Hello from Angus Stephenson

[Angus Stephenson]

Thanks for accepting me into the group, which I found by looking up old pictures of the area. I'm a semi-retired archaeologist who worked for the Museum of London for many years and moved back to my family home in Gateshead, Tyneside, a few years ago, when my mother died suddenly aged 88. I applied to join for two reasons.

The first reason is because I had family in the area. Somehow my mum managed to be born in Dunstan to parents living and working in London. I've no idea how that would have come about. She never lived with her parents, although I was fairly close to them later until my grandfather died in 1974, but was brought up by her grandmother in Alnmouth, and had uncles and aunts living in Lesbury and Warkworth (family name Arthur, mostly buried in Embleton). I will be looking into the whole story, as at present it seems hard to fathom out, and some of your members may be able to point me in useful directions.

Secondly, I was coming up to retirement anyway (now being 68) but when I moved back to the North-East, the Museum of London was given the contract for running a project called Citizan, which stands for the "Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network" (website at citizan.org.uk), and I do voluntary work for them, recording training and so on, but mostly just keeping my eye in on the sea shore. Some of you may have seen the Channel 4 TV series "Britain at Low Tide", much of which was about the project. Basically it is all about recording archaeological stuff along the coast which is under threat from sea erosion and the Amble / Hauxley areas are obvious ones to keep an eye on, so I expect I will be asking you about the odd things that turn up.

Cheers,

Angus