Newcastle Stuff

  • Home
  • Newcastle Stuff
Website

Newcastle Stuff Stuff about Newcastle.

These two photos were taken 137 years apart on Neville Street, looking east towards Collingwood Street. While the scene ...
11/06/2026

These two photos were taken 137 years apart on Neville Street, looking east towards Collingwood Street. While the scene remains instantly recognisable, the story of this street is one of constant evolution, shaped by the grand hotels that have defined the area near the Central Station for over a century.

The black and white image captures a moment of transition in 1889. The Central Station already had a hotel, but the massive increase in passengers since it opened had rendered it totally inadequate. The area on the right of the photo had been fenced off as the foundations were being dug for the extension of the Central Station Hotel, which eventually opened in 1892.

While one hotel was rising, another was falling. The gap in the buildings on Collingwood Street marks the spot where the Royal Turf Hotel was being demolished in 1889 to make way for a new bank. However, the changing face of the street’s hospitality industry is perhaps best illustrated by the buildings in the foreground.

Historically, this part of Neville Street was dominated by the Douglas Hotel, which stood just out of shot on the left of the black and white photo. Three of its neighbours are pictured here. The first building was called Station Chambers and housed the regional offices of the Great Northern Railway Company, and the ground floor was occupied by the Northern Cocoa Rooms.

The shop next door with the canopy belonged to the tailors and wool merchants Hunter & Nisbet. The run of buildings is completed by Standard Chambers on the corner, built in 1884 for the Standard Life Assurance Company.

The Douglas Hotel remained a fixture of the city until 1971. It was owned by Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, who also operated the nearby County Hotel, which they decided to focus their investment on. They were unable to find a buyer for the Douglas Hotel, leading to the demolition of the whole block, including the buildings in the foreground of the black and white photo.

There were hopes that the vacant plot would become a public square, but a property developer had other ideas and built a huge office block called Baron House. Yet the ever-increasing number of passengers at the Central Station created the demand for more hotel rooms.

The site turned full circle in 2015 when Baron House was converted into a hotel, now operated by Hilton, proving that while the buildings change, the needs of the street remain the same.

Pictures: W. Embleton Collection / Newcastle Stuff.

Visit newcastlestuff.co.uk for more stuff about Newcastle.

This is the east side of Sandhill in 1866, across the road from Bessie Surtees' House. The river is just out of shot on ...
09/06/2026

This is the east side of Sandhill in 1866, across the road from Bessie Surtees' House. The river is just out of shot on the right. These buildings had survived Tyneside's biggest fire a decade earlier, but were eventually cleared away by the resulting wave of redevelopment in the area.

Newcastle was once an international sea port, and the business of the town's coal merchants, manufacturers and shipping companies had been conducted for centuries in these ancient buildings, as well as others that lined the Quayside.

The horse and carriage on the left was parked outside an overhanging Elizabethan building, which was occupied by the h**p merchants W. B. Proctor & Co. The company also imported guano - the excrement of seabirds - directly from South America, which was used as fertiliser.

The Georgian brick building to the right of it was the warehouse of the wine merchants Surtees & Co. It also housed the first telegraph office on Sandhill. The ground floors of the other buildings were shops, including a tobacconist, a hairdresser and three beer retailers, with offices above them.

The Great Fire of 1854 devastated the Quayside immediately behind Sandhill, creating a huge demand for new offices in the area. This was partly met when Exchange Buildings rose up from the ashes of the fire, which was one of the country's biggest office blocks when it was completed in 1861.

The property boom caused by the fire also spread to Sandhill; the buildings in the photo were pictured shortly before the east side of it was dragged into the nineteenth century too. They were no longer fit for purpose and the occupants hankered after the practicality and prestige of modern premises.

The properties were gradually demolished and replaced by the impressive range of buildings that we see there today. All physical traces of this old part of Sandhill are now long gone, but there is still one link to these buildings.

W. B. Proctor & Co moved across the road to the Side, where they built Proctor House and traded as Thomas Proctor and Co. Amazingly, they are still in business today, on the Team Valley Trading Estate in Gateshead. Although they no longer deal in seagull dung.

Visit newcastlestuff.co.uk for more stuff about Newcastle.

This busy scene was photographed around a hundred years ago on New Bridge Street, with Blackett Street beyond. The colou...
04/06/2026

This busy scene was photographed around a hundred years ago on New Bridge Street, with Blackett Street beyond. The colour picture shows the same scene today for comparison. The black and white photo is undated, but there are some clues in it that help narrow things down.

The building on the far left was occupied for many years by the house agents Watson & Sons, who rented the ground floor shop to the jeweller J.J. Grant in 1922, giving us a starting date. The gold clock on the front of Northern Goldsmiths was installed in 1935, which closes the timeframe. So the late 1920s would be a reasonable guess for the date of the black and white photo.

The recent widening of New Bridge Street gives us a better view of the Northern Goldsmiths building, on the corner of Blackett Street and Pilgrim Street. It was built in 1892 by a property developer and Newcastle councillor called Thomas Cooke, who bought and demolished a drapery shop on the spot that was owned by the Mayor of Newcastle.

It was a speculative build, but Cooke soon found tenants. The upper floors were taken by the photographer Richard Emerson Ruddock, whose Grand Studio was reputedly the largest and most lavish in the country. He specialised in portraits of local dignitaries and the landed gentry, and would have found plenty of customers in the shop below.

This was occupied by the Goldsmiths & Silversmiths Company, giving the building its name, Goldsmiths Hall. They became known as Northern Goldsmiths and are still there today, the business uses the whole building and has expanded into the one next door.

The YMCA can be seen in the distance behind the tram in the black and white photo, but is absent from the colour one. The building was demolished in 1973 at the YMCA's own request. They had built new premises on John Dobson Street and asked the Council to knock their old building down, instead of incorporating it into the shopping centre, as had originally been planned.

Northern Goldsmiths still dominates the corner as it did in the 1920s, although the variety of traffic has changed dramatically. The trams and horse-drawn carts of the first photo have gone and the newly widened road is mostly used by buses, but the black and white scene is instantly recognisable a century later.

Visit newcastlestuff.co.uk for more stuff about Newcastle.

The Brass Man was photographed on Collingwood Street in 1966. It is a rare example of a pub's nickname becoming its offi...
02/06/2026

The Brass Man was photographed on Collingwood Street in 1966. It is a rare example of a pub's nickname becoming its official title, and it’s all thanks to William Shakespeare. The colour photo shows the same location today for comparison.

Newcastle’s first Theatre Royal was on Mosley Street, and there was a pub opposite it called the Shakespeare Inn. It remained there after the theatre was demolished in 1836 to be replaced with the present Theatre Royal on Grey Street.

The Shakespeare was bought in 1861 by a wine and spirit merchant called George Gibson. He was building up a large portfolio of pubs and hotels that would later include the Post Office Inn, the Crown Posada, and the Douglas Hotel; but he didn’t have the Shakespeare for long.

It was demolished in 1870 and a large branch of the National Provincial Bank was built on the site at the corner of Mosley Street and Dean Street. Gibson transferred the licence and the name of the pub to a house at 3, Collingwood Street. He took with him a brass bust of William Shakespeare, which had stood on the counter of the old Shakespeare Inn for as long as anyone could remember.

Shakespeare’s head took pride of place in his new pub, which quickly became known as ‘the Brass Man’. Gibson was a councillor and was also known as the Brass Man among his colleagues at the nearby Town Hall.

The Brass Man had only a few years left when the black and white photo was taken. The pub and the tobacconist to its left occupied the last two original buildings on Collingwood Street, dating to around 1810. So there was much consternation at plans to replace them with a concrete office block.

The last pint was pulled at the Brass Man on Saturday, August 14th 1971, with its demolition happening shortly afterwards. The replacement building housed the First National Bank of Chicago, so this was the second time Shakespeare had been booted out by a bank.

It’s not clear what happened to him next, but perhaps his parting words were “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”.

Photo credits: Embleton Collection / Newcastle Stuff.

Visit newcastlestuff.co.uk for more stuff about Newcastle.

Stan and Hilda Ogden were Coronation Street legends for two decades. But the man who played Stan grew up in the posh New...
28/05/2026

Stan and Hilda Ogden were Coronation Street legends for two decades. But the man who played Stan grew up in the posh Newcastle suburb of Jesmond, a world away from the grim cobbles of Weatherfield.

The actor was born Bernard Arthur Popley in 1914 at Hove, East Sussex. His father Leonard worked for a jewellery company and played piano at social gatherings in the town. Their lives were changed by a culinary innovation, when Frank Smith opened the UK’s first crisp factory in London in 1920.

Crisps had been around for a decade or so but they were bland and unflavoured. There are no mentions in local newspapers of them being sold or consumed in Newcastle. Smith's genius was putting a small sachet of salt in every packet of crisps, which also had the effect of making people thirsty, and they became hugely popular in pubs.

The people of Newcastle have always liked their beer, and Leonard Popley landed the job of launching Smith's Potato Crisps in the region. He moved his family to an upstairs flat on Grosvenor Gardens in Jesmond in 1924, and Bernard would spend the next decade or so in the neighbourhood.

He attended Rutherford College on Bath Lane and was an excellent tennis player, practising for several hours every day. He competed regularly in junior tournaments around the region, and was pictured in the Evening Chronicle after one of these events, looking lean and athletic.

When he left school he became assistant manager at the Playhouse in Jesmond Vale, a short walk from the family home. He made his acting debut there in Noel Coward's satirical comedy 'Easy Virtue' in the summer of 1932 at the age of eighteen.

Business was booming for Smith’s Crisps in the 1930s. They had 95% of the market nationwide, and built a factory and distribution centre on the Coast Road to serve the North East. Leonard Popley was able to move his family to a house on Kimberley Gardens, a few streets away from their flat in Jesmond.

Bernard spread his wings and began appearing in repertory theatre around the country, changing his surname to Youens, his mother’s maiden name. He was cast as Stan Ogden in Coronation Street in 1964, the henpecked husband of Hilda, played by Jean Alexander.

Stan’s first line in the show was "A pint of mild and 20 f**s, missus", setting the tone for the idle slob he’d play until his death in 1984. A far cry from the Jesmond lad who was one of the North East’s most promising young sportsmen.

Visit newcastlestuff.co.uk for more stuff about Newcastle.

This shop at the bottom of Pilgrim Street was photographed in 1890. Just two years later, it would become the scene of a...
26/05/2026

This shop at the bottom of Pilgrim Street was photographed in 1890. Just two years later, it would become the scene of a shocking tragedy when a mother cut her young son's throat. The colour photo shows the same location today for comparison.

The woman in front of the doorway can be identified from local records as a 69-year-old widow called Mary Forster, who had been proprietor of the grocery store for nearly a decade. In February 1892, a friend called Sarah Ambrose and her two young children spent a night at Mary's after she'd separated from her husband.

The following day Mary heard the children screaming and found Sarah holding her 3-year-old son Thomas, who was bleeding heavily. Mary took a bloodstained knife off her and sent for a doctor. Thomas was found to have a deep wound across his throat and was taken to the Fleming Memorial Hospital for Sick Children, where thankfully he survived.

Sarah was also examined by a doctor who stated she appeared to be mentally unstable, though sober and able to speak sensibly. She appeared before the Northumberland Assizes the following month and pleaded guilty to wounding with intent to kill, and was sentenced to twelve months in Newcastle Gaol. But the court stipulated there should be no hard labour, and she was to be treated as a patient rather than a prisoner.

The black and white picture was taken by the famous Victorian photographer Lyddell Sawyer, who had a studio on Northumberland Street. Entitled ‘A Quaint Corner of Newcastle. Itt was shown in London at the annual exhibition of the Photographic Society of Great Britain in September 1890, and became a popular picture postcard.

It is also one of the last surviving photos of the shop. The area around lower Pilgrim Street was full of squalid lodging houses, mostly inhabited by single men. They were demolished along with the shop in a slum clearance programme and replaced by Rowton House on Dog Bank, which opened opposite the steps in 1906 to provide better accommodation for the men.

Rowton House is also now long gone and the steps have been claimed by nature. But we still have Lyddell Sawyer’s iconic photograph to remind us of the people who lived here, and the dramatic human stories that once unfolded.

Visit newcastlestuff.co.uk for more stuff about Newcastle.

These two photos illustrate how dramatically Newcastle’s Quayside has changed in recent decades. The bleak transit sheds...
25/11/2025

These two photos illustrate how dramatically Newcastle’s Quayside has changed in recent decades. The bleak transit sheds in the first image have made way for the Pitcher & Piano, marking the shift from a working riverfront to a place for leisure.

The black and white photo is from around 1970 when these sheds were becoming redundant due to the introduction of container ships, which offloaded their cargo at modern facilities downriver from here. But Newcastle had been a busy seaport when the sheds were built in 1910, and they were among the last vestiges of the Tyne’s heyday to survive.

They were part of a scheme to rebuild Newcastle’s waterfront, a project almost as ambitious in scale and cost as Richard Grainger’s redevelopment of the town centre in the 1830s. It began when Newcastle Corporation received Parliamentary approval in 1904 to replace the quay between the Swing Bridge and the Milk Market, and extend it along the North Shore towards the Ouseburn and beyond.

This new quay was lined with sheds like the ones in the first photo, and there were ships moored alongside them as far as the eye could see. Their cargo was unloaded by dockers and stored in the transit sheds before being despatched by road or rail to their final destination. Ships were also loaded with products from Newcastle’s mighty industrial base, destined for the four corners of the world.

The sheds in the photo stood on the London Wharf, where much of Newcastle’s trade with the capital took place. Passenger ships also plied their trade from here, notably the Bernicia and her sister ship the Hadrian. They provided a scheduled service to London every Wednesday and Saturday in the 1920s; it took about 24 hours and single tickets cost a quid. This was about the same price as the train or coach fare, but was a more exciting journey.

Those days were long gone when the first of these photos was taken, and by the 1980s the transit sheds were occupied by car mechanics and other tradesmen. The Cutty Sark Tall Ships Race visited Newcastle in 1986, and the following year this part of the Quayside was cleared of its sheds, as the Tyne & Wear Development Corporation began the second major redevelopment of the area.

Over £100m was spent clearing away the Quayside’s maritime past and replacing it with offices and housing. The Pitcher & Piano was built on the same spot as the sheds in 1996, and was joined by the Gateshead Millennium Bridge five years later. Nowadays, the Quayside is a popular place to live, work, and play.

However, despite all that investment, nobody managed to fix the puddle that appears in both photos.

Follow Newcastle Stuff for more stuff about Newcastle.

This pub on Shakespeare Street was opened almost two centuries ago by a circus clown, who named it after a horse-riding ...
20/11/2025

This pub on Shakespeare Street was opened almost two centuries ago by a circus clown, who named it after a horse-riding muscleman. It’s had a couple of names since then, and is currently called Lady Grey’s.

Shakespeare Street was built by Richard Grainger during his redevelopment of Newcastle’s town centre, and this is one of a dozen or so pubs that were included in his scheme. He had recently finished building his new Theatre Royal, occupying the whole north side of the street, when William Atkins leased the pub from him in October 1838.

It stands directly opposite the theatre’s stage door, which would have appealed to Atkins, who was no stranger to performing in front of an audience. He had previously worked as a clown for Andrew Ducrow, a skilled horseman known as the "Colossus of Equestrians", who was one of the most famous entertainers of his day and owned a circus that made several visits to Newcastle.

Ducrow’s acrobats, jugglers, tightrope walkers, and clowns such as William Atkins, were mere sideshows, the crowds came to see the main man. He’d enter the ring with his sons, all dressed in flesh-coloured body stockings, and they’d mount a pair of white stallions. They’d stand on the horses’ backs while striking poses and flexing their muscles for the audience’s titillation, their body stockings making them seem buck naked.

Atkins called his new pub the Ducrow Inn, which would have flattered his former boss when he brought his circus to the Theatre Royal in November 1839. He ran the pub until his death in 1857, and it was put up for sale the following year. The advert in the local press gives us a good description of it.

The pub was much bigger than it is now, extending all the way back to High Bridge where it had a frontage known as the Back Bar. There were stables for customers to park their horses, a brewhouse, and refreshment rooms “fitted up and finished in a Style of Elegance and Comfort”. The pub changed hands several times over the following decades, and in the summer of 1894 it was reduced substantially in size.

The rear of the Ducrow was demolished to accommodate the Central Masonic Hall, which was built on Pilgrim Street but extended a fair way along High Bridge. It is currently occupied by a nightspot called Pilgrim. The Newcastle upon Tyne Lodge of Masons – the oldest lodge outside of London – held the first meeting at the Masonic Hall towards the end of 1895.

The Ducrow changed its name to The Adelphi the following year, which would seem appropriate for a pub on Shakespeare Street, as it’s also the name of a famous theatre in London. But this wasn’t the reason it was chosen: the word ‘adelphi’ has great significance among Freemasons, being Greek for “brothers”.

This name would see the pub through to the 21st century, when it was remodelled and relaunched as Lady Grey’s in 2011.

Follow Newcastle Stuff for more stuff about Newcastle.

The people of Newcastle were either freakishly tall a couple of centuries ago, or this entrance served some other purpos...
18/11/2025

The people of Newcastle were either freakishly tall a couple of centuries ago, or this entrance served some other purpose. It faces south and was probably intended to illuminate the steep set of stairs behind it, but it does a poor job of this.

The entrance and the stairs were the work of Amor Spoor in 1841, a builder who lived on nearby Hanover Square. Richard Grainger was creating a new town centre at the time, while other developers were busy on the fringes making smaller but still significant changes to the streetscape. Spoor’s contribution was a vast wall of warehouses along the west end of the Close, as well as creating Hanover Street, which ran behind them.

Spoor’s first big project was in 1838 when Newcastle Corporation gave him the contract to build the New Corn Exchange in the Cloth Market, which stood on the site later occupied by the old Town Hall. In July of 1839, they accepted his plan to build warehousing at the west end of the Close, and to create Hanover Street behind them, so that goods could be transported quickly and easily to the upper town.

The Corporation gave Spoor £1,200 to buy up properties that stood in the way of the new street, but it came with a condition. He must build a set of stairs from Hanover Street down to the Close, “for the use of the public, so far as his property extends”. These would replace the nearby Breakneck Stairs, which people had hurtled down since mediaeval times.

He built three adjacent warehouse complexes, known as Bond No. 60, Bond No. 50 and Bond No. 40, which towered above the Close and backed onto the higher elevation of Hanover Street, where the entrance to the stairs is of a normal height. The warehouses were advertised in the local press for sale or to let in April of 1841, and he looked set to reap the rewards of his investment.

Unfortunately, the following year got off to a bad start for Amor Spoor. In January of 1842, he was found guilty of assaulting a tenant of his warehouses, having cracked his head open with a stick in a Shieldfield pub; he was fined 50 shillings. That same month, Spoor was declared bankrupt. But this was a mere blip: his bankruptcy was annulled a few months later and the money began rolling in from his warehouses.

His new properties were bonded warehouses, where imported wines and spirits were stored until the necessary duties were paid. They also contained combustible goods such as h**p, and the first of several fires broke out in November 1849, when two of his warehouses were completely gutted and lost their roofs. They were eventually repaired but Amor Spoor didn’t live to see this, as he died two months later.

Only Bond No. 40 remains today, the rest of Amor Spoor’s warehouses were destroyed in a fire in 1997. They were replaced with apartment blocks, and the surviving warehouse is inhabited too. Hanover Stairs have been gated at the top and bottom for several years, to keep the public safe. They are very steep and dingy, and worthy successors to Breakneck Stairs.

Follow Newcastle Stuff for more stuff about Newcastle.

The 3 Bulls Heads stood on the corner of Sandgate and the Milk Market; the pub and everything else in the photo are long...
13/11/2025

The 3 Bulls Heads stood on the corner of Sandgate and the Milk Market; the pub and everything else in the photo are long gone. The age of the building and the date of the photo are unknown, but we can take an educated guess at both.

The range of buildings on the east side of the Milk Market, including this one, was still known as “The Folly” when the photo was taken, after a misguided attempt by Cuthbert Dikes to supply the lower part of the town with water. He began to build an engine to pump water from the river in 1681, but ownership of the land was disputed and he was sued. Nevertheless, he continued with his project – his ‘folly’ – which never pumped a drop of water but cost him £2,000 in legal fees.

The building probably dated from then, as it couldn't have been much older. Most of the original buildings in Sandgate were burned to the ground by the defenders of Newcastle during the Siege of 1644, to stop them being used as cover by the attacking Scots. The Town Wall was directly opposite this building, and anything on that spot would have been unlikely to survive the siege.

The date the photo was taken can be established to within a handful of years, thanks to the sign on the front of the building. It says “3 Bulls Heads. J. Spires, late of London. Sailors’ Boarding House Keeper.” John Spires and his wife Amelia ran their boarding house from around 1885 until his death in 1890, and she sold second-hand clothes there for a couple of years after that.

The building had previously been a pub, one of many in Sandgate that served the thousands of keelmen who lived in the neighbourhood. It was thirsty work rowing tons of coal downriver in their keel boats, and part of their payment was known as a ‘can’: an allowance of ale equal in value to two shillings and sixpence. The 3 Bulls Heads was known as a ‘can house’ in the early 19th century, where this allowance could be drunk.

It was owned by Newcastle Corporation who leased it to the Heron family; they ran the pub for a couple of decades until 1881, when Lois Heron’s licence was taken away after the death of her husband. This was convenient for the Corporation, who wanted to pull the building down and replace it with a huge lodging house on the corner of Sandgate and the Milk Market, which was sorely needed in the area.

John and Amelia Spires were allowed to continue providing accommodation in the building until the Corporation decided how to proceed with their plans, but they built their lodging house elsewhere. The 3 Bulls Heads was eventually demolished in 1893, and nowadays there’s no trace of it, or indeed of Sandgate and the old Milk Market.

Follow Newcastle Stuff for more stuff about Newcastle.

Address


Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Newcastle Stuff posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

  • Want your business to be the top-listed media company?

Share