Interior Design on the Northumberland Coast

Bamburgh, Alnmouth and the Coast Between

Drawn from the Northumberland Coast National Landscape, the body that looks after the coast, and from Historic England.

Bamburgh

Once the capital of the seventh century Kingdom of Northumbria, Bamburgh is a village dominated by its castle, which sits on the Whin Sill between miles of sand to the east and the cricket pitch to the west. The castle is listed at Grade I: a twelfth century keep in squared sandstone, restored for Lord Armstrong between 1894 and 1904. St Aidan founded a place of worship here in 635, and the church that stands now dates from the twelfth century.

The National Landscape’s design guide is fond of the place. Bamburgh never had a viable harbour and so never became an industrial village, and there is, the guide says, “an air of quality” about it: good buildings, well kept open space, and a stand of mature sycamores full of rooks’ nests over the village centre.

Alnmouth

Alnmouth grew along the sheltered slope of a spur above the River Aln, and its medieval layout has hardly changed. It was once the busiest port on this coast, until a storm in 1806 broke through the isthmus that protected the harbour; the railway in the 1840s remade it as a holiday resort, and the old sandstone granaries survive. That commercial past gave the village a larger scale than most on the coast, which is why its late nineteenth century villas, with their bargeboards, balconies, bay and oriel windows, look at home here. Lovaine Terrace, a row of 1860s concrete houses, is painted in colours the guide calls more Mediterranean than North Sea.

The coast between

From Seaton Point to Dunstanburgh, rocky reefs shelter small coves; further north the dunes give way to the mudflats and saltmarsh around Budle Bay and Lindisfarne. The guide reads the whole coast as one long answer to two questions: the desire for shelter, or for sea views, and the effect of maritime exposure on everything that stands here.

Sources: Northumberland Coast National Landscape: Where we are, What’s special, National Landscapes, Bamburgh, Alnmouth, Development and planning, and its Design Guide for the Built Environment (PDF on that page); Bamburgh Castle, list entry 1280155 (Historic England).

Salt, Wind and Light

What a coastal house asks of the rooms inside it. Plain observations, not rules.

The design guide is written for the outside of buildings, but its lessons carry indoors. It warns that bare metal on a coastal house is vulnerable to the aggressive action of salt, and that once corrosion starts it is very hard to control. It records the practice of rendering walls as a shelter coat in exposed maritime areas, and makes the case for timber windows that can be repaired for a century or more. The same thinking applies to a room.

• Metal. Brass, iron and unlacquered fittings all change faster in salt air. That can be their charm, as long as it is chosen on purpose. At Bamburgh the brass is kept quiet: a lantern over the dining table, a flower-shaped cabinet pull in the sage panelling.
• Cloth. The coast has a vast open sky and little to filter the light, so textiles are chosen for the way they age. Pattern where it earns its place, plainness where it does not.
• Windows. A coastal house is built either to shelter from the weather or to look at it, and often both. The bay at Bamburgh holds the room, and the room holds the view: a drystone wall, then grass, then the sea. Curtains, Roman blinds and plantation shutters each frame it differently, window by window.
• Evenings. The National Landscape has some of the darkest skies in the country, with limited streetlighting. The night is part of the setting, so bedrooms are kept low and amber, as they were at Bamburgh, rather than lit against the dark.

Conservation areas and the National Landscape

The National Landscape’s maps show conservation areas at Bamburgh and Alnmouth, and Northumberland County Council consults the National Landscape on planning applications within the area. All of that concerns the outside of a building and its setting. If the house is listed, Historic England says consent covers the whole building, inside as well as out, and we would check with the conservation officer before anyone touched joinery or plasterwork.

Sources: as above, plus What Are Listed Buildings? (Historic England).