Sole-searching over origins of 'mystery' shoe art

Mystery surrounds the origins of a piece of coastal artwork featuring shoe soles nailed to a large wooden pole in the sand dunes.

Jayne Gray regularly walks along Crimdon beach, near Hartlepool, and came across the sculpture before posting on social media to ask if anyone knew its history.

Locals have named it the "lost soles" art but nobody seems to know who put it there or when it was erected.

The local parish council Monk Hesleden said it did not know the origins of the sculpture and asked to people to come forward if they knew anything about the curious structure.

Gray, 61, said shoe soles washed up along the beach all the time because families used to dump household waste into the sea.

"Shoe leather, sea glass and even conveyor belts from the old colliery wash up along the beach," she said.

Gray believes the sculpture was deliberate as it must have taken the artist some time to gather all of the shoe soles.

"It's been done very deliberately and it is very well executed," she said.

"It is a mystery, I would like to know who did it, when they did it and how they did it."

One theory suggested by the parish council is that it was created as part of the Turning the Tide on the Durham Coast programme, following the closing of the colliery.

The project, which started in 1997, aimed to reverse the suffering of the coastline after 100 years of waste tipping by the coal industry.

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