River Tyne Old Buoys

What do you do with redundant marine buoys? These substantial chunks of metal do not easily lend themselves to reuse and needed imagination and creativity to come up with a solution. In the case of the River Tyne “Old Buoys”, two solutions in fact.

The Cycling Buoys

Adjacent to the Low Lights car park, a short distance downstream from the Fish Quay, are three redundant navigation buoys that have been imaginatively used to mark the point just west of them where three national cycle routes converge.

National Route 1, stretches from Dover to John O' Groats within which the section known locally as the Coast and Castles route stretches from Edinburgh to Newcastle. National Route 72, or Hadrian's Cycleway, stretches from Ravenglass in Cumbria to South Shields. National Route 10 forms most of the Reivers Route which stretches from North Shields to Carlisle and Whitehaven via Kielder Forest.

There is also another, red and black painted, old buoy close by numbered 72 NCN. For those hardy cyclists starting or finishing at the buoys there is a new refreshment kiosk and, importantly, there are toilets at the nearby car park.

Tyne Tunnel Buoys

When the second Tyne Tunnel was completed in 2011, an artwork made up of three redundant marine buoys was installed near the northbound exit. The buoys are painted with historic railway poster-style images of the North Tyneside coast. When viewed from the Tyne Tunnel northbound exit, they show St Mary's Lighthouse, Tynemouth Priory and a surfer.

Thanks to David Dixon for this photopgraph.

It can also be viewed from the A187 but again this is a main road and stopping is not recommended. The paintings from this view are of a cyclist, an inshore lifeboat and a fishing boat.

Unfortunately, and perhaps unusually, there is no public access to the installation. Nonetheless, as some 60,000 vehicles a day use the tunnel the artwork will be seen by many.

The installation was a joint project by North Tyneside Council and Tyne Tunnel operator TT2. The artist, Lynda Nelson, from Jarrow, produced the designs and painted them by hand.

Thanks to Terry Gardner for the photos and information.