A view of a house in a yard off the South side of Castlegate, Stockton (previously Ferry Lane or Cooks Wynd) c1900.
The building was the Stockton and Darlington Railway terminus in 1825. Demolished c1968.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
Another fine tribute to those foreward thinking planners and architects of the 1960’s and 70’s. A 400 year old building demolished because it was old! Incredible what sacriledge was done under the name of progress!
Here is an image showing the front of the building that overlooked the river
http://picturestocktonarchive.wordpress.com/2002/09/23/castlegate-2/
Here is a fourth view of this building:
http://picturestocktonarchive.files.wordpress.com/2002/11/s196.jpg
Bill, I do believe you are right! This child definitely has an artificial leg (which seems little more than a pinion), you can tell by his stance and the way he is taking the weight on his ‘good’ left leg. Incredible! Well spotted!
A few observations… the house architect wasn’t local. The tiles on the roof are red dutch pantiles sent over as ships ballast. The roof timber rafters are sagging under the weight. The two chimneys are highly unusual suggesting this was two houses called back-to-backs… The roof has got no roofing felt or tile mortar backup (sarking) so someone tried to repair it with cement which won’t last a bad winter (when did we ever have a good winter in those long gone days) Entering the front door the staircase was to the right, and the eldest boy of the house once kept a few pigeons in the small loft- you can still see the landing board he put up. The house suffers from damp and was probably built at the bottom of a bank with poor drainage. An attempt was made to this improve this houses appearance by painting the front brick wall. The house next door had the windows bricked up to avoid paying ‘the window tax’: A famous London Estate Agent Roy Brooks would described this property as “This property contains clear evidence that nature as fought back and won!”
THE WINDOW TAX: First imposed in England in 1696, Window Tax was repealed in 1851 after campaigners argued that it was a ‘tax on health’, and a ‘tax on light and air’, as well as being an unequal tax with the greatest burden on the middle and lower classes. Originally introduced to make up for losses caused by clipping of coinage during the reign of William III, the tax was based on the number of windows in a house. It was a banded tax, for instance, in 1747 for house with ten to fourteen windows, the tax stood at 6d. per window, fifteen to nineteen windows, 9d., and exceeding twenty or more, 1s.. The tax was raised six times between 1747 and 1808. By then the lowest band started at six windows. This was raised in 1825 to eight windows. The window tax was relatively easy to assess and collect as windows are clearly visible from the street.
Difficult one this Bob. I was ‘opining’ that the holes may have been to secure some earlier large-section timber gantry or hoist mechanism to the internal timbers of the roof structure and floor joists. However, the bricked up 1st floor window does not seem large enough to enable the effective ‘swing-in’ of goods, etc.
Also what is strange, is that the ‘bricking-up’ seems set very deep within the reveals of the aperture as if the walls were an unusual 3-brick thickness and yet had only a one-leaf protection against the elements.
You are right about the general architecture, the ‘oeil de bouef’ (bullseye) uppermost window is incredibly elaborate for such a structure, just imagine the cost in making the window frame! As such, I’ve certainly never seen one before locally, on an 18thC house of this type, or intended use.
After re-thinking about the ‘oval’ window and any similar installations to be found locally, I remembered the Ketton Ox pub at Yarm which has a series of such original windows at high-level, though these too have been infilled. They are identified on a wall-plaque, as having been on the floor level that served as a cock-fighting ‘pit’.
Thank you Chris, who kindly pointed out this house is comparable to the Elizabethan house in Yarm, looking at the quality of the brickwork one could argue they were both built by the same firm using the same team of bricklayers (‘brickies’). Both houses bear their signature. It’s not commonly known but old time brickies could look at a house or brickwork and identify the man who laid them – like art historians today can identify artists by their brushwork, subject and skill.
In September 2011 Dave Summerfield, Kevin Mc Gowan and Fred Starr made a number of pertinent remarks about this house, (see the gable end photo) in 1968 prior to demolition it had a gable-end side door – suggesting a much larger front door is around the corner facing the railway line which ran alongside it from the dockside, from this collective information it would be fair to say this building was originally the “Fleece Inn” public house. Beer in those days was brewed on the premises by the landlord, so since this house does not appear to have a store cellar one must assume the building next door and adjoining it was Stockton’s first and probably ‘oldest purpose built brewery’, so as Chris remarked it must have had an outside chain hoist for hauling barley grain upstairs to the two upper floors for fermenting with extra room to store barrelled Scots whisky, which suggests that the old Stockton Dock archive records should show whisky ships arriving at Stockton docks from Leith docks, Edinburgh. So one wonders does the old Scottish brewers still have the invoices and shipment records?
I suspect that the doorway on the left is part of an extension that was added to the original rectangular building. The end gable wall can be seen in the image http://picturestocktonarchive.wordpress.com/2003/07/27/formerl-stockton-darlington-railway-terminus/
You can see the line in the bricks where the extension meets the original building line.
Cliff, with this second view (and use as a riverside inn) you’ve noted, I’m almost certain that this building was probably one of the oldest surviving structures in Stockton up to it’s demolition. There are several comparable architectural features to the ‘Elizabethan house’ at Yarm, seen here;
http://picturestocktonarchive.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/an-elizabethan-house-yarm-2013/
Your right Cliff, it was originally a single story extension, the new owner took the roof off it and made bedrooms upstairs, marrying in his roof timbers must have been a sod of a job for the builder, and then he had to add the chimney flue with two pots (ones chimneys missing) so where was the second fireplace? common sense says upstairs in the *master bedroom*, for 2/6 a week rent what could you expect, this house was impossible to keep warm and the tenants must have went to bed in the winter half-dressed, maybe at one time they offered lodgings to the dock workers so one imagines they would have had a sign saying ‘ No clogs or boots to be worn in bed’. In no part of this post am I making fun of our forbears and relations, so will add no wonder these men, our men and our brothers, put up such uncomplaining courage during WW1 and WW2.
Bob, I don’t think the roof timbers are sagging. There looks to be two different roof angles to me.
There is some slight roof movement, my guess is when the outhouse roof was raised or extended and an upper floor added, the property owner used second-hand timber and at first the old tiles, when he ran out of tiles he bought some more from elsehwere and you can see where ‘ when the tiler was laying them he lost his temper with the job and started slapping them down carelessly’ in order to get paid and away. Just guessing the tiles at the front extension area are older than the tiles at the rear – which is a far better job undertaken by a much finer and more upright and careful person.
I was born in Billingham in 1936 and I can remember youngsters with no shoes and in the winter no coats .
I wonder what the holes knocked through the brick gable end signify – other than they were keeping a few pigeons?
Another youngster with no shoes !
Bill, Hmmm? Is it the same one, following the photographer from the Black Lion Yard pic?
Chris, I don’t think they are the same one, the youngster in this photo looks like he only has one leg, I can’t see a foot, one leg, maybe it’s the photo…