Bridging 150 years of time and Tyne
TODAY’S main image doesn’t have the usual sharp, pristine quality of pictures published in the Chronicle.
That’s because it was taken more than 150 years ago when photography was still in its infancy and primitive by today’s standards.
Nevertheless, our view of Newcastle in around 1860 give us a fascinating early glimpse of one of Britain’s emerging imperial boom towns.
Looking from the Gateshead side of the River Tyne, we see the High Level Bridge, opened around a decade earlier.
We see the Moot Hall, where the assizes were held, which dated from 1812.
There is the unmistakable lantern tower of St Nicholas, the parish church which would become a cathedral in 1882, the same year Newcastle became a city.
And there is the Castle Keep, dating from Norman times, the city’s oldest building, and the source of its name - the New Castle.
All those structures are still with us, part of the varied, historical cityscape we know and love in 2018.
But one isn’t. The Georgian Tyne Bridge with its low stone arches had opened in 1781. It replaced the earlier medieval bridge, complete with rickety houses and a chapel, which dated from around 1179. That, in turn, was sited where the original Roman bridge - called Pons Aelius - had stood from around 122AD.
The ships moored on the Newcastle side of the river in our 1860 photograph are a clue to that bridge’s disappearance.
By the mid-19th century as booming Tyneside became a major industrial and commercial powerhouse, the low arches of the bridge made it impossible for even medium-sized shipping to sail any further up the Tyne. It was bad for business.
Coal from upriver had to be carried in keels, before it was unloaded into larger vessels for transportation out of the Tyne. The rapidly expanding Armstrong’s works at Elswick was also out of bounds for larger vessels thanks to the impassable old Tyne Bridge.
Replacing it with the Swing Bridge in 1876 was the typically ingenious Victorian solution.
Incidentally, if you wander down to the Quayside here today, you can still see two or three of the stone arches of its Georgian predecessor.