Memories of a different Bigg Market
WANDER down to Newcastle’s Bigg Market and you’ll see that work on renovating the famous location is in full swing.
In May this year, the Chronicle reported: “The first spade has cracked into the ground to start the £3.2m revival scheme.
“The Bigg Market transformation plan was first announced in 2015 when the Heritage Lottery Fund backed ambitious plans to regenerate the historic site, which has 31 listed buildings.”
It’s an area that today is perhaps synonymous with stag and hen parties and Newcastle’s famously vibrant nightlife.
But what was the place like in past decades?
A trawl through the Chronicle archive leads to a story we published some years ago. It recalls a very different Bigg Market in the years between the two world wars.
Thomas Knowles Bell was brought up in Gateshead in the 1920s.
On Saturday afternoons, he and his friend Richie used to walk over the Swing Bridge into Newcastle in search of free entertainment.
Thomas remembered: “On our visits to Newcastle, we always used to end up in the Bigg Market, which on Saturday afternoons was full of noise and bustle and a feeling of exuberant life.
“There were cheapjacks with croaky voices who attracted crowds and made them laugh with jokes we did not understand, quacks selling medicines, loud-voiced barrow boys shouting out prices.
“We were sometimes able to pick up a bruised apple or orange from under the barrow.
“Ice cream sellers with Italian names sold sandwiches of enormous thickness for a penny. A hunchbacked strong man who bent iron bars about his neck fascinated us. Men with sandwich boards announcing that ‘The wages of Sin is Death’ moved among the crowd
and handed out tracts, and various speakers standing on boxes harangued any audience they could collect.
“By the time the flashing advert in coloured lights for Bovril was switched on, it was time for us to begin our long, weary walk back to Windy Nook.”
These vivid memories came from a book called A Ha’penny over the High Level by Thomas Knowles Bell. It was published by Tyne Bridge Publishing.
But the Bigg Market’s history long predated Thomas’s visits there in the 1930s.
Named after a type of barley, it was a bustling, thriving marketplace from the Middle Ages onwards.
The Bigg Market was one of several markets along the old Great North Road - the major thoroughfare that crossed the Tyne (where the Swing Bridge is today), protected by the castle, and continued up Percy Street Clustered around St Nicholas’ church (later cathedral) were a number of thriving markets, including the Bigg Market.
Later, the Bigg Market was also home to the old Town Hall, built between 1858 and 1863. It played host to Newcastle’s council chamber from the mid-19th century before the opening of the new Civic Centre at Haymarket in the late 1960s.
In the meantime, the once fine building had been left to decline, and was demolished in 1973 to be replaced by the Cathedral Square office block. We look forward to the rejuvenation of Newcastle’s Bigg Market.
Thomas Knowles Bell A VISIT TO THE FAMOUS LOCATION IN THE 1930S
A hunchbacked strong man who bent iron bars about his neck fascinated us as youngsters