It’s rush hour on Grainger Street in the 1890s. The vehicle in the middle of the road is standing still while a horse-drawn tram is hurtling past at around five miles per hour, far too fast for the photographer to capture it properly.
The photographer is unknown and there aren’t enough clues in the picture to give it a precise date, but it can be narrowed down. A sign at the top of one of the buildings in the background says “No.30”. These premises at 30 Grainger Street were occupied by the drapers Darlington Mills from July 1889, whose sign is also on the building. So the photo could have been taken no earlier than this.
A wine and cigar merchant from Greece called Andreas Masarachi opened the Continental Restaurant upstairs at 30 Grainger Street in the Spring of 1891 and he fitted his premises out in sumptuous style, boasting it was the finest dining experience outside of London. He erected a huge sign on the front of the building, there’s no sign in this photo so we can presume it was taken between 1889 and 1891.
The building had previously been occupied by an art gallery until it was severely damaged by a fire, which wasn’t the last to happen there. One of Masarachi’s kitchen porters, Spiros Chelmis, was burned to death in an attic room in 1899. The restaurant was rebuilt after this latest blaze, it continued trading until the 1930s under new ownership and the sign outside was changed to ‘Simpson’s Continental Restaurant’.
Back on the street, horse-drawn trams ran in Newcastle from 1878 until they were replaced by an electric tram system in 1901. This tram was going towards Newgate Street and would have turned into Clayton Street, where it then headed up Westgate Road on its route towards Benwell.