By George,
OUR main photograph of Newcastle’s Grey Street takes us back just over 85 years to May 1937.
Back then, our finest thoroughfare was done up in celebration of the imminent coronation in London of King George VI. The image was one of a set captured around the city by Chronicle photographers at the time.
Behind the temporary bunting and flags, put up a week or two before the big day, we are afforded a relatively rare view of Newcastle as it was in the inter-war years.
If some city streets have radically changed - and not always for the better - over the last eight and a half years Grey Street, apart from some cosmetic differences, remains much as it was - although modern fashionable bars, restaurants and pavement cafes have more often that not taken the place of former business premises for banks and insurance houses.
It’s interesting to consider that before the street became solid stone and mortar, a stream ran down there.
This was the Lort Burn, one of several now-culverted waterways which flowed downhill through old Newcastle to the River Tyne.
Grey Street was conceived, designed and built by the builder and visionary Richard Grainger.
It was the centrepiece of Grainger and John Dobson’s ambitious plans for a new town centre in the 1830s. Originally it was intended to be called New Dean Street because it continued down on to the earlier Dean Street, much of which had been built in the mid-1700s.
However, it was the Northumberlandborn Prime Minister Earl Grey - whose commanding 130ft monument was built at the street’s northern end in 1838 - who gave the street its name.
Grey Street’s most famous address, the Theatre Royal, opened in 1837 with a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice.
In the early decades of the last
century there was even a cinema - Grey Street Picture House - at the top of the street where HSBC trades today.
Grey Street has seldom been short of admirers. In 1948, the poet John Betjeman declared: “As for the curve of Grey Street, I shall never forget seeing it to perfection, traffic-less on a misty Sunday morning. Not even old Regent Street in London can compare with that descending subtle curve.”
Meanwhile, listeners of Radio Four voted it “best street in the UK.
The neo classical-style buildings which so distinguished the street for decades were black from years of Tyneside industrial grime until extensive sandblasting in Grainger Town in the 1970s and 80s revived them.
Just recently, the Chronicle reported how Nick Kemp, who recently replaced Nick Forbes as the city’s Labour council leader, was planning a review into the proposed pedestrianisation of Grey Street as part of a promised reset at the civic centre.