In the footsteps of Stan Laurel

Whilst out and about on Tyneside, I wanted to visit a little spot that I’d never got to make it to previously, the one time home of Stan Laurel, one half of that legendary comedy duo of a century ago, Laurel and Hardy.

Like myself, Stan was born in Cumbria and moved to Newcastle at a young age before moving away. Even though it is well away from where most visitors go, finding the site was relatively easy, helped a great deal with this fantastic statue that sits in the square outside the place where he lived in the appropriately named Laurel Park.

At the base of the statue is a wonderful relief of the comedy duo. I am always a little relieved when metalwork actually looks like the figures depicted as so often that isn’t the case.

A few feet away is a blue plaque proving that X marks the spot, or something like that!

When Stan lived here, it was a very different sort of place with the river being one of the busiest in the world and rows of old terrace houses going down to the local quayside where fishermen and others would ply their trade.

Much of the old industry and housing has long since vanished but these are the long and steep steps that Stan would have trodden every day as a boy as he would go down to the river from his home. Perhaps he had to do chores and carry heavy bags of shopping back up to his home. You can imagine that it would have been quite tiresome and I didn’t need to go down them and back up to make sure.

If you think they may look vaguely familiar then you might well be right.

I have to say that I’d only ever seen clips of this sequence before, I’m more of the age where I would watch Ross from Friends shouting “Pivot!” in a thankless task of getting a sofa up a tight stairwell.

True comedians and indeed creatives of all types, get their ideas from many different mundane situations and it’s hard not to believe that having lived next to these steep stairs that it couldn’t have inspired one of the most memorial moments in the vast collection of Laurel and Hardy’s works.

It just goes to show there is a bit of history almost everywhere you look. If you want to see a substantial clip from ‘The Music Box’ then click below.