The older photo shows Nelson Street in 1912 and the other one was taken in 2024 for comparison. There’s little difference in the streetscape except for Bank House peeping over the Central Arcade, despite being half a mile away at the bottom of Pilgrim Street.
The arcade opened shortly before the older photo was taken, occupying the former Central Exchange Building, which had been gutted by a fire in 1901. The Central Exchange was built in 1839 by Richard Grainger and had once housed an art gallery, reading room and a hotel, and more recently the Vaudeville Theatre. It was remodelled as a shopping arcade by the architects J Oswald & Sons, opening in 1906.
The boot maker John Hamilton was among the arcade’s earliest tenants; you can see his sign on the Grainger Street frontage of the building in the older photo. The company ceased trading there in the 1970s, but there’s still a large and beautifully painted ghost sign for Hamiton’s on a window inside the arcade.
The white building to the left of the arcade was the Gaiety Variety Theatre on Nelson Street, and was also part of Richard Grainger’s redevelopment of the town centre in the 1830s. It was originally a concert hall and became a theatre in 1884, hosting vaudeville and music hall acts.
After successfully screening a couple of short movies to its punters between acts, it became a full time cinema in 1911 called the Gaiety Picture Hall. It still says “theatre” on the outside of the building in the older photo, they mustn’t have updated their signage, or Newcastle Libraries are a year or two out with the date they’ve attributed to it. The cinema closed in 1947.
The Grainger Market is on the right and one of the properties in the old photo has a sign on the front that says “Simpson”. This was the Blackett Arms and the sign refers to a former landlord, Edward Simpson. The pub dates from the building of the Grainger Market in 1835 and was taken over by him in 1872, after which it was informally known as “Simpson’s”.
Edward’s widow became the landlady after he cut his throat with a penknife on a holiday in Whitley Bay in 1884, and it remained in the family for many more years. It continued to be known by its regulars as Simpson’s, and the sign was a local landmark. The Blackett Arms closed down about twenty years ago and the building is currently occupied by a bar called No28.
Photo Credits: Newcastle Libraries & Newcastle Stuff.