironworks of Hartlepool and Middlesbrough.
The construction of docks had also been mooted in 1844 and 1850 but the arrival of the railway led instead to the construction of coal staithes. A change in consulting engineer in 1869 resulted in extensive dredging of the harbour but did not greatly improve the prospects of the port. Shipments of coal amounted to over 500,000 tons by 1914, but this was a modest volume when compared to the other regional ports. Robert Rennison notes with regard to the relative lack of prosperity that the port served a "small and discrete coalfield".
The railway branched on a single track to Amble at a point near to Chevington and was opened in September 1849 by the York, Newcastle and Berwick Railway, initially as a freight-only line. Passenger services between Amble and Chevington began in 1879, following the construction of a station at Broomhill in 1878 and facilities at Amble itself. The line between Amble and Broomhill was double-track. The passenger service ended in July 1930 and the general freight service was withdrawn in 1964. Coal traffic, which had amounted to around 750,000 tons annually in the 1920s, came to an end in 1969 when the line was closed completely.
Other industries, such as sea fishing and both ship building and repair in an area known as the Braid had expanded with the growth of the town. Traditional Northumbrian fishing vessels such as cobles had previously sheltered in the natural harbour for centuries. One local coble manufacturing business, J. & J. Harrison, founded in 1870, had been the first to introduce engines to the form and was still producing it in 1973, along with more generally utilised craft.
Amble Golf Club was founded in 1910 but disappeared in the late 1950s."Amble Golf Club", "Golf’s Missing Links".
On 1 December 1943, a Royal Air Force Short Stirling Mk III (EH880) which departed RAF Mepal, Cambridgeshire, had completed its mission of dropping sea mines off the coast of Denmark. The aircraft was due to land at RAF Acklington. The pilots attempted a second approach to Acklington in bad weather; the aircraft crashed into Cliff House Farm, Togston. Six of the seven crew died along with five children on the ground: a 1997 housing development in the western edge of the town has streets named after the children who perished.
Present day
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's guide of 1992 says that "Today Amble is a not unpleasant small town but has few buildings of distinction." Of those, he records the church of St Cuthbert, which was originally constructed in 1870 and expanded in 1929, and its associated 1876-built vicarage. In addition, he notes some early Victorian terraces on Queen Street and North Street, as well as "a fragment of wall with a C 15 window, square-headed and of two trefoiled lights with uncusped sunk panels above. Though it may seem unlikely, this is an in situ fragment of the medieval manor house. It belonged to Tynemouth Priory and may have served as a monastic cell." This latter is found on High Street.
The fishing industry continues in Amble today, albeit with a reduced number of vessels, as does a small marine industry which is mainly concentrated around the construction and repair of yachts and other pleasure craft. However, in 2001, Ken Bell International, a seafood exporter, closed down its production facility in Amble, at the cost of 38 jobs. A small industrial estate is located to the southwest of the town, whose clients include vehicle repairs and telecommunications companies. However, , most of the units on the estate are unoccupied and the town has been affected by the closure of nearby businesses, such as a site operated by Alcan, as well as two food processing businesses in the town that employed nearly 300 people. A proposed retail development by Tesco had also been postponed due to poor trading conditions. The town's mayor announced that "the prospects for jobs are very bleak indeed."
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution maintains a station at Amble. Amble RNLI station has two lifeboats – the Shannon Class 'Shannon Elizabeth and Leonard', which replaced the Mersey Class lifeboat 'The Four Boys' in November 2016 after the station raised £200,000 towards the new vessel's £2,000,000 cost. Amble's second lifeboat is the 'D Class' Inshore Lifeboat (or ILB), the 'Mildred Holcroft'. There have been lifeboats operating from the town since 1842 and, for example, between 30 and 40 people perished in various wrecks near to Amble on 17–18 December 1872.
Regeneration and community development Amble had been a recipient of regional development assistance from 1965, when the restructuring of coal-mining operations, led by Alfred Robens of the National Coal Board, had a substantial detrimental effect on the local economy. Unemployment in the town was then 6.5 per cent, compared to a national average of 1.5 per cent. By 1969, the Northern Economic Planning Council was proposing the closure of the port, which no longer had any coal traffic, in favour of redevelopment for leisure purposes. The same year saw the closure of the nearby airbase of RAF Acklington, where some of the population worked, and local unemployment exceeded 13 per cent as proposals for a substantial mushroom farming operation that would alleviate the problems were made. The farming operation failed to materialise due to lack of financial support from the government.
The development assistance was withdrawn in 1984, at which time a newspaper report noted that over 30 per cent of the 6,000 population were unemployed, with 80 per cent of council house tenants and 45 per cent of home owners receiving benefits or rebates for their housing costs and over 25 per cent of children claiming free school meals. The change in official status was one of the "glaring anomalies" of a government review, resulting from the town being reclassified as part of the "travel to work area" for Alnwick rather than a part of the industrialised regions to the south. Four businesses had been encouraged by the assistance to locate in the town during the preceding decade, creating around 400 jobs.
Amble Development Trust is a company operating as a charity with the purpose of working with other bodies to regenerate the town. It was established in 1994. The Trust has been involved in numerous local projects to develop Amble both physically and socially, including having input on improvements to Queen Street, which is the main shopping thoroughfare. The work of the Trust and its associated body, the Amble Strategic Partnership, was recognised by the Royal Town Planning Institute in 2003 when they were given the institute's Planning for Town Regeneration award. This came soon after the same organisation had awarded them their Regional Award for Planning Achievement. Recently new housing has been built, adding an extra 900 homes, and a new hotel called the Amble Inn opened in 2019 bringing much-needed employment to the town. Another project of the Trust is The Ambler, a bi-monthly community newspaper and website, established in 2000 and operated mainly by volunteers. The free bi-monthly newspaper is delivered to every house and business in the town.
Demography Samuel Lewis reported a township population of 247 in 1831. By the seventh edition of his Topographical Dictionary of England, which was published in 1848, this figure had risen to 724. The population was reported as being 1,040 in 1851. The 1871 census recorded a population of 1,233, spread among 233 houses.
+ Population of Amble Urban District, 1901 – 1961 1901 1911 1921 1931 1939 1951 1961Male 2,475 2,427 2,006 2,197 2,292 2,427Female 2,406 2,424 2,199 2,483 2,390 2,473Total 4,428 4,881 4,851 4,205 4,680 4,682 4,900
D. J. Rowe notes that, in common with many Northumbrian towns, historically there was "endemic" overcrowding of the population in Amble. The number of houses that averaged over two people per room was 32.6 per cent in 1911. This figure, while not atypical for the region, was above average for the county and well above that for other regions of the country, such as London.