Seven people died when a fire broke out at the old Theatre Royal on February 19th, 1823. The first picture is of the old theatre and the second one shows where it stood on Mosley Street until it was replaced by the present Theatre Royal on Grey Street.
The audience was watching a play called ‘Tom and Jerry’ when a leaking gas pipe ignited. It was quickly extinguished, but not before a cry of “Fire! Save your lives” started a stampede towards the stairs, in which dozens of people were crushed. The deceased were a mix of men, women and children, the youngest being Isabella Parkinson, aged eleven.
The old Theatre Royal was the centrepiece of Mosley Street, which was built in 1784 and was Newcastle’s first new thoroughfare since mediaeval times. This very modern street was the first in the town to have purpose-built shops with glazed windows, and the first in the country to be lit by gas, and later electricity. Neighbouring Dean Street was built around the same time, and it’s from this period that the commercial centre of Newcastle began to move away from the Quayside towards the upper part of the town.
The illustration of the old theatre is from 1804 and isn’t to scale, it was a much larger building than this. It had a capacity of 1,350 and its frontage stretched from Drury Lane, which you can see on the left of the illustration and the photograph, to what would now be the middle of the road on Grey Street.
This presented a serious problem for Richard Grainger when he redeveloped the town centre in the 1830s. He needed rid of the theatre in order to build Grey Street but its owners refused to budge, until he offered to build them a brand new Theatre Royal further up his new street. Contracts were finally exchanged at nine in the morning of May 26th, 1836, and Grainger’s workmen had most of the old theatre’s roof off by lunchtime.
The owner of the Pine Apple Inn, directly behind the old theatre, proved to be more stubborn. His pub continued to jut out across the road after Grey Street was completed, stopping traffic from using it for the first three years. Grainger was eventually able to bribe the owner with a new pub called the Pineapple on the corner of Grainger Street and Nun Street.
Some brickwork from the old Theatre Royal has survived on Drury Lane, which is thought to be from the backstage area.