The road to the coast is bordered with fenced-off industrial land, terracotta-coloured silos and a lot of sky. There are the locked gates of Britishvolt, the embattled battery manufacturer that has promised to bring a sustainable energy industry to the former pit village of Cambois (pronounced Cammus). On the beach, the sand is black-flecked with coal. The pit closed in 1968, houses condemned and residents pushed to move out. But people stayed. “There’s not much in the way of anything really,” says one local resident, Becca Sproat, except for a strong sense of community.
This isolated patch of Northumberland seems an unlikely place for the German choreographer Esther Huss to have set up shop, after 20 years in London. But her husband, the playwright Alex Oates, who grew up down the coast in Whitley Bay, brought her here. “I fell in love with the oddness of this place, this meeting of the industrial and nature and being slightly outside mainstream society. It’s creatively interesting,” she says. Just as importantly, they could afford to live here.
