West View in Elswick used to be called Glue House Lane, its name was changed in 1961 because it was unromantic. Councillor Arthur Grey was head of the Town Improvement & Street Committee and claimed it would be difficult for a girl to find a suitor if she said she lived on Glue House Lane.
The Glue House closed in 1869 and Cupid would have certainly had his work cut out before then, finding a match for someone who lived amid the stench of dead horses being boiled up to make glue. But the row of houses was built on the lane in 1884 and Arthur Grey argued they had no connection with the Glue House, and its residents would be luckier in love with a different address.
The name wasn’t the only problem the inhabitants faced, it’s one of the steepest residential streets in Newcastle and this has caused several accidents over the years. The most serious of these was in 1886 when the driver of a horse and carriage was heading to a funeral at Elswick Cemetery and lost control going down Glue House Lane.
He jumped off to save himself, while his four passengers hurtled to the bottom of the hill and smashed into a building. The horse was killed and the carriage destroyed and everyone was severely injured, but fortunate not to have come to a sticky end.
Newcastle Corporation came up with a novel way of tackling this Alpine slope in 1906 with a proposal to run a cable car up and down Glue House Lane, connecting the new tramlines on Scotswood Road and Elswick Road. The project was costed at £26,500 but came unstuck when it was considered too expensive for the number of people who would benefit.