THE BACKSTORY BLOG • DEATH ON THE RIVER WEAR - Part Two
- Vicky Peplow
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Ryhope, Sunderland
The Village Behind the Story
When Grayson Taylor Shaw arrives in the North East of England in Death on the River Wear, he comes as a stranger to a place he has never been. A London surgeon searching for the family his mother left behind. His mam, Tracey, grew up in Ryhope, Sunderland. She never spoke of it. And now she's gone, and all Grayson has is a name on a map and a hunger to understand where he comes from.
That village — Ryhope — is an actual place. I know it because I grew up there. And writing Grayson's first visit to its streets was one of the most personal things I have ever put on a page. In this post, I want to tell you about the real Ryhope: what it looks like, what it feels like, and why it was the only place this story could ever have been set.
What Grayson Sees When He Arrives
In the book, Grayson drives out to Ryhope on a weekend before his new job at the Royal Victoria Infirmary (RVI) in Newcastle begins. He is nervous, searching, not quite ready to knock on any doors. So he simply drives and walks and watches. And what he finds is a village that notices him straight away.
That detail is true to life. Ryhope is a close-knit coastal community on the southern edge of Sunderland, and strangers stand out. As Grayson walks down the main street, people look at him, but they say hello anyway. That's something I wanted to capture honestly: the North East's reputation for warmth and directness, the way a community can be tight and guarded and yet still open its doors to a stranger at the same time.
He notices the village is divided into two distinct parts: the Village at the bottom, the old heart of the place around the green, and the Colliery at the top, the newer settlement that grew up around the pit. He drives from one to the other and finds that both have their own pubs, their own rhythms, their own identities. That divide is real. It has been there since the colliery opened in 1859, and it shaped everything about how Ryhope grew and who lived in it.
The Village Green and the War Memorial
At the centre of old Ryhope sits the triangular village green, and right at its heart is the war memorial. It's the first thing Grayson notices when he drives through. In the book, he assumes, correctly, that it commemorates the fallen of the World Wars. He is right. The memorial was erected in 1926 and stands as the focal point of the village to this day.
The green itself is ancient. The layout of Ryhope around that central space has barely changed since medieval times, when the village was first mapped with its three rows of houses and its lanes leading down to the beach.
When I wrote Grayson pulling up his car and stepping out to look around, I was thinking about all the years of footsteps that the green has absorbed and hundreds of years of ordinary life played out around the same patch of grass.
It was important to me that Grayson felt the age of the place, even if he couldn't name it. He is a man searching for his roots, and Ryhope is the kind of village where the roots go very deep.
The Ryhope Allstars Jazz Band: A Real Piece of the Village
One of my favourite details in the book is the moment Grayson discovers, through his online research, that his family is connected to a marching jazz band. He finds videos on YouTube and watches them with growing wonder, realising there is an entire world attached to his heritage that he never knew existed.
The Ryhope Allstars Jazz Band is real. It's a genuine part of Ryhope’s community life and has been for decades, with bands across the country competing in jazz band championships throughout the year. Including it in the story felt essential to me — it's the kind of detail that is so specific, so local, so utterly Ryhope, that it could not have come from anywhere else.
And for me, it’s deeply personal.
My nana, Nan Self, and her brother Elliott Halliday formed the band in the 1960s, and from that moment on, it became part of the fabric of our family. Nearly every member of my family has marched in the Allstars at one time or another — my aunties, uncle, my brother, my cousins, my relatives, and eventually me, joining almost as soon as I could walk. I grew up in those tiny uniforms, learning the routines, feeling the drums vibrate through my chest, and carrying the pride of something my family helped build. Even today, the tradition continues, with new generations still marching.
So when Grayson watches those videos, feeling something shift inside him, that moment comes from a place I know intimately. It's the first point in the novel where he feels something other than loss when he thinks about his mother’s village. He sees people full of life, full of pride, belonging to something joyful. And he realises he might belong to it too.
A Coal Mining Village Through and Through
Grayson quickly learns that Ryhope was, at its heart, a coal-mining village. His grandfather, he discovers, worked in those mines. The colliery shaped the community, drew workers in from across the region, and left its mark on every street name, every pub, every division between the old village and the newer colliery settlement.
The Ryhope Colliery was active from 1859 until its closure in 1966. For over a century, it was the engine of the village, and it was dangerous, demanding, the kind of work that defined a man and a community. When it closed, Ryhope had to find itself again, the way all mining villages did. The pride and loss of that era are still present in the village today, carried quietly by the people who grew up in its shadow.
And for me, that history isn’t abstract. My grandfather and his father worked in the Ryhope mine. The same shifts, the same dangers, the same sense of belonging and endurance that defined the village for generations shaped their lives. That legacy sits alongside the story of the Ryhope Allstars, two threads of the same place, one forged underground and one marching proudly through the streets above.
For Grayson, discovering his grandfather’s connection to the mines is more than a genealogical fact. It's a thread. It's the beginning of understanding who his mother was, why she left, and what she carried with her to London. The coal dust, in a sense, is in his blood too.
Beyond Ryhope: The Road to Seaham
After his first walk around Ryhope, Grayson drives further along the coast to Seaham, another actual place, another coal mining town, sitting a few miles south on the Durham Heritage Coast. He finds somewhere to eat, walks along the seafront, watches the North Sea, and promises himself that he'll come back.
Seaham is a town with its own remarkable history, and most famously as the place where Lord Byron married Anne Milbanke at Seaham Hall in 1815, but for Grayson it represents something simpler: the first moment of peace he has felt since arriving in the North East. The coast does that to you. The scale of the North Sea, the weight of the horizon, the way the cliffs drop into the water along that stretch of Durham coastline. It has a way of making your problems feel briefly manageable.
I wanted to give Grayson that moment before the story darkens around him. The coastline isn't just scenery in this book. It's a breathing space, a reminder that the world is larger than the darkness gathering along the River Wear.
Why Ryhope? A Personal Note
People sometimes ask me why I set a crime novel in a quiet coastal village rather than in Sunderland city centre, where the police stations are, where the nightlife is, where the bodies are found. The answer is that Ryhope is where the story begins and ends — in the blood, in the family, in the secrets that a person carries when they leave a place and never come back.
Tracey Shaw left Ryhope and told her son nothing about where she came from. That silence is the engine of the entire novel. And silences like that belong to small communities, to places where everyone knows everyone, and a family secret is not just a private thing but a communal one. Ryhope is that kind of place. It has always been that kind of place.
Growing up there, I absorbed it without knowing I was doing so. The two halves of the village. The old green. The warmth of strangers saying hello on the street. The way the sea is always just out of sight, just over the cliff edge, is present in every breath of air. When it came time to write, all of that was already there, waiting.
Ryhope is the home Grayson never knew he had. It's the place Death on the River Wear keeps returning to, even as the murders along the river pull the story toward Sunderland and beyond. Because home has a way of pulling you back, no matter how far you go.
Are you from Ryhope or Sunderland? Do you have memories of the village, the green, or the jazz band? I would love to hear from you in the comments below.
If you’d like to follow more of the stories behind the book — and the real places and people who shaped it — you can subscribe below. And if you’re curious about Grayson’s journey, you can find the novel here, too.
🇺🇸 US readers: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y3V8VPQ
🇬🇧 UK readers: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07Y3V8VPQ
— Vicky Peplow, Author of Death on the River Wear
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