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.
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.