Newcastle Stuff (2025)

07/10/2025

This engraving of Neville Street was published in 1887, when there were people alive who could remember this part of town as an open field. The colour photo was taken in 2025 for comparison.

Neville Street was created in 1835 to improve the eastern approach to Newcastle town centre. Its route was laid out by the architect John Dobson across the Spital Field, connecting Collingwood Street with Scotswood Road. Thousands turned out on Christmas Day for the official opening, which featured a brass band and the spectacle of Dobson being hauled along the street in a chariot.

It didn’t have a name until 1840, when Newcastle Corporation decided to commemorate the nearby Neville Tower on the Town Wall. Thankfully it wasn’t named after the Stank Tower, which had been demolished when the street was created. The route of Neville Street was altered when the Central Station was built in 1850, and the Neville Tower was pulled down.

We can see the station’s portico in both pictures. The station had been mostly designed by John Dobson but his grandiose plans had to be scaled back when the money ran out. Thomas Prosser’s more modest portico was added in 1863, he was a former employee of Dobson and had been given the job on his recommendation.

It took over a year to construct the portico, during which time it was a great nuisance. Building materials rained down on passengers entering and leaving the station, injuring several of them. It was especially dangerous for those working on it, a labourer called Martin Rabbit was killed when he was hit on the head by a large piece of iron.

There is no clock face on the portico in the engraving, which was added in 1888. Most people presume there are three clocks on the portico, but in fact there is only one. It faces Pink Lane and its mechanics synchronise the clock faces above the east and west entrances to the portico by means of revolving rods.

This ingenious system worked well for about a century, until the clock faces began displaying the wrong time or stopped working altogether for long periods. The one above the east entrance of the portico was taken down in 1981 during the building of the Metro Station underneath. It was eventually replaced in 1993, when the main clock opposite Pink Lane and the clock face in the photo above the west entrance to the portico were renovated.

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25/09/2025

The world’s biggest grain warehouse had its own fleet of ships bringing grain directly from America. It’s pictured here in 1951, the second photo shows the Dakota Hotel, which currently occupies the site near the Millennium Bridge.

It was built by Newcastle Corporation and leased to the Newcastle Grain Warehouse Company to ensure that the city and its suburbs had a ready and reliable supply of grain to feed themselves. This was a big task, but everything about the Newcastle Grain Warehouse was on a gargantuan scale.

The digging of its foundations began in the summer of 1876 and took almost a year. Construction of the six-storey warehouse began in May 1877, and it was said to have consumed more bricks than any other building in Britain at the time. The ground floor contained a railway station where grain was loaded onto trains so it could be distributed throughout the region.

The warehouse was ready to receive its first cargo in October 1879, when a steamship called the Lovaine arrived from Baltimore in the USA. It would take more than one ship to feed this monster of a building, so the Ta**us Line was established with a fleet of six large steamers that brought grain directly to Newcastle from New York. They also provided one of the first scheduled passenger services between the two cities.

The grain was hoisted from the ships by hydraulic machinery built at William Armstrong’s Elswick Works, you can see some of this equipment protruding from the front of the building in the first photo. More hydraulics were used to lift and move the grain between the warehouse’s floors. There was also a vast basement with a sloping floor to drain water seeping in from the river.

The building was severely damaged in 1902 when a fire broke out on the top floor and worked its way downwards. It reopened for business and helped feed Newcastle during two world wars, but by 1970 it had fallen into disuse, and there was a proposal to convert it into a maritime museum. The scheme failed to gain approval and the warehouse was demolished shortly afterwards.

The last trace of the world’s biggest grain warehouse was erased in 1986, when the vast hole in the ground that had once been its basement was filled in and landscaped ahead of the Tall Ships Race visiting Newcastle that year. An office block was later built on the site, which has since been converted into the Dakota Hotel.

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23/09/2025

Dr James Calvert Spence was the guiding force behind the Babies Hospital, where he was a pioneer of modern paediatrics. It's pictured here in 1955 and the colour photo shows the same location in 2025 for comparison.

This small but remarkable chapter in Newcastle’s history began on January 24th 1918 when the West End Day Nursery opened a couple of miles away on West Parade in Elswick. It was founded by Miss Greta Rowell, to provide care for young children roaming the streets while their mothers worked long hours in the factories producing munitions during World War I.

Its role began to change after the war. In 1925 it became the Babies Hospital and Mothercraft Centre, under the guidance of Dr Spence, a war hero who had been awarded the Military Cross at Gallipoli. He recommended closing the day nursery to increase the number of beds for in-patients, particularly children whose health had been ravaged by their unfortunate circumstances.

Conditions in Newcastle’s West End were harsh after the war: overcrowded housing, poor sanitation, damp homes and little sunlight meant many infants suffered from rickets. Spence’s use of open-air treatment – moving babies into airy wards or verandas, and letting them lie in sunshine when possible – was not just medical innovation, but a practical response to the realities of poverty in the city.

He also realised that feeding practices mattered. Many working-class mothers lacked information, support or confidence to breastfeed, especially while juggling factory work or domestic duties. The Babies Hospital’s “Mothercraft” training included teaching mothers how to breastfeed, giving them space and encouragement – a radical act of empowerment in that community.

Spence also held the novel belief that infants should not be separated from their mothers when they were admitted to the hospital. This idea went directly against the strict rules of the day, when visiting was thought to upset children rather than comfort them. His approach placed family care at the heart of medicine – a principle we take for granted today.

The hospital made a temporary move to Blagdon Hall in Northumberland during World War II, and in this period its outpatient services were gradually transferred to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. New premises were found near the RVI on Leazes Terrace, where the Babies Hospital in the photo opened on May 18th 1948. Meanwhile, in 1943, Dr Spence became the first professor of paediatrics in England.

By the early 1970s, paediatric surgical services had moved to the Fleming Memorial Children’s Hospital, and in 1975 the Babies Hospital finally closed its doors. Though its life was relatively short, the hospital left a lasting legacy. It stood not just for medical innovation, but for compassion – for the simple but powerful belief that children and mothers belong together.

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11/09/2025

This photo was taken at Newcastle’s Quayside Market on a Sunday morning in January 1945. A street performer called John France was swallowing a watch, with a boy from the crowd confirming its descent into his gullet.

The market’s origins were at nearby Sandhill where men had gathered on Sunday mornings since the early 19th century; some came to socialise while their wives and children were at church, and others simply to kill time until the pubs opened. They were entertained by political speakers, trade unionists, quack doctors, teetotallers, and religious ranters.

The crowds were so large that they spilled onto the Quayside, and towards the end of the century the scene had shifted there entirely from Sandhill. It was like a fair – a newspaper article from 1883 gives a flavour of a typical Sunday morning:

“Shooting galleries and all sorts of penny shows are in full swing, ice vendors, proprietors of unholy-looking shellfish stalls – indeed all dealers in cheap delicacies – reap a small harvest. Barrel and piano organs, German bands, bagpipes, and other musical instruments render the air hideous with their sound.”

The scene evolved into a market when the sellers of drinks and snacks were joined by people peddling cheap clothes and household goods. Many were summoned before the magistrates for flouting the Sunday Trading Laws. The prosecutions proved futile, and the market continued to grow.

The crowds were larger than they had been on Sandhill, but many still came mainly for entertainment. The ranters, preachers and musicians were joined by racing tipsters and street performers like John France, vying for the pennies in people’s pockets.

An escapologist called Tommy Blackburn was one of the most popular attractions in later years. He could free himself with ease from a chained-up sack, but his skills deserted him when his bungalow in Felling caught fire in 1975. His son Raymond had to rescue Tommy and his wife Harriet from the blaze.

The popularity of the market ebbed and flowed over the decades. In the 1930s attendance was so low that it almost disappeared altogether. It was a similar situation at the beginning of this century, due to competition from shopping malls and supermarkets opening on Sundays, but it has since been reinvented as the popular arts and crafts market we know today.

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09/09/2025

The north side of Bailiff Gate is pictured here in 1880, seven years before it was demolished. The railways reshaped much of the city centre and had already consumed the south side of this street.

Bailiff Gate was one of the most ancient streets in Newcastle. It connected the lower end of Westgate Road with the Bailey Gate, which was the principal entrance to the Castle before the Black Gate was added in the 13th century. You can see the Castle in the background of the photo.

Newcastle was separated from Northumberland in 1400 by King Henry IV and became a county in its own right, but the Castle remained part of Northumberland. Criminals from Northumberland were imprisoned there before being tried at the Assizes; they were taken to it by the Castle’s bailiffs along Bailiff Gate.

‘Gate’ in this sense is an old term for a road or street; we see it elsewhere in Newcastle at Gallowgate, which was the road to the gallows on the Town Moor. Bailiff Gate was lined with the homes of people who either had connections with the Castle, or might need to seek refuge there in times of trouble.

The Old Duke of Cumberland Inn stood on the south side of Bailiff Gate, a building that was formerly the home of the bailiffs of the Castle. The Bank of England was another important occupant, their first branch in Newcastle opened on the south side of the street in 1828. Demolition of these buildings began in 1846 to accommodate a railway viaduct from the High Level Bridge to the Central Station, which separated Bailiff Gate from the Castle.

The north side of the street also once had important inhabitants. The two men in the foreground of the photo are standing outside Richard Wade’s marine store, said to have been built as a house for an Earl of Northumberland. The building to the right of it was occupied by a shopkeeper called Christiana Walker – there’s a woman standing in the doorway, who could be her.

You can see the railway viaduct on the right side of the photo. It was no longer able to cope with the growing number of trains passing over it, so it was decided to double its width. The demolition of the north side of Bailiff Gate began in April of 1887, along with part of Back Row directly behind it.

There's no trace of Bailiff Gate today, but this photo gives us a rare glimpse of one of Newcastle’s oldest and most historically interesting streets.

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07/08/2025

The White City roller rink and the Olympia Cinema are pictured on Northumberland Road in 1912. Both buildings were three years old when the photo was taken, and were built as replacements for older palaces of entertainment.

The White City’s story begins in 1890, when the famous Victorian showman George Ginnett opened a circus in a temporary building on the parade ground next to the Army Riding School. Ginnett only lasted a couple of years, but his building became more permanent when it was refurbished and reopened as a downmarket theatre called the Hippodrome. It closed in 1908 and was demolished, making space for the White City.

The original Olympia opened next door in 1893 as a variety theatre. It was one of the first theatres in Newcastle to dabble in movies, when an American picture company began a short season there in 1903. It was during another movie season in 1905 that the Olympia hosted what was reputedly Britain’s first beauty contest.

In December of that year, female contestants lined up for the Blonde and Brunette Beauty Show, competing for the prize of a gold bangle. The show lasted all week, but got off to a bad start on the first night, with the Newcastle Daily Chronicle reporting that “none of the weaker s*x could be induced to compete”. The Olympia burned down two years later, in December 1907.

The White City and the new Olympia opened within days of each other in December 1909, the White City as a roller skating rink, occupying the site of the Hippodrome. But this was the tail end of a skating craze that had swept the country, and the White City closed in 1912. Its beautiful white dome was lopped off and it became a dance hall, which was called, once again, the Hippodrome.

Its neighbour, the Olympia, catered for the next craze in Newcastle — going to the movies — and was a successful cinema until 1961. The building on the far right of the old photo was built at the same time as the new Olympia in 1909, in the same style, and was occupied by Rossleigh’s Olympia Garage. The Hippodrome was demolished in 1933 and Rossleigh built a much larger garage on that site as well.

Northumberland Road changed beyond recognition in the early 1970s when John Dobson Street cut through it, making its incision where Rossleigh’s garage stood on the site of the Hippodrome/White City. The Army Riding School has survived and can be seen in the distance in both pictures, it is nowadays known as the Drill Hall and is occupied by Northumbria University.

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05/08/2025

The Wellington Grill Room is pictured here in 1898, at the west end of Collingwood Street. Grill rooms were hugely popular in Newcastle at the time, but this one was demolished shortly after the photo was taken.

Grill rooms first appeared in London where they were usually in hotels or large pubs, and began spreading to other cities in the 1870s. They served grilled steaks, chops and sausages, accompanied by potatoes or chips. It was simple food cooked over an open flame, often in view of the diners, and washed down with pints of beer.

Their clientele were mostly male industrial and office workers who wanted a hot, filling meal in a setting that was less formal than a restaurant. The rooms were often smoky, bustling and noisy with conversation; not places for lingering, but for fueling up before heading back to work.

Farquhar Laing introduced the first one to Newcastle when the Pine Apple Grill opened above his pub on the corner of Nun Street and Grainger Street in 1883. Other pubs and hotels quickly latched onto the idea and opened grill rooms of their own, but Laing kept one step ahead of them. He built the Eldon Grill in 1893 at the head of Grey Street, one of the largest and finest in the North East of England.

The Wellington Grill Room opened above the Wellington Hotel in 1886 and the location was perfect. Collingwood Street was the business and commercial heart of Newcastle and the Wellington was also in sight of the Central Station. The newspaper lad in the photo would have worked for the Evening Chronicle, whose offices and printing presses were a few yards away, employing hundreds of men.

The Wellington Hotel had opened in 1852 when the Cumberland Arms was converted into a boarding house aimed at catering for commercial travellers arriving at the newly completed Central Station. It continued to trade as a pub too, and a billiard hall was added on the floor beneath the grill room. This successful combination was put up for sale in October 1896, along with several neighbouring buildings.

They were bought by William John Sanderson, whose father John Sanderson owned the Newcastle Brewery, and between them they had a large portfolio of pubs and hotels. William intended to build a grand hotel on the site to pick up trade from the recently demolished Royal Turf Hotel on the opposite side of Collingwood Street. The Wellington Hotel’s drinks licence was extended to cover the new project.

But his father died that same year and the brewery was quickly sold, so William had a change of plan. He built a huge office complex instead called Collingwood Buildings, it was completed in 1903 and Barclays Bank occupied the corner site for nearly a century. The bank closed in 1991 and their premises are now the home of the Revolution Vodka Bar, on the exact same spot as the Wellington Hotel in the photo.

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29/07/2025

Neville Street is pictured here in the late 1920s, and almost a century later in 2025 for comparison. There’s no precise date for the older photo, but there are some clues that help narrow it down.

The tram in the foreground is displaying an advert for ‘Numol’, which was a tonic for sickly and undernourished children. It was invented by a local chemist called Sydney Dunstan, and manufactured in a factory on Elswick Road.

The product was originally prescribed to hospital patients as an aid to recovery, but an advertising campaign began in 1927 to alert the general public to its invigorating qualities. It put a spring in the step of many a Geordie, young and old - and some even fed it to their whippets prior to a race. The photo must have been taken during or shortly after 1927.

The tram belonged to the Gateshead & District Tramways Company, and was built at their works on Sunderland Road the same year. Its single-deck design was a solution to a tricky problem: it had to pass beneath a low bridge next to Gateshead railway station before crossing the river to Newcastle.

It had an extra-long chassis to compensate for the absence of an upper deck, allowing it to accommodate forty seated passengers with another seventy standing. The saloon had separate smokers’ and non-smokers’ compartments with a centre partition, quite innovative for its day. Passengers boarded the tram at the rear and exited at the front, as per the sign in the photo next to the driver’s cab, which was also quite unusual for that era.

The tram company operated double-deckers as well, but the model in the picture was so efficient that they were still being used when the Gateshead tram system ceased operation in 1951. Working examples of the model still exist in transport museums.

The car in the bottom right of the first photo offers another clue. It appears to be a Morris Cowley ‘Flatnose’, which is of a similar vintage to the tram, manufactured between 1926 and 1931. It had a pre-1932 numberplate which has been cropped off the picture, so a date of 1929 would be a reasonable estimate for the first photograph.

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 s*xually 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.

Newcastle Stuff