Newcastle Stuff (2025)

19/06/2025

The building in the middle of these two photos stands on the site of the West Gate — a heavily fortified entrance to Newcastle. It was also a gateway to the gallows, through which condemned prisoners left the town to be hanged.

Criminals from Newcastle were hanged on the Town Moor, but executions also took place on Bath Lane. These gallows, directly behind the Waterloo Hotel, were reserved for people from Northumberland. You can see part of the pub on the far left of the photo, it stood on the corner of Westgate Road and Bath Lane and was demolished about thirty years ago.

King Henry IV granted Newcastle independence from Northumberland in 1400, creating the Town and County of Newcastle upon Tyne. But he didn’t want to give his castle to the town, so the area immediately around it remained part of Northumberland. The Northumberland assizes courts were held at the Moot Hall next to the castle twice a year, where serious criminal cases were heard by judges from the Northern Circuit.

Prisoners who received a death sentence at the assizes were executed in their native county. The Town Wall marked the boundary between Newcastle and Northumberland, and the nearest convenient spot in Northumberland was just outside the West Gate. They were taken from their confinement in the Castle Keep and out through the gate, where they were hanged from gallows on Bath Lane.

In later years, the West Gate became home to a craftsman’s guild called the Company of House Carpenters. It was demolished in 1811 and the guild replaced it with the House Carpenters’ Hall — the building in the two photos. It also served as a toll house for the road to Carlisle, and shop fronts had been added by the middle of the nineteenth century.

The older photo doesn’t have a date, but there are a couple of clues that help narrow things down. The tramlines tell us it was taken no earlier than 1901, and a sign for the pork butchers Kaufmann & Sons dates it to no later than 1915.

The Kaufmanns occupied the shop in the middle of the House Carpenters’ Hall, facing Westgate Road. They were born in Newcastle but their shop was repeatedly attacked by anti-German mobs after the outbreak of World War I, despite putting their British birth certificates on public display.

The shop was looted and wrecked in May 1915, and they became one of many families driven out of their businesses and homes in Newcastle simply because they had German surnames.

Photo credits: GPTN / Newcastle Stuff

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17/06/2025

The lower end of Pink Lane is pictured here in 1924, this prime bit of land opposite the Central Station remained undeveloped and covered in advertising hoardings until the 1960s.

Pink Lane was created when the Central Station was built in 1850. Newcastle Corporation had high hopes that Westgate Road would become the town’s principal shopping street—before Northumberland Street had taken off—and Pink Lane was supposed to provide quick access to it from the station.

But the left side of Pink Lane still had remnants of the Town Wall, which created a bottleneck at the lower end, hampering its development. The Corporation tried to rectify this in 1885 by agreeing to the demolition of the Wall and the Gunner Tower, so that the Tyne Improvement Commission could build their headquarters there. That’s the tall building in the photo with the fire escapes.

The Gunner Tower had a tenant called James Cuttriss, a photographer who used it as a studio. He’d already had a run-in with the Corporation when he built a wooden shed next to the tower without planning permission, and he refused to leave the tower when the demolition began. He was eventually ousted when his staff deserted him and his studio was reduced to a pile of rubble.

Cuttriss moved his business into the shed and began selling picture postcards, a common sideline for photographers. Newcastle had six postal deliveries each day back then—people could conduct conversations with each other across the town in much the same way as they would in later years by telephone or email.

Postcards provided a cheap and convenient means of doing this, and the people of Newcastle bought vast numbers of them. Picture postcards were also popular with visitors arriving in the city from the Central Station, so Cuttriss had a good spot for his business. However, his wares got him in trouble with the authorities again.

In November 1904, the police seized 21 obscene prints from his shop—he’d been charging customers a penny to look at them. He appeared before Newcastle Police Court, agreed not to do it again, and was ordered to pay ten shillings in costs. He died in 1912 at the age of 73, and his business was taken over by a pair of photographers called Crowe & Bell.

They occupied the shop in 1924 when the photo was taken—although curiously enough, Cuttriss’s name is still on the side of it. The site was eventually developed in 1963, when Gunner House was built there.

Part of the Gunner Tower has been preserved on Pink Lane and has a commemorative plaque, but it’s not something James Cuttriss would have recognised. An archaeological survey in 1964 concluded that this semi-circular structure is probably a fake, created in 1885 with rubble left over from the demolition of the tower.

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06/06/2025

This newspaper lad was standing at the top of Pudding Chare in 1898, with the Groat Market on the left and the Bigg Market on the right. We also get a glimpse of a building behind him on Pudding Chare that burned down two years later.

The early months of 1900 were a terrible time for fires in Newcastle. Huge blazes gutted the Central Exchange and the Theatre Royal, and many of the town’s oldest buildings were lost at the top of the Side when a paper merchant’s warehouse burned down. But the fire at Harrison’s lodging house on Pudding Chare was the only one to claim any lives.

The lodging house was a three-storey building near the top of Pudding Chare, you can see its white sign in the photo to the right of the lad. It had 54 beds, most of which were occupied by men, women and children on the night of February 4th, 1900.

The alarm was raised shortly before 11pm and the residents immediately began to flee the building, some of them jumping almost naked through the windows of the upper floors. It took a while for the fire brigade to arrive, during which time there were heroic efforts from members of the public to rescue those still trapped inside.

Among these was a young man named Stott who carried two children out and went back into the burning building and fetched another two. An Irishman named John Riles jumped from a window thinking he would drop into the street, but fell on the staircase and broke his leg. Stott entered the inferno once again and brought him out.

A thorough search was conducted after the flames had died down and four bodies were found, including that of John Harrison, owner of the lodging house. Three of them had died as a result of the fire and it was established that the fourth man had died in his bed several days earlier, but nobody had noticed him.

Back to the photo, the building to the left of the newspaper lad was occupied by the flour merchant Robert Hope and was demolished in the 1920s. To his right, on the corner of the Bigg Market and Pudding Chare, is the premises of the wine and spirit merchants Graham & Bradley, which would become a pub called the Vine Inn shortly afterwards.

As for the newspaper lad, he'd have worked for the Evening Chronicle, whose printing presses were a little further down Pudding Chare on Rosemary Lane.

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03/06/2025

The old photo shows the Head of the Side in the 1920s with The Empress Inn on the left, the colour photo shows the same scene today for comparison. The pub has a complicated history that takes some effort to untangle.

Many historians claim it stands on the site of Admiral Lord Collingwood’s birthplace, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar. He was indeed born in a building that became a pub, but that was the Meters Arms next door to The Empress. It was demolished in 1900 when Milburn House was built, the site is marked with a bust of Collingwood above one of its entrances.

The Empress stands on the site of a building that commemorated another national hero, albeit a Scottish one. A timber-framed house had been there since Elizabethan times and in the 1830s it became known as the Burns Tavern. There were three pubs in Newcastle named after Scotland’s most famous poet, Robert Burns, but they were snubbed by the town’s Burns Society, who held their meetings and Burns Night celebrations at the 3 Indian Kings on the Quayside.

The Burns Tavern was demolished in 1881 and replaced with a large office block called St Nicholas Chambers. The architect was John Johnstone, who had also designed the nearby Town Hall. Maybe he thought he was adding a touch of culture to his creation by including a new pub called the Burns Tavern on the ground floor.

But there was nothing cultured at all about this Burns Tavern, it was frequented by thieves and its owners were criminals too. It lost its licence in 1888 when the landlord, William Ray, was charged with drugging the drinks of some female customers. He and three other men sexually assaulted the women, and Ray was fined five pounds for the offences at Newcastle Police Court.

It was rebranded as The Empress the following year and run for over two decades by John Longstaff, a former champion cyclist. Jack Mitchell became the landlord in 1924 after moving there from a pub on Blackett Street, and ran it until his death in 1928. You can see his name on the front of the building in the first photo.

The current owners of The Empress decided to reintroduce some culture to their premises, and have converted it into a Country & Western bar.

20/05/2025

Britain’s bicycle craze had reached its peak when members of the North Eastern Cycle Club were pictured outside Newcastle’s Grand Hotel in 1910. The second photo shows the same view on Barras Bridge today for comparison.

The craze had begun a couple of decades previously when the penny-farthing design was succeeded by the ‘safety bicycle’. The wheels were now both the same size so it was less dangerous to mount, and inflatable tyres gave a much smoother ride than the solid ones on the older boneshakers.

Bicycles were cheaper to own than a horse, so people pedalled to work until motor cars became affordable after World War I. They created a new leisure industry too, cyclists could leave the smelly streets of Newcastle and enjoy the surrounding countryside. Women were able to travel without a chaperone and with friends, their newfound freedom and independence played a role in the women's rights movement.

Newcastle was at the forefront of biking innovation, Elswick Cycles had a factory behind Fenwick’s department store on Northumberland Street and was an internationally-known brand. There were several other bicycle retailers on the street; William Olliff's Cycle Emporium took up the whole corner with New Bridge Street and included a cycling school.

Local newspapers covered the craze extensively. They published weekly columns about cycling, with interesting places to visit and updates on the condition of the roads. Bicycle races featured prominently in the sports pages, the contestants were often members of clubs like the one pictured here.

The North Eastern Cycling Club was about to depart on their annual ride to Barnard Castle when the photo was taken in May of 1910. The hundred-mile round trip would test many riders today on their modern machines, and was quite an ordeal for Edwardian cyclists on unsurfaced roads and bikes with no gears to help them up the hills.

Little wonder that the President and Lady President of the North Eastern Cycling Club, Mr and Mrs Po***ck, preferred to make the journey in the comfort of the motor car on the left of the photograph.

13/05/2025

The pair of elephants was standing on Brunswick Place in 1931; they had come to say goodbye to Arthur Fenwick, a director of the nearby Fenwick’s department store. The second photo shows the same scene today for comparison.

Arthur was the son of John James Fenwick, founder of the store, but had shown no inclination to join the family business when he left school. At the age of nineteen, he took to the road in a green caravan and befriended lots of people involved with circuses and fairgrounds on his travels. He returned to the family fold after six years, but his love of showfolk and their way of life lasted until his death in 1957 at the age of 79.

He put his experience and contacts to good use when he established the Fenwick's Children Circus in the store, around the time the first photo was taken. In 1947 he took a thousand employees of Fenwick’s to the Town Moor to see the Bertram Mills Circus, and when poor health prevented him leaving the house in later life, the circuses came to see him. A maid at his house in Brandling Park once opened the door to see an elephant holding a bunch of flowers for Arthur.

The pair of elephants was standing on Brunswick Place in 1931; they had come to say goodbye to Arthur Fenwick, a director of the nearby Fenwick’s department store. The second photo shows the same scene today for comparison.

Arthur Fenwick was made an honorary member of the Showmen’s Guild but his life wasn’t all sawdust and muck. He was an expert on women’s fashion and developed Fenwick’s famous French Salon, and he married into another department store dynasty. His wife was Annie Beavan, whose family’s business was on Shields Road in Byker.

06/05/2025

On This Day In Newcastle: Several people died on the Quayside on May 6th 1867 when boarding a ferry after watching a boat race on the Tyne.

The race was between London oarsman Henry Kelley and local lad Robert Chambers for a prize of £200, which Kelley won. These were two of the best oarsmen in the world and the sport was followed as passionately in Newcastle as football is today, with over a hundred thousand people lining both sides of the river along the route of the race.

The tragedy occurred after the race when spectators were trying to board the Tyne General Ferry from the landing stage opposite the bottom of Broad Chare. The stage was connected to the Quay by a gangway and around a hundred people were crowded onto it when a girder broke, throwing most of them into the water.

Several journalists were in town to cover the race and they telegraphed news of the accident back to their newspapers in London, which initially reported that hundreds had drowned. Their interest soon waned when that number proved to be an exaggeration.

An inquest was opened immediately afterwards, the Coroner's initial report said that six people had drowned and a similar number were unaccounted for. The landing stage drifted several hundred yards downriver to the Swirle, and it was suspected that some bodies could have been swept further by the tide and out to sea.

The report is a harrowing read. Two young boys were playing on a boat next to the gangway and were killed when it collapsed, and a mother had her baby swept away from her arms when both were in the water. There is nothing on the Quayside to commemorate the deaths, which wouldn't be the case today if half a dozen people died at a sporting event.

The Tyne ferries were an important part of Tyneside’s transport infrastructure, serving the communities, factories and shipyards on both banks of the river. The black and white photo shows the replacement landing stage in 1895, the colour one shows the same scene today.

22/04/2025

The Bigg Market used to be Newcastle’s Hyde Park Corner, a place where people could rant at the public about politics or religion. The black and white photo shows one of these ranters standing on a carriage in 1908, and the colour one shows the same scene today for comparison.

The old photo was taken in September of 1908, it can be dated by a poster on the right which is advertising an appearance at the Empire Theatre by the actor Laurence Irving that month. The identity of the man on the carriage is unknown, but September 1908 is when the famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst made an appearance in the Bigg Market, amid disgraceful scenes.

She drew a crowd of around 7,000 people, almost all of them men, and spent an hour standing on a carriage while being subjected to a frenzy of abuse. The men engulfed her carriage and pushed it up and down the Bigg Market with the horse still attached, before she was able to make her escape down Pudding Chare, protected by policemen with their truncheons drawn.

Votes for women wasn’t the only thing that excited the Bigg Market crowds, who were spoiled for choice every Sunday evening. Political agitators of all persuasions vied with religious fanatics and teetotallers for their attention. These individuals were goaded and heckled until midnight, their audiences fuelled by the large number of pubs in the vicinity.

The man in the first photo has parked his carriage next to the Rutherford Memorial Fountain, the prime spot for the teetotallers. It was erected in memory of the preacher and fanatical abstainer from alcohol, John Hunter Rutherford, by a temperance movement called the Band of Hope. They added an inscription to the fountain, ‘Water Is Best’.

The fountain has since been relocated to the top of the Bigg Market, where the people of Newcastle continue to ignore its advice.

newcastlestuff.co.uk

17/04/2025

The third-oldest surviving locomotive in the world stands on top of the High Level Bridge in the black and white photo, the colour one shows the same scene today for comparison.

Nobody realised its true age when it was put on the bridge. Known as the Killingworth Billy, it was built by George Stephenson at Killingworth Colliery and was presumed to date from after he built his Rocket. But it was recently examined by experts who determined it was built in 1816, over a decade before Stephenson’s famous locomotive.

The Killingworth Billy hauled coal there until one of the colliery’s owners gifted it to Newcastle Council in 1881 to use in their celebration of the centenary of Stephenson’s birth. It was placed on top of the High Level Bridge in December of that year.

It remained there for several years but began to deteriorate due to the weather, so it was restored in 1896 and moved inside the Central Station. It was on the move again in 1945 when it was relocated to the Exhibition Park, and it’s current home is the Stephenson Steam Railway in North Shields

The Bridge Inn on the left was originally a shop that sold beer to the Irish navvies who built the High Level Bridge in 1849. When the bridge was completed the shop owner decided to capitalise on the passing trade and obtained full pub licence in 1853.

It was bought in 1892 by an Irishman called John Fitzgerald, founder of the Sir John Fitzgerald chain of pubs. He replaced it with the present building in 1901, and the Bridge Hotel remained a favourite with the city's Irish community.

The photo can be dated by the landlady’s name on the front of the Bridge Inn, Sarah Oughtred ran the pub from April 1886 until October 1887. We can narrow this down further thanks to a poster on the right of the photo, it’s advertising a Royal Show on the Town Moor which was attended by the Prince of Wales in July 1887.

newcastlestuff.co.uk

15/04/2025

The black and white photo shows a massive retaining wall under construction in 1909 near the mouth of the Ouseburn, the colour photo shows the same scene today for comparison.

Newcastle Corporation was empowered by an Act of Parliament in 1904 to improve the Quayside and extend it beyond the Ouseburn, which was to be the largest single engineering project that had been undertaken in the city. Work commenced in 1906 and the ancient Glasshouse Bridge over the Ouseburn was blown up with dynamite and replaced, connecting the old quay with the new one.

The retaining wall marked the northern edge of the new quay, holding back the steep ground above. It incorporated a new road linking the quay to St Lawrence Road and Walker Road. This road led up to the Free Trade Inn — you can just make out part of the landlord's name, Thomas Taylor, painted on the roof in the first photo.

It was originally one of several hundred homes in Newcastle where the householder had been granted a license to brew beer and sell it to their neighbours. This was a result of Parliament passing the Beer Act in 1830, in an attempt to wean the public off hard liquor.

Many of these beer houses were eventually bought by big breweries and became pubs. The White Lion Brewery demolished this one and built the present building in 1896, but the Free Trade didn’t get a full pub licence until 1963.

The big industrial building on the left of the first photo belonged to a metal polish company called Mepo, they had just been taken over by Reckitt & Sons, manufacturers of Brasso and similar cleaning products. The building remained there until the 1970s, the site is now a landscaped hill between the Free Trade and the Tyne pub.

newcastlestuff.co.uk

28/03/2025

A warm Geordie welcome awaited FA Cup winners Newcastle United at the Central Station in 1951, but they had already shown off the trophy to fans at Sunderland Station on the journey back from London.

Newcastle had defeated Blackpool 2-0 at Wembley on April 28th, and the team made the return trip to the Toon on May 5th. Their train took a winding route north, and hundreds of people lined the platforms at York and Hartlepool to cheer on the victors as it passed by. It paused for a few minutes at Sunderland Station, allowing local fans to join in the celebrations.

In those days, football fans across the North East supported local teams with a camaraderie that would be unthinkable today. It was common for Newcastle supporters to watch Sunderland at Roker Park if there was no home game at St James’; and vice versa. Over a thousand Sunderland fans travelled to Wembley by train, bus, and car—many without tickets—eager to support the region’s representatives in the final.

The Sunderland Echo reported that there was a stampede along the platform as people rushed to catch a glimpse of the cup, which stood on a table in the team’s first-class carriage. Several fans were crushed in the frenzy and the Echo’s photographer had his camera smashed. As the train pulled out of the station, they were still chanting the name of Jackie Milburn, scorer of both United goals.

The train arrived in Newcastle shortly afterward, where an estimated quarter of a million people lined the streets to witness the team’s triumphant procession to St James’ Park aboard an open-topped bus. The colour photo shows the Central Station the day after the 2025 Carabao Cup Final, if you look closely you’ll see some black and white balloons placed there to welcome returning fans.

26/03/2025

This drug store on Northumberland Street is where people in Newcastle bought co***ne a hundred years ago. It was advertised with a sign in the window.

Inman’s Cash Chemists was opened in 1887 by James Inman, a couple of doors up from Fenwick’s department store, opposite the entrance to Saville Row. You can see the words “Inman’s Coca Wine” in the window to the right of the door—a product aimed at those who found that wine alone wasn’t sufficiently stimulating.

Coca wine was invented in 1863 by a chemist in Paris who extracted co***ne from several kilos of Peruvian coca leaves and blended it with Bordeaux wine. It was marketed as ‘Vin Mariani’ and endorsed by two Popes and a couple of American presidents; Pope Leo XIII loved it so much he allowed them to use his image in their advertising, and it kept him going until the age of 93.

British chemists manufactured their own versions of coca wine, and Dr. Williams’ ‘Great Peruvian Restorative’ was the first to arrive on Tyneside in the late 1880s. He claimed that footballers were especially fond of it. James Inman was relatively late to the party with his own concoction, produced just a decade or so before co***ne became illegal when the Dangerous Drugs Act was passed by Parliament in 1920.

The photo isn’t dated, but we can narrow it down quite precisely by the ‘Ozonia’ signs in the window. This was a quack remedy Inman sold for rheumatism, which sufferers added to their bathwater to relieve tender feet, soft bones, and muscular strain. It was manufactured in Dublin and imported by English chemists for a short period from 1906 to 1907.

Inman built up a chain of drug stores. At the time the photo was taken, there were three in Newcastle and others in Byker, Blyth, and Whitley Bay, with several more in Scotland. They were bought by Boots the Chemists in 1910, who merged the shop in the photo with its next-door neighbour and created one of Northumberland Street’s landmark buildings, with statues of local worthies Thomas Bewick, Roger Thornton, Sir Henry Percy, and Sir John Marley on its frontage.

Newcastle Stuff