The Great North Run: Why 60,000 People Run to South Shields

The Great North Run begins on the central motorway in Newcastle city centre and ends on the seafront at South Shields, thirteen and a half miles south and east. It takes place in September every year. The entry list grows year after year and now closes almost immediately after opening. Sixty thousand runners are on the road simultaneously. It is the largest half marathon in the world and it was created by a man from Gateshead who wanted to give the northeast something it could be proud of.

Brendan Foster and the Idea

Brendan Foster is from Gateshead. He won a bronze medal in the 10,000 metres at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and set world records at 3,000 metres. After his competitive career he went into television commentary and sports promotion, and in the late 1970s he began developing the idea for a mass participation road race in the northeast. The London Marathon had not yet been run – it started in 1981, the same year as the Great North Run. Foster and the London Marathon organisers were working in parallel, independently, on the same idea: that mass participation running as a spectator and community event had a future in British cities.

The first Great North Run took place on 28 June 1981. Thirty-six thousand people entered, which was an extraordinary number for an inaugural event of this type. The route was chosen specifically to take runners through the communities of Tyneside – from the city centre, over the Tyne Bridge, through Gateshead, through Felling and Hebburn and Jarrow, ending on the coast at South Shields. The geography was not neutral. The route passed through communities that were experiencing the beginning of the deindustrialisation that would transform Tyneside in the following decade. Running through them was an act of visibility as much as an athletic event.

The Route and What It Passes

The race crosses the Tyne Bridge – the image that defines it and that appears in every broadcast of the event, thousands of runners visible on the green arch with the city and the river below. The bridge crossing is the emotional highpoint of the route for spectators and many runners. It has become one of the iconic images of British sport.

After the bridge, the route moves through south Tyneside communities that were built around shipbuilding, steel and coal. Jarrow, which the runners pass through or near, is the town of the Jarrow Crusade – the 1936 march to London by two hundred unemployed shipbuilders that became the defining image of 1930s depression-era Britain. Running through Jarrow in 1981, when the shipyards were closing again, carried a meaning that was not entirely coincidental. Foster understood the geography of what he was creating.

The Elite Race and the Masses

The Great North Run functions on two levels simultaneously. The elite race at the front involves the best long-distance runners in the world competing for one of the most prestigious half marathon titles on the calendar. Mo Farah won it six times. Ethiopian and Kenyan athletes have dominated the recent elite results. The finish times at the front are extraordinary – under an hour for the leading men.

Behind the elite field, 59,000 other people are running the same course for reasons that have nothing to do with competitive athletics. They are running for charities, for personal goals, for the experience of the crowd on the Tyne Bridge, for the memory of someone who died, for the feeling that completing thirteen miles gives you regardless of the time it takes. The Great North Run has raised over a billion pounds for charity since 1981. That is what the back of the field means.

What It Means to the Northeast

The Great North Run is one of the few large-scale events that belongs entirely and unambiguously to the northeast of England rather than existing in the northeast as a branch of something that originates elsewhere. It was created here, it celebrates the geography here, it draws its character from the specific landscape of Tyneside and the specific communities the route passes through. When the runners cross the Tyne Bridge and head south through Gateshead into south Tyneside, they are doing something that would not work anywhere else, in the same way. That particularity is the source of its meaning.