A Trip down the Ouseburn
This month we had held our meeting outside the Tanners Arms New Bridge Street for the beginning of our tour around the Ouesburn area. It was well attended but the weather was cool and overcast.
Not far from the Tanners Arms is the site of Stepney Windmill which can be seen in the image of the Ouesburn Bridge from Newcastle's Libraries collection. Its listed on
twsitelines as:
'At the western end of Stepney Pottery (HER 5281) on Stepney Bank stood a
five-sailed windmill. The operator was listed in a 1858 directory as a
sand miller. The mill was possibly designed by the famous engineer
Smeaton. The site was cleared for the building of Byker Bridge.'
Alan Morgan mentioned it in his book Victorian Panorama:
'It is said that no other UK town had so many windmills as Newcastle and its suburbs, In 1825 there were 49. Most windmills ground corn but this one was probably also grinding bark (from nearby timber yards) for an adjacent tannery. It appears first in records for 1698. A severe storm in 1839 tore off the wands and shortly afterwards the Tanners Arms pub opened next to the stone tower of the former Mill.'
Its possible these references are for the same Mill or perhaps another further along from the bridge.
The design for the Ouseburn Rail Viaduct was by celebrated local architects, John and Benjamin Green forming part of the Newcastle and North Shields railway. Originally the arches of the viaduct were made of laminated timber but were replaced with wrought iron some thirty years later.
Our main route to the Ouseburn was Crawhall road which used to be called Elwicks (Ellick's) lane (lonnen) it again is listed in Alan Morgan book Victorian Panorama:
'Before the opening of the New Road in 1776 this thoroughfare was the route for carriages between Newcastle and Shields via the Ouseburn Bridge. A reference exits to coals being carried from a pit in Shieldfield via Elwick's Lonnen and then down St Anne's street to shipping staith. The name was changed to Crawhall Road in recognition of that family's ropery business nearby.'
Before we went down Crawhall Road, John directed us to a plague on an unusual building a few yards from the Tanners Arms on Stepany Bank. Clearly the door was a bit of a joke but the plague on the wall gave us a few laughs and many people said , ' Can that be true' but just like the door its a bit of a joke, check it out next time you are there.
Across the street is (highlighted on the map) is a housing trust building that has a plaque explaining how they have preserved parts of the Roman Wall which were on the site of the houses.
The houses near by are collectively called Red Barns, Alan Morgan in his book Victorian Panorama lists the original Red Barnes as:
'Little is known about this small group of buildings that appear on the first detailed map of Newcastle dated 1723. The fairly large and ugly building was probably a farm house together with some terraced housing amid fields. In 1863 the site was taken over by the Dominicans and ten years later their fine Gothic church, designed by A.M Dunn, opened for the Roman Catholic residents. The adjoining Priory opened in 1887.'
We walked down Crawhall road to the junction at Breamish Street. Further on down the road on the left is the former site of St Ann's Chapel School which is now a hotel
Alan Morgan in his book Victorian Panorama lists it as:
'Built in 1682, Langley at the town's expense and with the mayor as governor. About 100 children attended in the 1820's and for 1s 2d a month they would be taught reading, writing and arithmetic. It was possible to learn reading only for the bargain price of eighteen pence a month.'
We turned left at the junction and walking a few hundred yards across the street to the back of St Ann's Church in the area called Battlefield. There are a few explanations for the term Battlefield, one is; the area became known as
Battlefields from its popularity as a venue for dog fights. The other is the name might be a corruption of Bottle Field, which appears on a map
in the 1870s and possibly reflects the practise of in-filling clay pits
with local industrial waste. The glass bottle industry was concentrated
immediately east of the Ouseburn for almost 300 years from the 1640s.
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| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ |
We met a group residents of Battlefield who were Friends of St Ann’s Church having a coffee morning and they were friendly and helpful. There was a large display about the history of the church which is well worth looking at. The church was built as a chapel of ease to All Saints and replaced a previous medieval chapel. It was built between 1764-1768 by William Newton for the Corporation of Newcastle. Some of the building stone used was taken from the
City Walls which used to run alongside the Quayside.
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| http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2155836 |
For more photos and images taken inside the church check out the following link:
newcastlephotos.blogspot.co.uk
We came out of the front of the church onto City Road and walked East for a few hundred yards and came across a plaque on the side of a building which was once the Ouseburn Mission in 1869. Not far from here Gladstone Adams 1880-1966 was born at 4 St Ann's Row and was credited as the inventor of the windscreen wiper in 1911.
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| http://www.exploreheritage.org.uk | | | | | | | | | |
Further down City Road we came across the former Tyne Tees Steam Shipping Company which is now a hotel. The
Tyne Tees Steam Shipping Company provided shipping services in the United Kingdom from 1904 to 1943. They operated several routes which included:
London /
Antwerp /
Rotterdam /
Amsterdam /
Dordrecht /
Hamburg /
Bremen /
Ghent / Northern French Ports.
By Andrew Curtis, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14591547
Directly across the road from the Tyne Tees Steam Shipping Company is the Blenkinsopp-Coulson memorial
Colonel Blenkinsopp Coulson was a
leading figure in the RSPCA and the NSPCC. He founded the local Dog and
Cat Shelter in Spital Tongues. From this monument you can look down onto
the riverside to where the Victoria Tunnel staithes once stood. The
monument has two fountains: the larger one for humans, and around the
back the smaller one for animals!
The inscription on the front side of the plinth reads:
“William Lisle Blenkinsopp Coulson 1841 – 1911 erected by public
subscription in memory of his efforts to assist the weak and
defenceless. Among mankind and in the animal world”
The inscription on the rear of the plinth reads:
“what is really needed is an all round education of the higher impulses
true manliness, and womanliness justice, and pity. To try to promote
these has been my humble but earnest endeavour, and until they are more
genuinely aroused, the legislature is useless, for it is the people who
make the laws” (w.l.b.c.)
Statue Unveiled 27th may 1914, by the
right honourable Johnstone Wallace, Lord Mayor. Herbert Shaw, Sheriff.
A.M. Oliver, Town Clerk.
We moved on west along Walker road over Glass House Bridge to the T Junction at Ford Street and got an impressive view of the former Ouesburn School which is now the Newcastle Enterprise Centre.
Burma or Byker? The former Ouseburn
school, makes an arresting sight, on the outskirts of Newcastle, with
its oriental style turrets. Rather like the Turnbull Building, it has an
imposing presence. The architect F.W Rich designed the Turnbull
building as well as Bolbec Hall. Hard to believe that all this large
imposing building was once a school.
The School opened 1893 to accommodate
928 scholars; 352 infants on the ground floor, 576 older children on the
first floor, with the top floor used for cookery, workshops, laundry,
art. There were two play yards, one for infants and girls, the other for
boys. The schools was aimed more at technical subjects rather than
simply ‘book learning’.
http://www.seenewcastle.com/building/ouseburn-school/
Across Ford Road is a set of steps that take you down to the Tyne Bar and our path took us through the arches of the Glass House Bridge travelling North following the Ouseburn. The Ouesburn begins life near Newcastle Airport, flows through Gosforth, Jesmond Dene and Heaton Park then disappears underground in Shieldfield-Heaton. It re-emerges near Ouesburn Viaduct and Byker Bridge eventually entering the Tyne on Newcastles eastern Quayside. William Grey, writing in 1649, describes:
‘the Ewes Burn, over
which is a wooden bridge, which goeth down to a place called Glasse
Houses where plaine glasse for windowes are made’.
The Glasshouse Bridge was built in 1878,
It is a solid brick construction like the Byker Road Bridge which opened the same year. It derives its name from the extensive glass works that dominated the
shore of the Tyne east of the Ouseburn from the 1640s to the early
1900s.
In the 1736 text of Bourne, he gives the following list of Ouseburn glass-houses:-
High Glasshouses:
The Western Glasshouse
The Crown Glasshouse The Middle Bottle House The Middle Broad House
Low Glasshouses
The
Eastern Glasshouse The Mushroom Glasshouse St.
Lawrence Bottle House
Next to it is the Ouesburn Barrage completed in 2009 which maintains the level of the water. The tidal nature of the Tyne flowing twice a day would create mud flats if the Barrage was not in place. When we were there it was pretty shallow.
We followed the river path North as far as we could but the new development on the East caused a detour. To the West we passed the Toffee Factory.
'The site opposite was developed in the
1870’s as a location where livestock (cattle, sheep and pigs) imported
from overseas could be held for twelve hours before being released to
local markets. When these imports declined in the early 1900s, the large
multi-storey building opposite was converted for use as a Maynards
toffee works.
You can see the chimney is made of
lighter, newer bricks than the original building and probably dates from
1906 when the toffee works began operation. The firm of Maynards had
recently merged with a local confectionary maker called John Vose, and
their new toffee works at Ouse Street was a feature of this area until
the early 1970s. Their elegant chimney continues to be a landmark to
this day, despite the damage caused by a severe fire in the 1990s.'
http://www.seenewcastle.com/ouseburn-heritage-panels/
Further up the river on the West side we saw the Seven Stories a former 19th century flour mill, now a museum dedicated to the art of British children's books. Some attribute the name to the seven stories of the building but it could also be from the theory of
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories book by
Christopher Booker, a
Jungian-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning. For those creative writers out there here are the seven basic plots which most stories follow:
- Over coming the monster
- Rages to riches
- The quest
- Voyage and return
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Rebirth
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Proctor's Warehouse ('Seven Stories'), Ouseburn
A seven-storey
warehouse facing onto Ouseburn built around 1870 to store grain and
flour for the adjacent flour mill (converted from an original flax
mill), owned by Messrs Proctor & Sons. In 2005, the building was
converted into the Centre for Children's Booksm 'Seven Stories' NZ2664 : 'Seven Stories' boat, Ouseburn. |
We took the left path up to the Ouseburn Village and the Cluny bar were we had lunch and also paid tribute to Eric whose plague was in position on his favourite place on the bar. The Cluny was originally a flax mill by Dobson (1848) and then a flour mill, it then became a bonded warehouse were Cluny whisky was stored hence the name.
There was far more to see but not enough time so we left the Ouseburn with a promise to return again and discover more of its heritage.
Our next meeting will be held on Wednesday October 12, 10:30 at the upstairs cafe of the Hancock Museum.
