Spanish City

The Spanish City stands by the North Sea in Whitley Bay, a seaside town in North Tyneside. Built in 1910, it began as a concert hall, restaurant, roof garden and tearoom, modelled on Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach. A ballroom was added in 1920 and later a permanent funfair grew around it. The building’s Renaissance-style front stretches 180 feet along the seafront, topped by a distinctive dome now listed at Grade II. Two towers flank the entrance, each holding a half-life-size copper figure playing cymbals or a tambourine. The architects were Robert Burns Dick, Charles T. Marshall and James Cackett. The place became famous after Dire Straits named it in their 1980 single “Tunnel of Love,” which played each morning when the fair opened. Mark Knopfler recalled hearing loud rock and roll there as a boy from nearby Blyth, while Sting spent his evenings there instead of studying for A levels. By the late 1990s the building had decayed and closed in 2003. A regeneration project began in 2011 and the restored centre reopened in July 2018. Inside, visitors find a dining and leisure complex with a 1950s-style diner and modern apartments. The original dome, supported on 46-metre concrete columns, now houses part of the leisure facilities. Outside, the funfair once included a corkscrew roller coaster, ghost train and a Rainbow Pleasure Wheel imported from the United States. The pleasure gardens stretched back from the seafront, offering river cave rides and rifle ranges in earlier decades.