A view of the houses in the Mill Street West area of Stockton before demolition. This area is now the car parks behind Debenhams department store. 
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
A view of the houses in the Mill Street West area of Stockton before demolition. This area is now the car parks behind Debenhams department store.
Hello Picture Stockton. Hello Pat Watson nee Quinn. Look out Stockton-on-Tees. Jimmy McCurley from Toronto, Canada and I from San Francisco, Calif. USA are coming home and meeting Felix McCoy ( related to all the McCoy’s from Tontine, Kirk, Real McCoy etc. etc.) who now resides in Glasgow . We will hit the British shores in Sept. ; specifically Sept. 7-17 and will be spending some time at the Queen Catherine in Osmotherly. Pat, we would like to meet up with Mardi and Jo; pass the message , we are paying for dinner and drinks!! Picture Stockton Team , where are your offices? Jim and I would like to come and meet you all and tour your offices. The web page is now being read by lots of folks out here on the West Coast, they can’t contribute but they love to read the history thats contained on this site. They are fascinated by the community aspect from Stockton that is shared on the pages. We love the page…keep it up !!!!
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Cliff, I also remember the same ceiling in my grandparent’s house. I also remember a small raised grating by the front door for visitors to scrape mud off the soles of their shoes before entering. I think such embellishments were attempts to give the houses some semblance of ‘class’! Do you remember the gas lights coming out of the walls and the cast iron stove by the fire in the middle room with a compartment to bake bread? The middle room we called the living room and the front room was the parlor. I spent many evenings in the living room reading my Dandy or Beano and listening to Dan Dare on the radio. I’m 67 now. Could it be that our paths crossed so many years ago and now thousands of miles apart the wonders of this modern age enables us to share memories?! (I’m in Tennessee).
Mentioning Mill street west, dose anyone out there remember the Griffiths family living at (I think) number 28?
John, you must have lived opposite my grandparents, Rosa and Arthur Johnson. They lived at 22 Mill Street West for many years, until about 1960. Their terrace house was small and very basic, but despite that I can remember a most elaborate ceiling rose in their front room. The high quality of the ceiling decoration seemed out of place, when compared with the standard of the rest of their house.
Sandra, Cliff, Linda, Lilylou, George, Steve, Malcolm, and Robert; thanks for the memories. Looking at the picture of 21 Mill Street West where I was born in March 1944 and lived there and on Derby Street until I was 19 you do help fill out my memories with your comments. I’ve begun to write my autobiography, gardening here in the southern Appalachian mountain chain, in Tennessee, and reflect often on the unique character of living in Stockton during that period of time. I remember my granny, Annie Dobson, and gas lights in her house, and when electric lights were installed (when was that?). I remember going with my younger sister Patricia with an old beaten up pram to get cinders for the fire from the gas works. Getting the Dandy and the Beano right across the road. Yes I was in Preston Hall museum in 1999, and the condition of Stockton railway station as well as the disappearance of John Walker’s shop on the High Street (walked past it five mornings a week to get the bus to St. Mary’s College, in Middlesbrough).
I can’t remember the street that chippy was in but I thought the fish & chip shop in Sydney Street was better. Anyone with any pics of Milbank Street? Thats where I was born and stayed till they were demolished.
Steve you forgot to mention the fish shop that would be about opposite the Phoenix pub. Myself and your brother Dave bought many a bag of chips there in the very early sixties.
I used to use the fish & chip shop which was on the corner, just before you got to the American Tavern. I cant remember the name of the street it was on.
Walked up this street every Saturday when I was young in the 60’s, on my way to the town from Browns Bridge. I think the name on shop on the right was O. Vokes. Further back (towards Dixon Street), there was an ‘Offy’, then on the dog leg, there was a barbers shop, painted green,(it had a sign in the window, which asked, ‘something for the weekend?’, which puzzled my young mind for years) and opposite that, another shop,(may have been a bakery) before you reached Dixon Street, where there was yet another shop. I think this one may have been called Halls, but can’t swear to it. The house next door to this had a car with a really odd name that I couldn’t pronounce. A black Peugeot 303 was not a car that was found very often, amongst all the Austin, Morris and Vauxhalls etc of the 60’s.
For people like John Fahey, now in Tennessee, who grew up in Stockton but now live elsewhere; the sight of Stockton station would bring tears to the eyes. What remains now of a once splendid station is a disgrace and I dare say that the station could be demolished completely with something like bus shelters put in place similar to Thornaby Station. Given that Stockton played such an important role in the establishment of the passenger railway system of the world, then the planners should be doing more to preserve what remains of that heritage.
As it is, it is virtually impossible now to travel from Hampshire, where I live, to Stockton by train. It is easier to get to Darlington and Thornaby than it is to get to Stockton
It is only through this site, and a very big thanks must go to the team at Stockton Library, and the efforts at Preston Park Museum, that former residents of Stockton from all over the world can have their memories revived of what the town used to be like.
I have this link stored on my ‘important links’ page and look back at it every so often as I remember my childhood. It’s thought provoking that Sandra, Cliff, Linda, and Lilylou also have similar memories. I now live in Tennessee but my Aunt Jean is still alive and living in Stockton with my two brothers and two sisters (all grew up at 35 Derby Street)all around the Tees-side area. Annie and Henry Dobson had fifteen grandchildren (I am the second born)and with another two generations on that little terrace house certainly launched a a small multitude of people.
I reflect today that at the top of Leeds Street turning left and walking up to the Stockton Train Station I now realise it is the oldest passenger railway station in the world. I am awed to think I lived so near to history and when I got the train north to go to university in Scotland I was leaving such a historic town.
The shop on the corner of Leeds Street was Rudges. On the other corner was a tailors shop, Gants I think, and on the other side of Mill Street on the corner of Victoria Street and Mill St was Alan Pinders shop. There were, I think, five or six corner shops in the whole street as well as two pubs.
I think the shop you refer to Cliff was called Ridge’s. There was a Pinder’s shop in Mill Street West but it wasn’t on the corner of Leeds Street.
John Fahey, do you remember the name of the small corner shop that stood opposite your house on the corner of Mill Street West and Leeds Street? In the 1950s whenever I visited my grandma at 22 Mill Street West she would give me a few pennies to spend at the shop. The name Pinder comes to mind but I can`t be sure?
The second door from the right (just before the alley) was 21 Mill Street West. I was born in that house March 4, 1944 to Edna Dobson, daughter of Annie and Henry Dobson. My mother had sisters Ivy, Vy, Annie, and Jean. I spent a lot of my childhood playing in the backyard of the house and in the alley and have vivid memories of the neighboring streets since I lived nearby at 35 Derby Street until I was 19 in 1963.
I live on Mill Street West now, in one of only 6 of the original houses left standing, but can remember what it looked like before they demolished them as I have always lived locally.