Saint Hildas Hartlepool

Hartlepool is a very famous North Sea port situated in England. Back in the 7th century this particular place was founded as a village and it was surrounding the Hartlepool Abbey that this village grew up. This particular monastery was famous because of St. Hilda and the Abbey was destroyed by the Vikings in the year 800.

The word ‘hart’ meant stag or deer and the terms ‘le pool’ meant beside the sea and as people came here in the beginning in order to hunt down deer that lived in the forest by the sea the place was named Hartlepool. Hartlepool was a very important market town throughout the Middle Ages and it served as the official port of the County of Durham. Hartlepool became even more famous when the renowned poet Thomas Gray found this place to be an inspiration for his poems and elegies.

During the great depression of the 1930s, Hartlepool suffered a lot and there was a severe state of unemployment over here until the Second World War. But during the war the ship building industry as well as the steel making industries came back to life. Today Hartlepool has got a nuclear power station which was opened in the 1980s. The old town center was once located around Lynn Street but gradually the shops and the markets moved to a new shopping center which happened during the 1970s. Hartlepool was again largely affected by unemployment during the 1980s but then a series of important investments brought the city back to life.