Some of the original village buildings are still intact today, such as St Peter's Church.

[3] Harton is one of ten wards who vote for the South Shields seat in the UK Parliament, with an estimated electorate of 4098 people in the 2015 elections.

[11] There was a colliery near Harton established sometime in the 1800s, as it features on, and has full rail infrastructure on, the Ordnance Survey map of 1896.

[12] There is also reference from the Durham Mining Museum to one fatality, where a man was "crushed in the cage" ('the cage' being slang for the carriage that transported men to and from the surface), on the 25 February 1851,[13] although it is not known how well-established the colliery was at this point.

Harton Colliery was the location of a successful experiment in 1854 by the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy, to calculate the mean density of the earth by recording the difference in the movements of a pendulum at the top and bottom of a coal mine.