South Tyneside is a metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, North East England.

It is surrounded by the four other boroughs in Tyne and Wear – Gateshead to the west, Sunderland in the south, North Tyneside to the north, and Newcastle upon Tyne to the Northwest.

There were 147,776 people living in the borough in 2021.^[1]

The largest town is South Shields. Other large riverside towns are Jarrow and Hebburn. The area was a centre for shipbuilding and repairing, coal mining and exports, and the chemical industries. They all declined in the half of the 20th century and there was a lot of unemployment.