As far as I know, right now I’m in Stockholm. So this page was posted by the Comicpress robot!

The wondrous building they are hanging out at is the CWS Soap Works in Dunston, Gateshead. There really were rotting carcasses of boats in the river around it. Now it’s been demolished and replaced by condos, and the river has probably been cleaned up a bit.

I tried to avoid every part of Tyneside that could be seen in the cute film Purely Belter (2000), which was a bit too much plagued by the “OMG we have to put in all the famous landmarks!!” urge (especially the way the Angel of the North was inserted into the storyline was rather strange). But here I made an exception, because the soap works were too nice to not include.

Purely Belter focused more on the Dunston Staithes, anyway. Here are some screencaps:

The story is about two boys with no money and messed up family situations, who want to get football season tickets. They try all kinds of schemes to raise the money, and encounter both hilarities and tragedies.

Here they try to salvage sellable scrap from the mud by the soap works. (That’s the same spot that can be seen in panel 3 above!)

In the end the film totally fails to get the class perspective, and claims that the reason why some people are poor and messed up is because they didn’t have “a good dad”. Mistaking a symptom for the cause. Sigh.