She knows how it sounds. “I know it’s cheesy,” Samantha Townsend laughs. But spend any time with Shildon’s new town mayor, and it becomes hard to doubt her, writes volunteer community journalist, Henri Birkholz.
Cllr Townsend was elected to the mayoral role at the recent Annual Town Meeting, held at Shildon Town Council’s chambers on Monday 18 May.
A lifelong resident who went to school here, whose children go to school here, and who has spent nine years serving the community as a councillor, Townsend steps into the mayoral role not as an outsider with a mandate, but as someone with a deep, personal stake in the town’s future.
Elected annually by fellow councillors, the mayor’s primary responsibilities include acting as the town’s “first citizen” – wearing the traditional chains of office, chairing full council meetings, and acting as a politically neutral ambassador for the local community.
While the town mayor serves a largely ceremonial and civic role, it was a very personal experience that first pushed Townsend into the political arena.
The 38-year-old studied philosophy at university before becoming an RE teacher, but it was motherhood that proved the real turning point. Her eldest son Stevie has a disability, and navigating a school system that wasn’t meeting his needs set her on a path she never expected. She understood the landscape — and that made the failings harder to accept, not easier.
She began engaging with local politics, eventually realising that real change required a seat at the table rather than a voice outside the door. “I said to myself, I can spend the next ten years waiting for the right person to stand as a councillor — or I can just put myself there instead.”
Being a visible woman in local politics has come at a real personal cost. During the 2019 election campaign, a man on a doorstep told her that Labour politicians deserved to be dragged into the street and shot. A stranger spent seven years cycling through social media accounts to send her sexually degrading messages about her body and appearance — blocked repeatedly, returning each time. When her local MP’s office was vandalised, the safety concerns became real enough that she questioned whether she needed CCTV at her own home.
It would have been entirely understandable to walk away. She didn’t. “People will attack me because they want me to stop talking. So the question is — why do they want me to stop talking? If I’m getting a strong reaction, maybe that’s a sign I need to talk louder.”
Powerlifting started as self-preservation — from park exercise during the pandemic to structured training and competition. Now she holds the regional squat record at 207 kilograms.
For a woman who has spent years absorbing hostility while raising three children and serving her community, the philosophy she has landed on feels hard won. “You can’t look after anybody else if you don’t look after yourself.” It is a principle that extends well beyond the gym — and shapes directly where she is directing her energy as mayor.
Quinn Beadle and her brother Dylan were young people from Shildon who both ended their own lives. Their parents, rather than being consumed by grief, built something from it — a charity called Quinn’s Retreat, offering respite breaks to families bereaved by suicide. It is the charity Townsend is likely to support during her mayoral year, and the reason is not hard to understand. “To see a family take the huge amount of pain that they have and make it into something positive that helps other people — it’s just so inspiring.”
After everything — the threats, the harassment, the losses, the setbacks — what strikes you most about Samantha Townsend is that none of it has made her bitter. “We should be here to sing loud and proud about our town,” she says. “We can focus on the negatives all day, but there’s plenty of other people who’ll do that for us.”
Shildon, it seems, has exactly the mayor it deserves.
Henri Birkholz
Shildon & District's local community newspaper.
