[14] The line from Stella to Carlisle, which was to consist of 250 towers spaced at 320 metres over a distance of around 60 miles (100 km), came up against opposition when first proposed.

The Northumberland County Planning Authority launched a public enquiry in 1951, and Hexham Rural District Council held a meeting.

The Ministry of Agriculture and other outdoor associations voiced their concerns, as it was feared that the line would interfere with good farming land.

An alternative route was proposed, but in view of its additional cost of £72,000 it was turned down, and the Ministry of Fuel and Power gave the line the go-ahead.

Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons were contracted for site clearance, provision of the foundations for the main and ancillary buildings, as well as the diversion of streams and sewers.

[19] Underwater electrical work was carried out by British Royal Navy frogman Lionel "Buster" Crabb, chosen for the dangerous job because he wore a rubber diving suit at a time when most divers used canvas.

Dunston power station could not take the extra load and it also shut down, creating a total blackout on Tyneside.

However they were found out only two days after starting the scheme, when a foreman at the station saw Patterson dropping a bag of cement into the sampling bin, and reported the incident.

[33] The boiler houses and turbine halls were all-welded steel structures, consisting of box-type main columns and roof girders, clad with brick and glazed in parts.

[34] The North station's four 73 m (240 ft) cooling towers were made from reinforced concrete and were of the typically hyperbolic, natural-draft design.

[38][40] Each boiler was equipped with two forced and two induced Howden fans, twenty-two electrically operated Clyde soot blowers, an automatic control system made by Bailey and Sturtevant electrostatic precipitators.

[40] The stations used them because of a Statutory Order of the Ministry of Supply in November 1947 that all turbo alternators made for the home market could only be of 60 MW at advanced steam conditions.

[50] Despite the SN&WR's closure on 11 March 1968, and the rerouting of the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway through Dunston in 1982, the track between Scotswood and Newburn was retained for supplying the North station, as well as for rail access to the neighbouring Ever Ready battery factory and Anglo Great Lakes Graphite Plant.

Ash from the Stella stations was taken out to sea by three flat iron barges: Bobby Shaftoe, Bessie Surtees and Hexhamshire Lass.

[63] On each trip, each ship took up to 500 tonnes of ash from the stations down the river and dumped it in the North Sea, 4.8 km (3.0 mi) off the coast.

This meant that less ash was produced by the Stella and Dunston stations; so by the end of the 1960s, the CEGB sold Hexhamshire Lass and Bobby Shaftoe.

In 1954, consideration was given to scrapping the plan to build the Union Hall housing estate in Lemington because of probable pollution from nearby power stations.

[49][75][76] Following the closure of the power stations at Stella, as well as those at Dunston and Blyth (in 1981 and 2001 respectively), the northern part of North East England has become heavily dependent upon the National Grid for electricity.

W. Ward Industrial Dismantling of Barnsley,[35] which started with the South station, whose twin chimneys were destroyed on 29 October 1995 by 82 kilograms (181 lb) of explosives.

The plant had made high-purity graphite for use in magnox nuclear reactors, and operated using the North station's available excess generating capacity, as large quantities of cheap electricity were essential for production.

[92] The park has a 4 km (2.5 mi) cycle route and nature trail around its edge, which takes visitors, walkers and cyclists beside the river and past the point in which the North station's cooling towers once stood.

"[96] As well as the NHSBSA, the other key occupiers of the Newburn Riverside site are DEFRA, North East Ambulance Trust, MacFarlane Packaging, True Potential LLP, Northumberland and Tyne & Wear Strategic Health Authority and Stannah Stairlifts.

He had been looking for scrap metal and power cables, and had climbed through a small hole into an underground room, from which he had to be rescued by fire crews.

[98] The derelict site was vandalised in July 1999, when people hurled burning tyres into the sub-station, creating a fire and damaging cables worth £150,000.

It will have 522 residential units, from two-bedroom flats to five-bedroom houses, as well as 1.6 ha (4.0 acres) of open space, a riverside walkway and a restaurant.

Due to the significant reclamation on the two sites very little evidence remains of the power stations, other than a small number of bricks and steel rods.

[21] Their chimneys could be seen along a roughly 13.8 km (8.6 mi) long section of the Tyne valley; from Bensham near Gateshead down to Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland: almost no other building was present to obstruct the view.

)[107] In Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, a British sitcom broadcast between 1973 and 1974, the stations themselves did not appear in the series, but in the end credits their ash boat, Bessie Surtees, could be seen passing Spiller's Wharf near Byker.

[108] In 1981, it was featured in Swing Bridge Videos' Check it Out, a short film about youth unemployment in the west end of Newcastle.

[109] In the mid-1990s, the decommissioned stations were photographed by north eastern artist John Kippin as part of his work The Secret Intelligence of the Silent.