Back in time to city’s Collingwood Street
THEN AND NOW: EARLY 20TH CENTURY AND TODAY
WE return, albeit briefly, to Newcastle city centre in the early 20th century. Our main image shows another day on Edwardian Tyneside, with busy Collingwood Street leading on to Mosley Street.
On the right, just out of shot, sits St Nicholas’ Cathedral.
Built in 1091, a matter of decades after the Norman invasion of England, it was originally the parish church for the small town of Newcastle.
Today it is the heart of the Anglican diocese of Newcastle which stretches from the Tyne to Berwick in the North, and Alston in the West.
On the right of our image is a bronze statue of Queen Victoria. It was erected to commemorate 500 years of the shrievalty (the jurisdiction of a sheriff) of Newcastle.
Sculpted by Alfred Gilbert and unveiled by Countess Grey in April 1903 - two years after Victoria’s death - the statue was a gift from WH Stephenson, a company director and politician who held the office of mayor in Newcastle seven times.
The statue still sits, with the sternfaced monarch looking down, more than a century later.
Across the road, on the left, as people go about their daily business and a trolley bus trundles by, is the old Town Hall.
Built between 1858 and 1863, for decades it was home to Newcastle’s council chamber, long before the opening of the new Civic Centre in the late 1960s.
Sadly, the old building was left to rot over the decades. By 1965, one Chronicle report read: “Newcastle’s old Town Hall is a monstrosity to begin with, but now derelict, dilapidated and filthy, it’s a nightmare.”
Older readers may recall, in the late 1960s, the Town Hall’s winter zoo which housed lions, tigers, monkeys, exotic birds and snakes. The council bureaucrats were long departed by that time, incidentally!
The Town Hall was demolished in 1973 and replaced by the period structure we see today, Cathedral Square.
In the middle of the old photograph, on the corner of Cloth Market and Mosley Street, we see the offices of the North British and Mercantile Assurance Co. In around 1930, the Midland Bank moved in, doing business until July, 1983. Today the building is home to a popular bar called Flares.
What would Edwardian Geordies have made of its 1970s-style wallpaper, booth seating and dance floor hung with glitter balls?