Blyth on Screen: Film and TV Locations

Northumberland's coast has quietly become one of the most filmed stretches of British shoreline, and Blyth sits right in the middle of it. The town's wide South Beach, its working harbour and the candy-coloured beach huts on the promenade give film crews a ready-made seaside backdrop, and the biggest name to make use of it is the ITV crime drama Vera.

Vera on the Blyth coast

For fourteen series, Brenda Blethyn's DCI Vera Stanhope has driven her battered Land Rover the length of the Northumberland coast, and the cameras have more than once come to Blyth and its neighbours. Cast and crew were spotted filming in the town, with Blethyn and the famous Land Rover seen around Blyth beach, and the show's final series in 2024 returned to nearby Cambois, where the Queens Head pub was used for crowd scenes. Just down the coast at Seaton Sluice, Blethyn has been photographed in the trench coat running through scenes for the series more than once.

What makes Vera such a good fit for our part of the coast is that it never pretends to be somewhere else. The fictional town of Mardle is played by the real coastal villages of Alnmouth and Amble to the north, and Vera's lonely clifftop cottage sits out on Holy Island. The show wears the North East openly, so the beaches, harbours and headlands you see on screen are the same ones you can walk yourself, Blyth's South Beach among them.

The huts, the harbour and the High Light

Blyth's own landmarks are photogenic in their own right. The twenty candy-striped beach huts on the promenade, completed in 2017 and each carrying a seaside name and artwork by local schoolchildren, have become one of the most photographed sights on the Northumberland coast. The harbour, with its offshore wind turbines and the striking Commissioners Quay, gives a working-port texture that a studio cannot fake, and the Blyth Battery coastal defence museum at South Beach is a genuine slice of wartime history a few steps from the sand.

Tucked inland on Bath Terrace, the Grade II listed High Light lighthouse is one of the oldest structures in the town, first built in 1788 and raised twice before it was finally de-activated in 1985. It is the kind of quietly distinctive building that gives Blyth its character on and off camera.

The wider Northumberland shore on screen

Blyth's stretch of coast is one chapter in a much longer story. An hour up the A1, Alnwick Castle has stood in for Hogwarts, Downton Abbey's Brancaster Castle and a Transformers battleground, and we have covered its remarkable screen career in full in our guide to Alnwick on screen. Inland, Durham Cathedral has doubled for Hogwarts corridors, the Asgardian palace in Avengers: Endgame and a Tudor royal palace, as set out in the Durham on screen guide on our sister site.

Between the two, the North East's beaches, castles and moors have carried everything from period drama to Hollywood blockbusters. Blyth's contribution is smaller than a castle standing in for a wizarding school, but it is real, and it is ours: a working seaside town whose beach and harbour have quietly appeared on some of the most-watched drama on British television.

Seeing it for yourself

The best of Blyth's on-screen scenery costs nothing to visit. Walk the promenade past the beach huts, follow the seafront round to the harbour and Commissioners Quay, and call in at Blyth Battery on a summer weekend when the volunteer-run museum is open. Bring a camera. You will not be the first to point one at this coast, and you certainly will not be the last.