All change in swinging ’60s Gateshead
Nostalgia Editor MUCH has changed in Gateshead over the last 50 years - as our picture collection shows.
We return to the 1960s, taking in locations in the town centre, Deckham, Dunston, Low Fell, Bensham, and elsewhere.
We could describe some of the images as ‘gritty’, and parts of the town were certainly down at heel in that momentous decade when the country was allegedly swinging.
But Gateshead - rightly or wrongly - has long had its detractors.
The famous Dr Johnson in the 18th century described the town as “a dirty lane leading to Newcastle”.
Two centuries later, in 1934, the writer JB Priestley wrote: “No true civilisation could have produced such a town”, adding that it appeared to have been designed “by an enemy of the human race”.
Come the 1960s, pubs and cinemas in the town’s High Street were torn down to make way for the new flyover and junctions taking traffic in and out of Newcastle
Nearby Shephards, the town’s hallowed department store, was cast in the shadow of a new brutalist multi-storey car park which would come to gain notoriety during the 1970s and 80s.
Down at Gateshead Quayside, heavy engineering was in full swing, and the likes of the Millennium Bridge, Sage music centre and Baltic art gallery existed only in some unimagined future.
The Baltic building, having said that, was a busy, working flour mill at the time, and there wouldn’t have been much call there for contemporary art!
Across the town at Redheugh Park, Gateshead began the decade still in the football league, but they were shamefully voted out by clubs from the South in the summer of 1960.
Meanwhile, as for housing, old Victorian terraced streets were being bulldozed in areas like the Teams.
In their place came the 29-storey Derwent Tower - a giant structure that would be nicknamed the ‘Dunston Rocket’.
There were also the emerging new tenement blocks of St Cuthbert’s Village, which received its first tenants in 1970.
Soon becoming highly unpopular, both radical housing plans were failures, and both have since been demolished.
Enjoy our pictorial trip back to a very different Gateshead of the 1960s.
Front: Littlewoods store in Gateshead, meat department, 1960s; Gateshead High Street junction with Old Durham Road and Belle Vue Terrace, 1965; Kelvin Grove Junior School, Gateshead, 1961-62, from Brenda Simm; the Bowes line at Eighton Banks, Gateshead, 1960 .