Cachet number

9:25am Tuesday 10th June 2008

The tide has turned at Seaham, once a decaying coastal town. The column dips its toes in.

WHEN people come to Seaham, as the Addams Family almost did, they may be in for a sea-change surprise.

A survey last month revealed that house prices in the former east Durham pit town have risen these past five years faster than in any other coastal area in Britain - up 193 per cent to an admittedly modest average of £126,348.

We went one sunny Saturday, disporting chance, folk and their dogs almost hurling themselves into the waves in their eagerness to show how greatly the tide has turned.

Once you couldn't even get a Sunday School charabanc to Seaham. Now, if the signs at the nascent East Shore Village are to be believed, it's going to be the place to be.

Some of it, of course, may simply be spin-off from the astonishing success and extraordinary cachet of the Seaham Hall Hotel - and as anyone will tell you, this column's a cachet number, anyway - but the town's transformation is impressive.

It's the place hitherto best known for its links with the poet Byron and with the Londonderry and Vane Tempest families.

This was the Londonderry air.

East Shore Village is on the site of the former Vane Tempest colliery. A website now talks of "almost rural surroundings", of "stunning, panoramic seascapes" and of how the Church Street shopping centre is "just yards" away.

So it is, about 1,760 yards.

Many of the new houses are inarguably impressive, the "apartments" externally less so. Surrounding parkland has the now almost obligatory sculptures, some of them apparently based on "single-cell organisms".

Reference in the same paragraph to apartments and single cells is, of course, entirely coincidental. They've two bedrooms, anyway.

East Shore Village also has a small Sainsbury's - very couth - two takeaways, a hairdresser's, a kitchen and bathroom place and a Marston's pub called The Crow's Nest with lots of folk outside and quite a few within.

It's a modern pub in both manner and manners, so that - at least with the young lady who served a pint of Merrie Monk - the words "please" and "thank you"

seemed to be as redundant as a Dawdon collier.

We walked down the transformed promenade to the Harbour View Hotel, opposite which the former police station is now also converted into award-winning apartments.

Electronic gates now help keep undesirables out and not, as previously, keep them in.

Once owned by Seaham lad and former England footballer Terry Fenwick, the Harbour View has also had a facelift.

There was fresh decor, three hand pumps, friendly barmaid, decent looking menu with a better then usual vegetarian selection - perhaps rustic Mediterranean salad, leek and cheddar bread and butter or mushroom and asparagus risotto - and something called chicken St Tropez.

Though there's a restaurant, it was difficult in the bar to find a haven between big screen and bandit. An elderly couple, the lad in a colliery cap, sat in a corner, he roundly rebuked by his lady wife for dunking crisps in his half shandy.

It seemed a pity. All those years down below and a man can't even dunk his cheese and onion. Whatever the cost of a house, the real price is that Seaham has discovered solecisms.

Since the pub's clearly trying hard, it was a pity that we didn't much enjoy lunch. "Cask ale battered" fish and chips (£8.95) shared the impression of having been cooked in something not very fresh; The Boss thought the asparagus "low ordinary".

They deserve to succeed.

Outside we essayed a couple of cliff top photographs. It mayn't yet be St Tropez, but right now the sun's shining on Seaham.

THE Good Food Guide's "North East Restaurant of the Year" has been named as the Weavers' Shed at Golcar. Golcar's near Huddersfield. Last year's North-East winner was the Yorke Arms at Ramsgill.

That's down that way, too. The North East Chef of the Year is 29-year-old Parichat Somsby-Kirby from Cafe 21 at Fenwick's.

Fenwick's, happily, is in Newcastle.

ON one of those fine early summer evenings when you just fancy a gentle evening out, we went to the Four Alls at Ovington and effortlessly achieved that ambition.

Ovington's roughly between Barnard Castle and Richmond but most easily found on the map. It may best be known for the improbably named pub and for a great lumberjack maypole in the middle of the green.

Since the year 2000 there's also been a metal maypole dancing sculpture, one of Graham Hopper's. Graham's a Hunwick lad, getting round these days like a maypole man on turbo.

Eight years back, the then licensee barred me for nothing more or less heinous than being Mike Amos. John Stroud, the present incumbent, commuted the sentence in 2003.

John's from Kent, goes on parade in shirtsleeves and what once we called bucolic braces. A Geordie would call them gallusses; in Kent they probably think gallussses are French fags.

He'd also run the Ales of Kent brewery, has continued production at Ovington but admits that his own brew isn't always available. This time he'd had to do some pointing, the temptation to lecture on priorities resisted because it was pointing the blooming obvious.

It was Wednesday, about eight others dining. Two were called Bob; both, coincidentally, old acquaintances. Comparsions ended there. One was ten stones wet through, the other approximately four times heavier.

One temptation resisted, it was impossible not to recall the limerick about the Young Man of Devizes. You know - the other was big, and won prizes.

It's a proper village pub, made yet more convivial by the cheery presence of the landlord - most now seem to be absentees - and by his mum, who bakes. Mums should.

The specials board had things like beef fillet stuffed with brie and apple, Gresingham duck (stuffed with something or other) and salmon with hollandaise sauce (£9.95) which The Boss thought excellent.

The steak pie (£8.95) was on the recommendation of one of the Roberts. It came with excellent chips, another bowl of carefully cooked potatoes, a third of cabbage, cauliflower and carrots and a fourth of peas. Great value.

The meal was accompanied by a wonderfully refreshing pint (or two) of Fuller's Chiswick Bitter - just £2.10 - and by the parish magazine in which the Reverend Christopher Cowper talks of having attended a pre-retirement conference and insists, paraphrasing Abide With Me, that change doesn't mean decay.

He and his wife Christine, also a priest, are lovely. They'll be missed no end.

We finished with a large creme brulee and a suet treacle pudding which (at risk of further banishment) looked to be experiencing a custard famine.

No matter, a trip is warmly recommended and that's not just my twopennorth.

This was a two-Bob bit.

AS forecast a couple of columns back, Wolsingham now has its third coffee shop within 20 yards one of the other. No 10, so called because it's at 10 Market Place, is smartly turned out - polished wooden floor, polished wooden tables, images of coffee cups and things on the walls. It had been raining all day, the chairs and tables outside a triumph of hope over reality.

The clear aim is to do simple things well.

The tomato and basil soup was ample and very good indeed; a nicoise salad had all necessary ingredients, came with a choice of dressings and would have been approved by the lady of this house, a leading authority on such things.

A large mural behind the counter displays all kinds of coffee information, including something called the Coffee Drinker's Prayer. Let me have the eyesight, please God, to be able to read the rest.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we'd heard about the chap arrested for stealing luggage on Darlington station. He asked for 20 cases to be taken into consideration.