Newcastle Stuff (2025)

12/12/2024

The long queue in the old photo was for a movie about venereal disease at the Stoll Picture Theatre in 1934. The second photo was taken recently and shows the same location on Westgate Road for comparison.

‘Damaged Lives’ was made in Hollywood and tells the story of a marriage ruined when the husband has an affair and catches syphilis. It was banned by censors in several American states and disowned by the studio that made it, but the British Social Hygiene Council decided to take a punt and distribute it over here as an educational film.

It was considered so racey that two high ranking police officers demanded a private screening behind locked doors at the Stoll before they'd allow it to be shown to the public. They ordered a couple of scenes to be cut, but this didn't stop Geordies turning out in droves to see what the fuss was about.

The queue in the first photo is snaking past the Brandy Vaults on the corner of Westgate Road and Thornton Street, but the second photo shows a different pub in the building. It has a long and complicated history, it originally housed the Cumberland House and changed its name to the Brandy Vaults in 1862.

It became the Golden City Chinese restaurant in 1965, until 1988 when it reopened as the Brandy Vaults. It has been called Tilley’s Bar since 1991, named after the female music hall entertainer Vesta Tilley, who did a reverse drag act and impersonated men. She appeared next door at the Tyne Theatre & Opera House several times around the beginning of the twentieth century.

The theatre became a cinema in 1919 when the lease was bought by Sir Oswald Stoll, and gained a reputation for showing mucky movies in its later years until it closed in 1977. It reopened as the New Tyne Theatre & Opera House and is one of only eight Grade I Listed theatres in the country, two of which are in Newcastle.

10/12/2024

This photo of the upper part of the Side is undated, but a poster for the Convict Ship gives us a starting point. The former floating prison arrived here on July 23rd 1899 and was open to the public for three months.

The ship was over a century old and her proper name was the Success. She had spent many years in Australia where some of the country's most notorious criminals were incarcerated below her decks in appalling conditions, including Ned Kelly and his gang. She was turned into a tourist attraction after being decommissioned and embarked on a tour of Britain.

The ship was moored in Gateshead next to the Swing Bridge until September 1899 and thousands of people paid sixpence each to gawp at waxwork models of prisoners shackled in cells, and admire the equipment that had been used to torture and punish the original inmates. Her next port of call was South Shields where she ran aground temporarily while berthing at Mill Dam, destroying a public urinal.

The building almost out of shot on the far left was the birthplace of Admiral Lord Collingwood, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar. His ship, the Royal Sovereign, was the fastest in the English fleet and the first to engage the enemy, fighting the battle single-handedly for half an hour before Nelson and Co. caught up with it. He took command of the fleet during the battle when Nelson was killed, and is buried next to him at St Paul’s Cathedral.

The ancient building next to it was occupied by Stephen Scallon at the time the photo was taken. He came from Ireland and opened his tailoring business on the Side in 1870, remaining there until the building was demolished in 1900. It had survived a huge fire in March of that year which started in another building a couple of doors down the street, but developers took the opportunity to clear the whole area to build Milburn House.

The Convict Ship poster is tatty and torn, which suggests the photo was taken a little after the vessel visited Tyneside, and there's another detail which confirms this. The building next to Stephen Scallon’s is propped up and there's debris on the road in front of it, suggesting this is shortly after the fire in March of 1900.

Photo credit: Newcastle Libraries.

03/12/2024

Four gadgies are pictured in 1935 sitting outside the Guildhall on Sandhill, the colour photo shows the same spot in 2024 for comparison.

Both sets of people are perching on a ledge between two pillars at the east end of the Guildhall, facing towards the Quayside. This part of the building was originally a fish market that was designed by John Dobson and added in 1825. The aim was to get the town's fishwives off the streets where they were causing a nuisance with their drunkenness and foul language.

The women didn't take kindly to being shoved indoors and made this clear to John Dobson in their usual sweary way. But the winter of 1825 was particularly cold and the fishwives were pleased to be under a roof, so they sent Dobson's wife a large box of assorted fish to show their gratitude.

The old men were probably relaxing after a visit to the Quayside Market on a Sunday morning. As were the couple in the second picture, almost ninety years later.

Photo Credits: Edwin Smith/RIBA & Newcastle Stuff.

28/11/2024

Two women are pictured walking up the Side, the steeple of St Nicholas’ Cathedral is in the distance. The photographer is unknown and it’s undated, but there are clues that tell us when it was taken.

There’s a gap in the buildings below the steeple which was created on the evening of March 9th 1900 when a fire broke out in the warehouse of the paper merchants Robinson & Co. It quickly engulfed their neighbours and led to the last big loss of ancient buildings in Newcastle; some of them, like Robinson’s, were built when Elizabeth I was on the throne.

The unluckiest pub in Newcastle was among them, this was the third time the Burnt House had burned down. The surviving buildings in the photo were demolished over the following months to make way for Milburn House. This occupies the entire area between the Side, Dean Street and St Nicholas Street and was reputedly the biggest office block in the country when it was completed in 1905.

Contemporary newspaper reports all say the fire broke out on “the Side”, but a Council street sign appeared on Milburn House shortly after it was built that calls it simply “Side”. This sparked a debate still raging among pedants today over whether or not there should be a “the” in front of the street’s name. Both are acceptable, neither is wrong.

However, all Newcastle’s principal historians called it “the Side”: William Gray did so in 1649, Henry Bourne in 1736, John Brand in 1789, Eneas McKenzie in 1827, and R.J. Charleton in 1885. This is how it appeared on most maps of Newcastle before the 20th century. Almost everyone today still uses "the" in front of "Side" in general speech, as they do with "the Bigg Market", which never has never had "the" in its official title.

Getting back to the date of the photo, the footpath in front of the gap between the buildings has been fenced off, probably because the site was still dangerous. This suggests the photo was taken soon after the fire and before the other buildings were also fenced off when their demolition began, so maybe April or May.

The abundance of litter on the street is another important detail. It tells us the two women and the people in front of them were coming away from the Quayside market, on a Sunday morning in the Spring of 1900.

26/11/2024

The older photo shows Nelson Street in 1912 and the other one was taken in 2024 for comparison. There’s little difference in the streetscape except for Bank House peeping over the Central Arcade, despite being half a mile away at the bottom of Pilgrim Street.

The arcade opened shortly before the older photo was taken, occupying the former Central Exchange Building, which had been gutted by a fire in 1901. The Central Exchange was built in 1839 by Richard Grainger and had once housed an art gallery, reading room and a hotel, and more recently the Vaudeville Theatre. It was remodelled as a shopping arcade by the architects J Oswald & Sons, opening in 1906.

The boot maker John Hamilton was among the arcade’s earliest tenants; you can see his sign on the Grainger Street frontage of the building in the older photo. The company ceased trading there in the 1970s, but there’s still a large and beautifully painted ghost sign for Hamiton’s on a window inside the arcade.

The white building to the left of the arcade was the Gaiety Variety Theatre on Nelson Street, and was also part of Richard Grainger’s redevelopment of the town centre in the 1830s. It was originally a concert hall and became a theatre in 1884, hosting vaudeville and music hall acts.

After successfully screening a couple of short movies to its punters between acts, it became a full time cinema in 1911 called the Gaiety Picture Hall. It still says “theatre” on the outside of the building in the older photo, they mustn't have updated their signage, or Newcastle Libraries are a year or two out with the date they’ve attributed to it. The cinema closed in 1947.

The Grainger Market is on the right and one of the properties in the old photo has a sign on the front that says “Simpson”. This was the Blackett Arms and the sign refers to a former landlord, Edward Simpson. The pub dates from the building of the Grainger Market in 1835 and was taken over by him in 1872, after which it was informally known as “Simpson’s”.

Edward’s widow became the landlady after he cut his throat with a penknife on a holiday in Whitley Bay in 1884, and it remained in the family for many more years. It continued to be known by its regulars as Simpson’s, and the sign was a local landmark. The Blackett Arms closed down about twenty years ago and the building is currently occupied by a bar called No28.

Photo Credits: Newcastle Libraries & Newcastle Stuff.

21/11/2024

This photo of a timber-framed house on The Side was taken in 1880, the Crown Posada is on the right if anyone needs to get their bearings. The house is long gone, but a cat that used to live there is still with us.

The Side was lined with houses like this, all the way up to what’s now St Nicholas Street. They were mostly occupied by wealthy merchants, mariners and ship owners; the one in the photo was the home of Ambrose Barnes in 1680, a mayor of Newcastle. The ironmongers Thomas Proctor & Son moved into the building in 1838, they’d had a shop next door for forty years and needed a showroom for the bathtubs they made at their factory in Gateshead.

Many years previously a black cat wandered off a ship moored on the Quayside and took up residence in the house, where it made itself useful catching mice. It came to a sticky end when it fell into a barrel of tar, which embalmed its body. A reporter from the Newcastle Chronicle visited the building around the time the photo was taken and was shown the cat, which was nailed to a wall.

One of the staff told the reporter it had been there all the years he’d worked for the company, and was considered ancient by his colleagues when he’d started there fifty years previously. The cat’s residence in the building - dead and alive - coincided with a prosperous period for the company, so the superstitious Proctor family locked its co**se in a safe.

Business was still booming for Proctor's at the beginning of the 20th century thanks to their Gateshead factory, which was now making boilers and water tanks for the mining industry and the Admiralty. It was becoming impossible to conduct a modern business in such ancient premises, so they hired the architect W.H. Knowles to design new offices and a showroom for them.

The old building was demolished in 1907 and replaced by Proctor House. The dead cat was moved to a new safe where it remained until 1991, when the company outgrew these premises and moved to their present location on the Team Valley.

The manky old moggy came with them, but not before the company had it framed, so it could be hung in the hallway of their new premises to bring them continued good fortune.

19/11/2024

A number 34 tram is about to begin its ascent of Westgate Hill in 1938, photographed in black and white from the upper deck of another tram. The colour photo was taken in 2024 from the upstairs of the number 38 bus for comparison.

The streetscape has remained unchanged over the past eighty-odd years, but none of the businesses in the photos are the same. The Westgate Picture House is on the left, it was about to face competition from the Essoldo, which opened a little further up Westgate Road in August of 1938. Nowadays, the Westgate Picture House is the NX music venue, and the Essoldo was pulled down a couple of decades ago.

On the right, Jayson’s Summer Clearance Sale is in full swing. This annual event would be women’s outfitter’s last, as their store was taken over by Book’s Fashions the following year. A couple of doors down from Jayson’s, the Bass sign on the wall belonged to the Star Inn. The pub is still there but it was recently renamed the Geordie Star.

The Bass beer at the Star Inn must have been strong stuff. Two years after the old photo was taken, the landlord of the pub came up with a novel way to raise money for the war effort. He invited his customers to stick coins to a mirror in the pub’s smoking room with beer and it was soon covered with pennies, shillings and half crowns, raising over three quid.

Changes were afoot on the road too. The vehicle immediately behind the tram is a trolley bus, one of a fleet of 30 that had been introduced to Newcastle three years previously. There are a couple more in the distance. Passengers preferred them to the trams, which were going to be phased out, but the war intervened. The trams continued to run in the city until 1950, while the trolleys lasted until 1966.

14/11/2024

This drinking fountain stands on Newgate Street next to St Andrews Church, but it has nothing to do with that building. It’s a remnant of the Gallowgate Baths & Wash Houses and was located at the far left of the old engraving.

The cholera epidemic of 1853 had claimed over a thousand lives in Newcastle and brought into focus the need for fresh and clean drinking water. The owners of a drapery shop on Market Street called Dunn & Co considered it their civic duty to provide the town with four drinking fountains, and Newcastle Corporation matched their offer by funding four more.

The one in the photo was paid for by the Corporation and unveiled in May of 1860 to serve the needs of the neighbourhood, where few houses had an indoor water supply. The residents could fill up a bucket and take water home, and there was a steel cup attached to a chain for passersby to quench their thirst. It was also used by farmers to water their horses and livestock on their way to and from the town’s markets.

The fountain took its water from the Gallowgate Baths & Wash Houses, another initiative to improve the health of the locals, by keeping them clean. The Corporation commissioned one of the town’s leading architects, Thomas Oliver, to design the new building, which stood on the corner of Newgate Street and Gallowgate. The baths opened for business on June 16th 1859, having cost £5,000 to build and equip.

From six in the morning until nine at night, its patrons could take a cold bath for a penny or luxuriate in a lukewarm one for tuppence. There were fourteen “slipper” baths, one vapour bath, and four tepid and cold shower baths. There were also forty-five separate washing stalls for laundering purposes, each with two fixed tubs, a poss tub and scrubbing board. The water was heated by a furnace designed to consume its own smoke, so that clean washing wasn’t immediately blackened with soot.

The baths were relocated further up Gallowgate in 1896, and the building in the engraving was pulled down four years later when the road was widened to accommodate the new electric trams. The drinking fountain ceased to function when its water supply was gone, but it’s one of two that have survived from this era. A fountain donated by Dunn & Co is still in place at Westgate Hill Cemetery and in much better condition, although it no longer dispenses water either.

13/11/2024

A mother and her children are sitting on the doorstep of a Newcastle pub in the 1890s. They look like they're waiting for the dad to come out, and hoping he had some money left from his session to feed them.

The pub was the Lord Nelson on Sandgate and stood next to Johnson’s Entry, which the woman on the left is emerging from. Sandgate had a dozen of these entries on its north side, they were narrow lanes about the width of the doorway and were lined with tenements that were extraordinarily squalid, even for the Victorian era.

Around 2,000 people lived in the entries, often two or three families in one room, making it the most densely populated place in the country. Newcastle Corporation was shamed into demolishing the south side of the street in the 1860s when a London newspaper said the stench in Sandgate was worse than Cairo and Calcutta. The North side wasn't much better 30 years later, where we can assume the family in the photo were living.

The Lord Nelson was an ancient timber-framed building that would have originally been a dwelling house. It’s unclear when it became a pub, but its first appearance in the public record is in the 1822 edition of Pigott’s Street Directory. This would make it a veteran of the Sandgate Riots in the 1850s when violence erupted between the locals and the Irish community; several thousand men and women battled on the street and most of the pubs there were wrecked.

Sandgate remained the roughest part of town until the end of the century, which would explain why the landlord of the Lord Nelson has his windows partially boarded up in the photo. It was also the poorest part of town, and it's unlikely the family on the doorstep would have been fed when their dad eventually spilled out of the pub.

12/11/2024

This photo was taken in 1930 and shows one of the first coaches to operate a scheduled service between Newcastle and London.

The Daimler CF6 coach was owned by John Glenton Friars of Blaydon. His service departed from Marlborough Crescent Bus Station at 8.15am every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday, arriving at King's Cross at 7.45pm in the evening. Tickets were 20 shillings one way and 35 shillings return.

The coach seated twenty people and had a range of amenities to make the long journey as pleasant as possible. There was an onboard toilet and a kitchen and buffet area at the back, where passengers could stand and eat or take their food to their seats where there were fold-out tables. They could watch the countryside roll past from the observation deck at the rear of the coach.

Glenton Friars owned a fleet of motor coaches and charabancs and had organised tours and excursions around the region for the past decade or so. He owned a motorcycle and was a well known figure on the racing circuit; he also learned to fly an aeroplane, a risky business back then. It seems he liked a bit of danger in his life.

He could have found this by taking a ride on his own coach service to London. Seven passengers were injured in 1930 when the vehicle crashed and overturned near Grantham, and the following year it burst into flames at Biggleswade.

His company was taken over by United Automobile Services Ltd in 1932.

05/11/2024

This lovely Art Nouveau tower and shop on the corner of Westgate Road and Clayton Street are pictured around 1928, shortly after Northern Goldsmiths moved in.

There were high hopes that Westgate Road would become Newcastle's principal shopping street in the decades after the Central Station opened, but it was eclipsed by Northumberland Street towards the end of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the jewellers Street & Co. still had faith in its potential in 1910 when they built this landmark building at the junction with Clayton Street.

The original building on the corner was built in 1837 by Richard Grainger, and Street & Co’s shop was next door to it on Westgate Road. The corner building was occupied by the confectioner George Haydock and became available in 1907 when his chain of sweet shops got into difficulties and was put up for sale. Street & Co bought it from him and set about expanding their business by combining the two properties.

They wanted something bold and contemporary so they hired the architects Cackett and Burns, who were designing the Spanish City in Whitley Bay at the time. They added the Art Nouveau tower and crowned it with a green dome, mirroring the dome on top of Atlas Chambers on the opposite side of the junction. It's the only Richard Grainger building in Newcastle that's been improved upon.

The company had been in business for 75 years selling diamond rings and necklaces as well as watches and clocks. They were a perfect fit for Northern Goldsmiths who acquired Street & Co and their building in 1928. They added the distinctive gold clock to the exterior in 1935, matching the one hung outside their Blackett Street branch the same year.

Northern Goldsmiths vacated the building in 1985 to concentrate on their flagship store on Blackett Street, the clock has never worked since. The upper floors were converted into flats in 1995 and the ground floor shop has had a number of tenants, it’s currently occupied by a dessert cafe called Soufflé Baby.

09/10/2024

This photo was taken in 1893 when the Dean Street Railway Viaduct was being widened, the men were working on the highest scaffolding ever seen in Newcastle at that time.

The viaduct is a marvel of Victorian engineering, built in 1848 by the Newcastle & Berwick Railway Company so their passengers could cross the new High Level Bridge and continue their journey towards Edinburgh. The eastern approach was skillfully slotted between the Norman Castle Keep and the mediaeval Black Gate before the viaduct itself soars eighty feet high above the gorge carved out by the Lort Burn, a river which now runs beneath Dean Street. It’s still one of the most impressive structures in Newcastle.

The railway company would have thought the viaduct was completed when the first locomotive crossed it in the summer of 1848, but unfortunately for them, the job was far from over. The opening of the Central Station increased the traffic over the viaduct and it was decided to widen it. So the whole job had to be done again, with a second approach and viaduct running alongside the original ones.

Work began in early 1893 when houses were pulled down behind the Black Gate, and the Dog Leap Stairs were demolished. The scaffolding for the viaduct went up in the summer, and two years later the viaduct was declared open for locomotives on June 9th, 1895. The railway company built a new set of steps called Dog Leap Stairs alongside the widened viaduct, a few yards north of where the originals had been.

When the viaduct first opened in 1848, the Castle Keep and the Black Gate were in a dilapidated state and an embarrassment to the town, especially as the town was named after the Castle. Work began immediately on restoring the Castle, and the Black Gate was pulled back from the brink of collapse in 1883 and fully renovated.

By the time the viaduct was widened, the Castle Keep, High Level Bridge, Black Gate and the Dean Street Railway Viaduct provided visitors and locals with unrivalled views. There isn’t anywhere else in Britain with as dramatic a mix of Norman, mediaeval and Victorian architecture, on such a huge scale, as this corner of Newcastle.

08/10/2024

Two families are sunbathing in the back lane between Carville Road and Mason Street in Byker, photographed in 1975 by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen.

03/10/2024

This 1924 photo gives a rare glimpse of a second entrance to the underground toilets at the bottom of the Bigg Market. It would later be destroyed when it was hit by a bus, there’s just the one entrance now.

The first public toilets on this site were built in 1872 and were above ground. There was a busy market nearby so they got heavy usage during the day, but people were frightened to pay a visit at night. A letter appeared in the Newcastle Journal, warning their readers that this part of town was frequented by "roughs and card-sharpers", and "others of the very lowest grade”. Any person going into the urinal in the evening, he added, would likely be pounced upon and robbed.

A motion was passed in the Council chamber, and it was agreed that better toilets were needed. The new facilities were designed by the City Engineer, W.G. Laws, and were ready for action on October 24th, 1893. The sanitary fixtures and fittings were provided by Messrs Shanks & Co, which the Newcastle Daily Chronicle declared "a marvel of modern scientific arrangement".

The toilets were lit at night by electric lamps and flooded with natural light in the daytime, through a cathedral-like glass dome. Unfortunately, the light in this cistern chapel didn't deter the roughs and others of the very lowest grade, with drug dealers joining the mix.

Three years before this photo was taken, Charles Snowden of Gateshead was arrested in the toilets for selling co***ne and o***m on the premises and in neighbouring pubs. He was sent to prison for six months in February 1921.

Disaster struck the toilets on September 10th 1949, when a Corporation bus crashed into the entrance on the Groat Market side. The toilets were remodelled with just a single entrance instead of two by Messrs W. Moss & Sons of Heaton at a cost of £160. A new glass roof was installed, which is much higher than the original one.

Nowadays, that roof has a chandelier hanging from it, the toilets having been converted into a cocktail bar.

02/10/2024

The older photo was taken in 1912, and the other one in 2024 for comparison. Clayton Street has always been the shabbiest part of Grainger Town and almost bankrupted its builder, Richard Grainger.

This stretch of Clayton Street was begun in 1837, after the core of Grainger Town was completed. It takes its name from John Clayton, the Town Clerk who assisted Richard Grainger in the redevelopment of Newcastle, and whose land the street passed through. Grainger’s business strategy depended on selling or letting his buildings as quickly as possible to finance the next batch, and Clayton Street is where he came unstuck.

He had already built around 450 properties in the town centre in the space of three years, and the market was saturated. He was accused of cutting corners by using building materials that wouldn't have been considered fit for the rest of Grainger Town; the difference in quality is clearly visible today. Grainger’s debts were mounting and he had to flee Newcastle to avoid arrest, only returning when John Clayton, who was also his accountant and solicitor, had smoothed things over.

Huge swathes of the right side of the street remained empty and boarded up long after Grainger’s death in 1861, newspapers were still describing it as being deserted in the 1870s. John Clayton’s mansion was behind these buildings, he insisted they had no windows at the rear to prevent people looking onto his property. Some of the buildings are only one room deep in order to fit on Clayton’s land, so they were a hard sell to prospective tenants.

There had been hope of improvement when the Central Station opened nearby. But this was dashed when Grainger Street was extended in the 1860s, providing a direct route from the station into the heart of the town, and drawing footfall away from Clayton Street. The street is fully occupied now, the mix of charity shops and bargain stores are a good fit for their down-at-heel surroundings.

But the commercial failure of Clayton Street has had an unexpected benefit: nobody thought it worthwhile pulling its buildings down and replacing them with something modern. The streetscape is almost identical in both photos, taken over a century apart.

Photo credits: Newcastle City Libraries and Newcastle Stuff.

01/10/2024

Four lads are watching the action on a stall at Newcastle Hoppings. The photographer is unknown and the date is tricky to guess, it could be any time in the 1950s or 60s.

All that can be said for certain is that it was the last full week of June, when Europe's largest travelling fair is held on the Town Moor. Hoppings Week traditionally coincides with Newcastle's monsoon season, so the lads' wellies were a practical choice of footwear and are still a common sight at the fair, despite being the height of summer.

26/09/2024

This gloomy photograph shows the shoreline at Pipewellgate in Gateshead, the photographer and date are unknown. The other photo was taken in 2024 for comparison.

The area pictured is between the Swing Bridge and the High Level Bridge, both of which are just out of shot on either side of the photos, although Pipewellgate extended further west than this. The older photo was taken from the wooden pier of the Swing Bridge some time in the 1890s, which isn’t possible today because the structure is unsafe. The pier runs across the middle of the recent photo.

Pipewellgate is one of the oldest parts of Gateshead, its name referring to wooden pipes that transported water from a well there. The mediaeval Tyne Bridge was on the spot currently occupied by the Swing Bridge, so this became a busy approach to Newcastle and a desirable place to live and conduct business. The Gategang family settled there around 1300, and a document from 1348 describes Alan Gategang as ‘Lord of Pipewellgate’.

The area remained the home of the town’s wealthier families until the 18th century, when it changed beyond recognition. Pipewellgate had an abundance of water from the river and limitless coal from collieries nearby, making it the perfect spot for heavy industry. A large iron works was established, where Richard Trevithick built the third ever locomotive engine in the world, in 1805.

The buildings in the old photo were a mix of factories, warehouses and tenement housing. They survived the Great Fire of 1854, which devastated the area to the east of the Swing Bridge, but their days were numbered by the time the photographer paid a visit. The derelict-looking wreck in the middle was the rear of the Fountain Inn, it was actually still trading when the older photo was taken. The pub was demolished along with most of its neighbours when a new quay was built on the Gateshead shore in 1910.

The new quay provided quick and easy access to the river, although nowhere near as quick and easy as the access that had been provided by the Fountain Inn. It had a door at the back so that goods could be hauled up from boats on the river. Many a bevvied-up customer mistook this for the pub's exit, and plunged twenty feet onto the muddy shore of the River Tyne.

Newcastle Stuff