The Blaydon Races: Why a Victorian Song Defines a City

There are songs that belong to places. “Flower of Scotland” belongs to Scotland. “Jerusalem” belongs to a certain type of English imagination. And “The Blaydon Races” belongs to Newcastle. Not to the northeast in the abstract, not to a football club specifically, though it gets sung at St James’ Park with full-throated conviction. It belongs to the city and the people who live there, and the story of how a comic music hall song from 1862 achieved that status is worth telling properly.

Geordie Ridley and Balmbra’s

The song was written and first performed by Geordie Ridley on 9 June 1862 at Balmbra’s Music Hall in the Cloth Market, Newcastle. Ridley was a miner turned music hall entertainer, one of dozens working the northeast circuit in the mid-Victorian era. The occasion was the opening of the Blaydon Races for the 1862 season, and the song he wrote was essentially a humorous narrative about a chaotic journey from Newcastle to the races at Blaydon, three miles west along the Tyne. The tone is knockabout – collisions with a bus, a street full of people, the general mayhem of a working-class crowd heading to the races. It was comic material, not folk poetry. It worked because the audience knew exactly what he was describing.

Ridley performed it at a moment when Tyneside had a distinct cultural identity – the Geordie dialect, the music halls, the heavy industries, the close-knit communities along the river. The song captured all of that in an accessible three minutes. It spread through the halls and the streets almost immediately.

The Actual Races

The Blaydon Races were real. Racing on the Blaydon Island had been going on since the 1830s, partly because events there fell outside the jurisdiction of Newcastle authorities. The races were a major Tyneside event through the mid-Victorian period – a working-class day out on a scale that dwarfed most other regional sporting occasions. The combination of horse racing, sideshows, drinking, and the general carnival atmosphere of the Tyne riverbank on a summer day drew huge crowds from across the region.

The races effectively ended in the 1880s, partly due to disruption from railway construction and partly from the general decline of this type of informal racing meeting as the sport professionalized. By the time the races stopped, the song had outlasted them. The Blaydon Races as an event are long gone. The Blaydon Races as a song never stopped.

The Football Connection

The association with Newcastle United is not as old as the song but it is now inseparable from it. Fans at St James’ Park have been singing it since at least the early twentieth century. The specific circumstances of its adoption as the club’s unofficial anthem are unclear, but the logic is obvious – it is the best-known Geordie song, it is about collective experience and local identity, and it lends itself to the kind of mass singing that stadium crowds do well.

For fans who grew up going to St James’, the song is embedded in the physical experience of the ground and the city. For the diaspora – Geordies who moved away for work or opportunity – it triggers something deep and specific. It is not a sentimental song by design, but it became one by accumulation.

What It Actually Means

The Blaydon Races matters for the same reason any piece of shared culture matters – it gives people a common reference point. At a time when regional identity in England is frequently dismissed or treated as a marketing concept, having a song that genuinely predates marketing, that came from working people’s entertainment and spread through communities without any institutional support, is significant. When 52,000 people at St James’ Park sing it before a match, that is not manufactured atmosphere. It is a genuine expression of collective identity that happens to be 160 years old and still functioning.

Ridley died in 1864, two years after writing it, aged 30. He is buried in Gateshead. The Cloth Market, where Balmbra’s stood and where the song was first heard, still exists. Not all of it is beautiful, but the street is real and so is the history. Every 9 June, Newcastle marks the anniversary with the recognition it deserves.