This paper presents findings from an exploratory study of the effect of speech rate on the variable realisation of /p t k/ in the Tyneside (north-east England) variety of English. While previous work on this particular variety has shown that patterns of variation observed in /p t k/ are strongly related to a range of social factors, in line with most work on sociophonetic variation there has been relatively little focus to date on the possible role of prosodic factors in governing such inter- and intra-speaker variation. This study considers one such factor (speech rate) in the performance of 32 speakers on a sentence production task. Findings suggest that rate cannot be entirely excluded as a factor in accounting for the patterns of variation observed, but that its influence is somewhat marginal being clearly present only at particularly high rates.