The road to Blyth runs along the coast, stretching from Whitley Bay to the Wansbeck Estuary of the River Blyth in the northeast of England. Numerous landmarks hint at the region's past. Remnants of Second World War batteries and searchlight sites look out to a lone fishing boat pulling into the harbour. The port of Blyth dates to the 1100s when it was used by a nearby monastery to ship salt. The town prospered from the 18th century onwards through coal mining and shipbuilding, with the expansion of the railroads allowing Blyth to become a key port for the export of coal to the European continent. This history is memorialised today. Standing on the quayside is the Spirit of the Staithes, a sculpture by Simon Packard that memorialises the spaces where coal was stored before being transported elsewhere.

During the miners’ strike of the 1980s, striking workers would come to the quayside where this sculpture stands to look for sea coal, while others would fish or work on their allotments (Samuel et al, 1986). Today, men fish off the quayside, near buildings with plaques memorialising industries long gone. The Blyth Shipbuilding Company (opened in 1883) closed in 1966 at the cost of almost 1,000 jobs (Milne, 1966). This was, to some extent, eased by the construction of the coal-fired Blyth Power Station (in 1958) and, later, the Alcan Lynemouth Aluminium Smelter (1974). Yet, these sites of work closed within two generations – being shut down in 2001 and 2012 respectively. Rather than locked into fossil fuel energy infrastructure, Blyth found itself cut adrift.

Today, dog walkers and couples on the beachfront eat ice cream and cast their eyes at five wind turbines in the mid-distance. These turbines power 36,000 homes and are symbols of the entrance of renewable energies into Blyth's future. The Blyth Harbour Wind Farm was initially commissioned in 1993, with an offshore facility (the first of its kind in the UK) built in 2000 and later replaced by these five turbines in 2019. This coastal town, a short journey from Newcastle, has become a key site of national energy transitions in the UK. Today, a walk around Blyth is a series of steps around key sites and infrastructures of the UK's decarbonisation ambitions. The old shipyard now houses the National Renewable Energy Centre, set up in 2002 to develop and test new technologies.