Seaham become a regional industrial powerhouse because of three things: Its harbour, its collieries and... its bottle works!

This place started producing only a couple of decades after Seaham Harbour's inception, and like Hartlepool became a bit of a Silicon Valley for Tyne & Wear industrialists to set up shop with lots of land and resources to feast from.

The man responsible for Seaham's bottle works was John Candlish. He keeps cropping up everywhere for me this past week due to his various activities in Sunderland prior to these works. Born over at Tarset in Northumberland, he moved to Sunderland as an eleven year old to work in the bottle making industry. His brother Robert was manager of the Ayres Quay bottle works in later times, and while John continued to dabble in this he ended up shipbuilding, draperies as well as exporting coal from the riverside.

Thanks to his family expertise he was drawn to Seaham to acquire the lease of the Seaham Bottle Works in 1852, renaming it the Londonderry Bottle Works thanks to the landowner who provided it.

The works was pretty massive and almost became a village, with 5 rows of houses built to accomodate the workers. Two streets were named Candlish Terrace and Fenwick Row - the latter named after Henry Fenwick perhaps. They produced black bottles upon opening with two seperate houses, though within 40 years there would be 7 bottle houses here and at Sunderland, alongside its own school and reading room. It became the biggest bottling enterprise in Europe, with 500 workers and up to 20 million bottles a year.

Though working practices were often as you'd expect for the time, there was a trusting relationship between the workers and Candlish. Just after the Panic of 1857 Candlish fell into hard times, and the workers agreed to work for a period of a month with no pay to keep the works and their jobs alive. This feeling wasn't temporary as regular dinners were held with the Candlish's and workers over the next few decades to express mutual gratitude, and the Candlish's established a savings bank for their workforce too.

John ended up Mayor of Sunderland between 1858 and 1861 as well as the MP between 1866 - 1874. His legacy is eminent across the North Durham coast with his statue at Mowbray Park and the road named after him in Sunderland too.

The bottle works eventually closed in the early 1920s, relocating to London. Though factory lay in situ but disused for a number of decades after, and you can still find all the glass on the beach today.