How Jewish community preserved Gateshead’s character
SOME of our best-loved Victorian and Georgian terraces are only here today thanks to a Tyneside town’s vibrant Jewish community, a planning report has found.
Orthodox Jews have called the Coatsworth area of Gateshead home since the 1870s, and throughout the 20th century the community grew.
And as the community developed, moving into the Victorian terraces they prevented the residential area from being demolished and replaced with modern housing as happened in so many towns through the 1960s and 1970s.
Plans have been submitted to convert a property on Bewick Road back into two dwellings after three houses were connected and used as a boarding house for many years.
The report to Gateshead Council’s planning department says that the cultural influence of the orthodox Jewish community has ‘had a significant impact on maintaining the historic character of the area’.
It says: “Many houses have been combined internally to form colleges and halls of residence required by that community infrastructure. Others have significant extensions to attics and rear yards to facilitate large families, another great characteristic of the orthodox community.
“The houses in the ‘Victorian residential zone’ were built to illustrate the wealth of the area with all the elaborate stone trimmings and fine detailing too – bay windows, stepped doorways and porches, elaborate eaves, sills and heads. “The architectural and historic relevance of this area is not so much defined by the merit of individual pieces of architecture but more by the collective of the terraces and roads which clearly reflect the social history of the area.”
Coatsworth Road was first established as a shopping destination in the late 19th century and was serviced by trams after 1901.
Zachariah Bernstone established the orthodox Jewish community in Gateshead in 1881 and in 1923 world-renowned Rabbi Dovid Dryan founded Yeshiva Talmudical College.
Fuelled by refugees from Europe in the 20th century, the community is one of the most well-known orthodox Jewish communities in the world.
Gateshead council invested £1.9m in the Coatsworth Road and Bensham area as part of a five-year project from 2012 to 2017 to bring empty properties back into use and restore historic buildings.