History of Newcastle upon Tyne
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Newcastle has a history that goes back over 2,000 years. During this time it has been controlled by the Romans, the Saxons and the Danes amongst others.
[edit] Roman settlement
Newcastle was founded by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who bestowed his own family name on it - Pons Aelius (Aelian Bridge). The Roman crossing was at the foot of the Tyne Gorge, roughly on the site of the present Swing Bridge, and the settlement lay approximately where the Castle Keep is today. Hadrian's Wall runs through present-day Newcastle with stretches of wall and turrets visible along the West Road, and at a temple in Benwell. The course of the wall can be traced eastwards to the Segedunum Roman fort at Wallsend, with the fort Arbeia down river, on the south bank in what is now South Shields.
[edit] Anglo-Saxon development
Known as Monkchester before the Norman Conquest, Newcastle lay within the powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, three of whose rulers held the title of Bretwalda - ‘Lord of Britain’ - in the seventh century, the Golden Age of Northumbria, when the area was a beacon of culture and learning in Europe. Pilgrims came to the Holy Well of Jesus' Mount, now part of Jesmond. (One of Newcastle's biggest modern shopping streets, Pilgrim Street, is so-called because of the popularity of the well.)
Monkchester was destroyed by the Danes in the 9th century.
[edit] Norman period
Monkchester was levelled again in the general devastation of the lands between the Tyne and Tweed by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, after the rebellion against the Normans in 1080.
Because of its strategic position, Robert Curthose, son of William the Conqueror, erected a wooden castle there in 1080 and the town was henceforth known as Novum Castellum or Newcastle.
[edit] The Middle Ages
Throughout the Middle Ages, Newcastle was England's northern fortress, the centre for mustering armies. A 25 foot high stone wall was built around Newcastle to defend it from invaders during the Border war against Scotland, which lasted intermittently for several centuries - possibly the longest border war ever waged. The Scots king William the Lion was imprisoned there in 1174, Edward I brought the Stone of Scone and William Wallace south through the town and Newcastle was successfully defended against the Scots three times during the 14th century. Around the 14th century Newcastle became a county corporate. Virtually every English ruler from the Conqueror to Cromwell has been in the city, along with such figures as Harry Hotspur, the dashing hero of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part One. Shakespeare himself performed in Newcastle in 1588.
[edit] Tudor period and after
King Charles bestowed upon Newcastle the East of England coal trading rights. This monopoly helped Newcastle prosper, but it had its impact on the growth of near-neighbours Gateshead and Sunderland, causing a North of Tyne/South of Tyne and a Tyne-Wear rivalry that still exists.
During the English Civil War, Newcastle supported King Charles and was stormed 'with roaring drummes' in 1644 by Cromwell's Scots allies, based in pro-Parliament Sunderland, thus ensuring London's coal supplies. The grateful King bestowed his motto "Fortiter Defendit Triumphans" upon Newcastle. Ironically, Charles was imprisoned in Newcastle by the Scots in 1646-7.
In the 18th century, Newcastle was the country's largest print centre after London, Oxford and Cambridge, and the Literary and Philosophical Society of 1793, with its erudite debates and large stock of books in several languages predated the London Library by half a century. Newcastle also became the greatest glass producer in the world.
[edit] Industrialisation
Newcastle's development as a major city, however, owed most to its central role in the export of coal. The phrase "taking coals to Newcastle" was first recorded in 1538; it proverbially denotes bringing a particular commodity to a place that has more than enough of it already.
In the nineteenth century, shipbuilding and heavy engineering were central to the city's prosperity; and the city was a powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution. Innovation in Newcastle and surrounding areas included the development of Safety lamps, Stephenson's Rocket, Lord Armstrong's artillery, Joseph Swan's electric light bulbs, and Charles Parsons' invention of the steam turbine, which led to the revolution of marine propulsion and the production of cheap electricity. Innovation in Newcastle and surrounding areas includes:-
- George Stephenson and/or Humphry Davy's safety lamps, which made possible the opening up of ever deeper mines to provide the coal that powered the industrial revolution.
- Stephenson's early work in railways, prior to The Rocket, including The Blucher, a locomotive working at Killingworth colliery in 1814, leading to the railways and a step change in the economics of transportation.
- Joseph Swan's first demonstration of his electric light bulb — like Davy's lamp, the subject of some controversy since Thomas Edison also laid claim to the invention.
- Charles Algernon Parsons' invention and commercialisation of the steam turbine, leading to his Turbinia, a turbine-powered ship that literally ran rings around the British Fleet at a review at Spithead in 1897.
- William Armstrong whose company was famous for the production of best-of-breed heavy armaments, used in the Crimean War, the American Civil War — by both sides — and the First World War
- Mosley Street, in the centre of Newcastle, is claimed to be the first in the world to have electric street lighting though this is contested.
Newcastle was one of the boroughs reformed by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 : the reformed municipal borough included the parishes of Byker, Elswick, Heaton, Jesmond, Newcastle All Saints, Newcastle St Andew, Newcastle St John, Newcastle St Nicholas, and Westgate. The urban districts of Benwell and Fenham and Walker were added in 1904. In 1935, Newcastle gaiend Kenton and parts of the parishes of West Brunton, East Denton, Fawdon, Longbenton. The most recent expansion in Newcastle's boundaries took place under the Local Government Act 1972 on April 1, 1974, when Newcastle became a metropolitan borough, also including the urban districts of Gosforth and Newburn, and the parishes of Brunswick, Dinnington, Hazlerigg, North Gosforth and Woolsington from the Castle Ward Rural District.
Newcastle was largely spared the horrors inflicted upon Coventry, London and other British cities bombed by the Luftwaffe. Although the armaments factories and shipyards along the River Tyne were targeted by the Germans, they largely escaped unscathed. Manors goods yard and railway terminal, to the east of the city centre, and the suburbs of Jesmond and Heaton suffered bombing during 1941. There were 141 deaths and 587 injuries, a relatively small figure compared to the casualties in other industrial centres of Britain.
As heavy industries declined in the second half of the twentieth century, large sections of the city centre were demolished along with many areas of slum housing. The leading political figure in the city during the 1960s T. Dan Smith who oversaw a massive building programme of highrise housing estates and authorised the demolition of a quarter of the Georgian Grainger Town to make way for a shopping centre Eldon Square). Smith's control in Newcastle collapsed when it was exposed that he had used public contracts to advantage himself and his business associates and for a time Newcastle became a byword for civic corruption as depicted in the films Get Carter and Stormy Monday and in the television series Our Friends in the North. However, much of the historic Grainger Town area remains to this day and was, for the most part, fully restored in the late 1990s. Today the city is a vibrant centre for office and retail employment. Though conversely, just a short distance from the flourishing city centre, there are impoverished inner-city housing estates, in areas where the original raison d'être was to provide affordable housing for employees of the shipyards and other heavy industries that lined the River Tyne. The Newcastle City Council has recently begun implementing plans to regenerate these depressed areas, such as those along the Ouseburn Valley.
[edit] Trivia
For a short time in the 17th century, Newcastle exported large quantities of urine down the coast to Ravenscar, North Yorkshire, to be used in the production of alum (a dye fixative) for the textile industry.[1] The urine was collected from public urinals or barrels in the city and it has been suggested that this may be the origin of the popular (though mildly offensive) English phrase "taking the piss".
