In the Dark

I’ve posted a few times posted about Benwell,  the part of Newcastle in which I grew up. For example I’ve posted about the little house where my first memories live here, and there’s an old photograph of it here:

The house itself (ours was the one on the left on this picture) was built of brick but to the left hand side you can just see a stone wall. The two cottages were demolished some time ago, along with Pendower School which was behind them as viewed from the picture.

I recently came across a picture of Pendower School taken sometime in the early 1990s when it was all boarded up and being sold for redevelopment.

The roof area with the fence around actually had a playground on it, used by Pendower Girls’ High school which occupied most of the building. The Infants and Junior schools which I attended were contained in the wing on the far right of the picture, the Infants downstairs and the Juniors upstairs. The school was built in 1929 and closed in 1992. It was used as a store for some time and then demolished.

The whole area including the school and the old cottages has now been covered with new houses, but for some reason they left the stone wall, part of which you can see to the left of the two cottages of the first picture. These were both taken from Ferguson’s Lane, which is immediately behind the stone wall to the left of the old photograph.

In the second picture you can see the filled in outlines of the door which led to our backyard (on the right) and (on the left) the holes through which the coalman used to deliver the coal that was the only form of heating in the house. There was no central heating and no heating at all upstairs, incidentally, so we had very cold bedrooms in winter!

Anyway, my excuse for reposting this trip down Ferguson’s Memory Lane is that I recently came across this fascinating picture taken from the West in 1897 of the old Benwell Village:

I had never seen this picture before but I am now quite sure from looking at street maps of the time that the houses you can see at the far left are in fact the cottages shown in the very first picture of this blog, including the one I lived in! I had never thought about it before, but notice how close the roofline is to the top of the first floor windows. Note also the wall separating them from the rest of the row as they were originally on a private estate.  In the background you can see Benwell Towers which, many years later, is where the TV series Byker Grove was filmed.

The row of houses you can see includes two pubs: The Hawthorn and The Green Tree. Both pubs survived in name though the newer premises were on opposite sides of the road when I lived there. These houses and pubs were all demolished long before I was born to make way for a road (Fox & Hounds Lane) which is basically continuation of Ferguson’s Lane but curving to the left.

A slightly better view from the early 1900s again shows the cottages on the far right. If you click to expand it you can see the drainpipe coming down the front of the house beside the first set of windows, exactly as in the first image on this blog.

Here’s a slightly different view of the same area, taken in 1920 and showing both sides of Ferguson’s Lane, again with Benwell Towers in the distance.

The lamppost is very useful for orienting these three images!

The cottages on the right no longer existed by the time I lived in Benwell: the new Hawthorn Inn stood at their location. At the far end of that row of houses was the old Smithy part of which became a dodgy garage called HQ Motors, which when I lived in the area was guarded by a very scary dog called Patch.

I never really knew what the old Benwell Village looked like. Now I have a much better idea, despite the fact the School the cottages and the pubs have now all vanished!