Mention Durham and people will inevitably think of two things: the ancient city with its stunning Norman architecture, the cathedral and university, or the coal-mining industry that flourished further out in colliery communities before being asphyxiated following the miners’ strike of 1984-85.
When discussing the north-east few ever remark on the suburbs, yet it was here, halfway between these two worlds, that my outlook was shaped.
Belmont is a series of postwar housing estates built on an old Durham parish for young professionals looking to start families – people like my parents, who moved there in 1967 and have stayed ever since. Serving a population of less than 10,000 were bus routes into the city in one direction and Sunderland in the other, a shopping precinct, library and the A1(M) motorway to take residents to Edinburgh, London and St Tropez if they kept driving. It was famous for one thing: in a house on Broomside Lane belonging to a local scrap dealer made good that Michael Caine uttered the immortal words: “You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape,” before slapping Alf Roberts in the seminal crime film Get Carter (1971).
The maze of cul-de-sacs and matrix of alleyways can be disorienting. Most of Belmont’s semi-detached houses look the same: neat gardens, clipped conifers and gleaming cars. I took comfort in the uniformity of the place, and still do. I love the smell of warm tarmac in the summer, and just beyond the estate lay another world of farmed fields, scrublands where camps could be built and tadpoles found. The names of places within the parish sounded almost mystical – Ramside, Gilesgate, Dragonville.
Some call these spaces edgelands, I simply called them home.
I was a part-feral child fully trusted by my parents. I spent a lot of time up trees or trespassing on municipal roofs, then in 1983 at the age of seven, pint-sized and an avid reader of Judy Blume, I began taking the bus into Durham to spend entire days wandering alone. I would browse books, records, antiques, eat chip butties and talk to strangers; the police would probably be notified now. In these solitary perambulations a natural curiosity for people and places was born.
Returning to Belmont in the evening was like returning to a warm, familiar embrace. Everything was in its place.
The comprehensive school on the estate was decent but for me a noisy nightmare, where my diminutive stature meant wit was relied on rather than might. In my teenage years the city became my stomping ground, via skateboarding and then music. What luck to grow up where the ghostly forefathers of English Christianity stalked the cloisters nearby, and where the verdant banks of the River Wear offered endless locations for drinking, drug experimentation, sexual encounters and, on occasion, sleeping rough.
At 15 I played in a hardcore punk band, which took us further afield; facing down rightwing skinheads in unknown territories was educational, and I’ll always argue the case for the suburbs producing so much of our best culture.
The big change in Belmont is where once it was a place busy with children playing, now the streets are quieter. Those children have grown and moved on, and today’s kids are perhaps kept on shorter leads. I still love the sound of the motorway at night nearby though. The speeding cars sound like ocean waves breaking on distant shores, and I keep returning.
• Benjamin Myers’s The Gallows Pole won the Walter Scott prize. His most recent book is Under the Rock.
