There’s a glorious curvaceous grandeur to Victorian railway architecture. I love the sinuous bends of those northern English stations whose geography prevents them from being termini but who nevertheless try to give themselves the airs of one. None is greater than Newcastle: John Dobson’s cathedral in iron and sandstone to the great god, Progress, and to the heaped wealth earned by coals from Newcastle.
Were Britain’s cultural geography more widely distributed, Dobson would be rightly renowned as one of our greatest architects. For where John Vanburugh or Gilbert Scott built mansions or churches, Dobson created streets. And what streets! Newcastle was made, economically and physically, by the coals beneath it and the waters running through it, gouging a steep valley through the sandstones, mudstones and coal seams beneath the city.
They crafted the stage for England’s greatest street, Grey Street, whose name, appropriately for a radical borough, celebrates Earl Grey’s 1832 Great Reform Act and whose form moulds itself into the sheer banks of the city curling down from Grey’s Monument to the quays of the great mercantile River Tyne. With the high steel bridges spanning the river and the merchants’ palaces beneath them, you might almost be in New York rather than Newcastle.
The city started life as a bulwark against revolt: first as the eastern anchor of Hadrian’s wall against the Scots (fragments still remain) and then as the Norman Novum Castellum against the rebellious north Saxons of the Kingdom of Northumbria. But if the city’s name comes from war, her nature comes from commerce — and geography.
At some point, probably in the late 12th or early 13th century, the good burghers of Newcastle began shipping coal down the coast to London where it was known as “seacoal” and was unloaded at Seacoal and Newcastle Wharfs on the River Fleet, still recalled in their modern street names, Old Seacoal Lane and Newcastle Close.
The trade caught on fast, mentioned in Royal Charters from 1253 and used to fuel the smiths and lime-burners of Westminster Abbey’s 13th-century reconstruction. By 1306, as lords temporal, lords spiritual and commoners gathered for Parliament in the week after Whit Sunday, they were greeted by a new and unfamiliar acrid smell. It was burning coal, arriving from Newcastle, landed on the Fleet and consumed by blacksmiths, artisans and households across the capital. Coal burned longer, hotter and slower than mere wood. It also stank. Revolted, parliament passed a ban on burning coal while it was in session. Had anyone paid any attention to this official attempt to ban innovation then the history of Britain, Newcastle and indeed the world might be completely different. But no one did.
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