Such was the imbalance that when I came across a solitary man-with-whippet I began to suspect he had been hired by the Tyne

Such was the imbalance that when I came across a solitary man-with-whippet I began to suspect he had been hired by the Tyne & Wear Development Corporation to add local colour.Down river, in the old shipbuilding yards of Wallsend and Hebburn, the cranes stand yet, like fastidious giant birds, roosting, with their yellow and blue necks held at odd pert angles, all along the edge of the river Some are still at work. In the Swan Hunter oil rig-dismantling site stands the gigantic red Titan III, a god of some previous primordial era. But all around are yards with rusting gantries and smashed windows. And, in between, great sweeps of grass now cloak the wreckage of a once- proud past.They are at work creating a similar shroud to smother memories at Easington Colliery a dozen or so miles to the south There are no serious coal mines left in the North-east. In Easington the neat rows of red-brick mining cottages stand like relics Some are boarded-up or daubed with graffiti. Yet others have neat gingham curtains and vases of daffs in their little front rooms.

All once looked out over a vast coalscape of spoil-heaps, belching chimneys and turning pit-wheels. Now they stand, bewildered, before a wide expanse of reddish-brown nothingness.Change is all around.Back on the arterial A19, the official road-signs bear words like Samsung and Nissan as if in evidence of the established status of the foreign investor in the region's economy. In Jarrow, the Co-op shop photographed by Jones has become an old people's home. In Wallsend, by contrast with the area's industrial atrophy, a new building has been erected, a viewing platform for an archaeological dig at one of Hadrian's forts. ("Even a god cannot change the past," said Aristotle, but he reckoned without a pounds 7.5m grant from the Lottery Heritage Fund.) The heritage industry has left its mark on Hartlepool too, where derelict docks have been transformed into Historic Quays.The spot at which Colin Jones once photographed steam trains in front of a billowing black steelworks has now become a bleak windswept motorscape.

Around one third of the town has been completely rebuilt to accommodate the great shift from manufacturing to service life. Hartlepool is demolishing houses because it has too many.It was only by stopping to talk to people that I discovered how far-reaching some changes have been. Some of them mirror those which have overtaken the whole nation in the years since the gullible optimism of the Sixties. Some have been accelerated here in the North- east; others have been retarded. Yet others are particular to the region between the Tyne and the Tees.Off the Scotswood Road, in a semi-derelict cul-de-sac where several houses have been set alight, is the shop of Mr Singh.