The black and white photo was taken on the corner of Grainger Street and Grey Street before the area around the Earl Grey Monument was pedestrianised. The colour photo shows the same view today for comparison.
The Hungarian photographer Laszlo Torday settled on Tyneside and took thousands of photos like the one above of Newcastle and its suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s; Newcastle Libraries has a large collection of his work. They estimate the date of this one to be 1970, which looks about right.
It shows someone pushing a bicycle across the road, his striped apron suggests he was a butcher’s boy from the Grainger Market, out on his errands delivering meat to customers. You can see the market in the background, in the gap between the buildings on the right.
There’s no road there now, but in 1970 the area was a busy junction between Blackett Street, Grey Street and Grainger Street. It was pedestrianised in the late 1970s when the Monument Metro Station was built beneath the Earl Grey Monument, you can see a small bit of one of the station’s entrances on the far left of the second picture.
Apart from this modern intrusion, the streetscape has remained unchanged over the past half a century, although the occupants of the buildings are very different today. The tobacconist and newsagent Lavells was there from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, Robson’s furniture store on the right of the old photo closed in the early eighties too.
Part of the Robson building is now occupied by a Vietnamese street food restaurant, there was a long queue outside on its opening day when the second photo was taken. The tobacconist shop in the old photo is part of the Central Arcade, it would seem to be a prime retail site but it’s had a brisk turnover of tenants in recent years, the Knoops cafe has only been there a few months.
The streetscape may be the same in both pictures, but the people enjoying Vietnamese cuisine, and drinking hot chocolate al fresco on a chilly February day in Newcastle city centre, may as well be on a different planet to those in the 1970 photograph.
Picture credits: Laszlo Torday/Newcastle Libraries & Newcastle Stuff.