1820-1914
A Revolutionary Interlude
Jean-Paul Marat, the French revolutionary writer, philosopher and physician who coins the term ‘an enemy of the people’ and in 1793 is famously stabbed in the bath by Charlotte Corday, comes to Newcastle in 1770 and while there publishes his first overtly political work, The Chains of Slavery (1774), ‘in which the clandestine and villainous attempts of Princes to ruin Liberty are pointed out, and the dreadful scenes of Despotism disclosed. To which is prefixed An Address to the Electors of Great Britain, in order to draw timely attention to the choice of proper representatives.’
Reinvention No 1: The Neo-Classical City
In March 1775 a philosophical society is established, meeting in Westgate Street. The radical Thomas Spence is a member, but by November he has been expelled for publishing Property in Land every One’s Right, which proposes common ownership of land, based on the parish as an early soviet. In 1793 the Literary & Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne is founded. It draws on the same French model that had encouraged the establishment of one in Manchester 12 years earlier, but it is keen to disclaim all links with a predecessor stained by association with Spence and Marat. It encourages the investigation of geology (coal and lead), mechanical engineering, chemistry, urban and rural improvement, the region’s romantic scenery and antiquities, ‘an exact enumeration of the inhabitants of the town’, the history and progress of the region’s trade, the biography of eminent northerners, navigation and mathematics. The discussion of religion and politics is banned. Built by John Green, the Library of the Literary & Philosophical Society opens in 1825.
George Stephenson’s Stockton & Darlington Railway opens the same year. Wylam-born Stephenson had started his working life as an engineman at Newburn, developed his first locomotive in 1814 and a miner’s safety lamp roughly at the same time as Humphrey Davy’s more famous one. In 1823 he had established a locomotive works in Newcastle with his son Robert.
C1823 Joseph Mallord William Turner paints a view the watercolour Newcastle-on-Tyne. Prefiguring T Dan Smith’s description of the city as the Venice of the North, Turner later pairs another Tyne painting, Keelmen Heaving Coals By Night, with one of the Italian city of canals, although, in the comparison, he may not have been trying to make the same point.
The developer Richard Grainger begins work on Eldon Square and on Blackett Street in 1824, builds St Mary’s Place in 1827 and Leazes Terrace, Crescent and Place in 1829 and the Royal Arcade in 1832. In 1834 he buys the land that enables the development of Grey Street (one of the finest streets in England, Pevsner) and the rest of what is now known as Grainger Town. With permissions smoothed by John Clayton, the town clerk and its architecture by John Dobson, Thomas Oliver and John & Benjamin Green, it is both a neoclassical reinvention and a relocation of the city centre, a projection of cultural, economic and intellectual ambition. Always borrowing against future rents, Grainger completes the project in 1839. Buying the Elswick estate for a planned railway terminus and industrial sector, he over-reaches himself and spends most of the rest of his life dodging bankruptcy.
Biblical Interlude
Born by the Tyne at Haydon Bridge and a fellow student with John Dobson in Newcastle, the painter John Martin has a finely developed interest in both urban improvement and annihilation. His plan for London’s waterfront from Greenwich to Hammersmith Bridge (1832 – 1842) later underpin Bazalgette’s designs for the Victoria Embankment in the 1860s. At the same time, his paintings imagine The Destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii (1821), The Fall of Nenevah (1829), The Fall of Babylon (1831) and The Destruction of Tyre (1840). In 1852, the year before he dies, his painting of The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, pictures the wrath of God visiting, instead of ‘cities of the plain’, twinned municipal corporations in a river gorge remarkably similar to that of the Tyne, where Grainger neo-classical improvements had been completed just over a decade before. His arsonist brother Jonathan had been committed to Bedlam after setting fire to York Minster in 1829. Two years after John Martin painted the fireball striking Sodom and Gomorrah, Gateshead and Newcastle were visited by the Great Fire of 1854, which destroyed much of the Quayside.
Reinvention No 2: The Industrialist’s City
Robert Stephenson designs and builds the High Level Bridge between 1847 and 1849. Another of John Martin’s brothers William, the anti-Newtonian ‘philosophical conqueror of all mankind’ accuses Stephenson of stealing his ideas. In 1835 he had similarly accused George Stephenson and Humphrey Davy of stealing his ideas for a miner’s safety lamp. His perpetual motion machine of 1808 may have incorporated a concealed draft of air. Time is running out for philosophical conquerors, however, and he dies in 1851. Robert Stephenson was elected President of the Lit & Phil in 1855.
In 1846 William Armstrong develops the hydraulic crane to improve the loading of goods on Newcastle’s Quayside. The following year he buys land along the river in Elswick and begins to build the factories Grainger had imagined. He develops the breech-loading gun in 1855. With a view to naval applications he designs and builds the Swing Bridge so ships built in Low Walker can be fitted out in Elswick. It has the simultaneous benefit of destroying the power of the keelmen, who had formerly brought coal downstream to the ships which could not pass the old Tyne Bridge. He improves river access to his works by removing the island where the Blaydon Races had been held. He encourages the addition of Oriental roofs to Newcastle’s skyline, to impress visiting Chinese and Japanese arms buyers as they sailed up the Tyne. William Armstrong is elected President of the Lit & Phil in 1860. The Lit & Phil had given birth the Natural History Society in 1829, which in 1884 opens the buildings which become the Hancock Museum.
Master of the Newcastle School of Design, between 1855 and 1860 William Bell Scott works on a series of murals on Northumberland history at Wallington Hall, including Iron and Coal. When he leaves for London in 1864 his friends commission Building the New Castle for the Lit & Phil, of which he has been an active member. Built next door to the Lit & Phil, the Library of the North of England Institute of Mining & Mechanical Engineers opens in 1872. With the city’s vast industrial expansion a dominant working class culture begins to emerge. In 1862 Geordie Ridley sings The Blaydon Races at Balmbra’s Music Hall. In the late C19th Ralph Hedley celebrates everyday lives in paintings such as Geordie Haad the Bairn, Paddy’s Clothes Market, Sandgate and Out of Work. Together with Martin’s Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, they are held by the Laing Art Gallery, which opens in 1904.
The playwright Githa Sowerby was born in Gateshead in 1876, where her father ran the family glassworks Sowerby & Co. After disagreements with the board the family moved to London in 1896. In 1912, her play Rutherford and Son, picturing an end to the age of Victorian industrialism in a Tyneside glassmaking family, opens in London to justified acclaim. In 1917 the Shipley Art Gallery is opened in Gateshead. Proposed by the Newcastle and Gateshead Corporation in part as a measure to address unemployment, the King George V or Tyne Bridge is opened by the King in 1928. The BBC broadcast The Bridge of Tyne – a Fantasy for Radio in celebration of the event.