A view looking south-east of numbers 70 – 82 Church Road, Stockton. The sign for the Trevelyan Hotel can be seen jutting out from the building of numbers 70/72. This Grade II Listed building is now Gloucester House.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
Another excellent photograph of ‘Paradise Row’, an elegant terrace of original properties built as private residences for no doubt wealthy owners. In recent photographs, the conversion of the open tree-lined and gated, promenading space known as The Square has been highlighted, particularly as to it’s conversion to the dedicated Stockton ‘Cattle-market’ (animals previously being sold on the High Street or nearby fields).
Now, if I owned one of these above homes and suddenly discovered in the late 19thC. that there was a proposal to turn the green-space in front of my home into a cattle-market, with all the attendant noise and smells that you’d expect from such an activity, I’d be hopping mad. This must suggest that the above properties by that time, had already been vacated by their original owners and converted to rooming-houses, flats, or offices and as shown above, an hotel. By the time of this particular photograph in the 1940’s, it can be seen that the properties are in a bad state of decay, the facade on the far right, actually having had it’s doorway bricked-up.
Undoubtedly, the ‘heavy industrialisation’ of central Stockton and areas along the riverbank, from the middle-third of the 19thC. with a resultant surge in population, had driven the more ‘affluent’ members of the local trading and professional classes out to the suburbs. Post 1947, when the ‘Listed Building’ scheme was introduced by Gov’t, these Church Row buildings still possessed some merit, even in their dilapidated state. This process possibly saved the ‘Paradise Row’ terrace from demolition.
However, the immediate requirement to give the town of Stockton a new-face of post WWII modernism, exceeded the desire and finances to restore or preserve many of the other older commercial buildings and houses between Finkle St and Tower St, many of which by the late 1950’s, were in a state of advanced blight. After two World-Wars and a lengthy period of economic depression in the 1930’s, the Stockton Borough Council had decided by the early ’60’s to move bravely forward and swept away those decaying east High Street areas, for the creation of the Castlegate Centre in order to meet the needs of a new age of consumer prosperity and general affluence.
Looking south-east? I suspect it is looking up towards the High Street and hence west/south-west