North Shields, lifeboat house and slips

Lifeboat house, boat house and two jetties shown on Ordnance Survey second edition map. The lifeboat house was destroyed by a German bomb on 10 April 1941. The Germans may have mistaken the lifeboat slipways for military infrastructure, or they may have been trying to target the nearby 12-pounder battery. A new lifeboat house was built by 1949 on piles at the low water mark of the Northern Wave Trap, accessed by a footbridge from the edge of the wave trap. A square two-storeyed cement-rendered and whitewashed building was built - probably as a watch house. The timber lifeboat house and footbridge were demolished in the 1990s, but the watch house and its later garage survives today. Late nineteenth century timbers from the slipway of the lifeboat house and iron footings from the footbridge are embedded in the boulders of the Wave Trap.