This image has been cropped from a larger one and shows a girl selling drinks on Sandgate near the River Tyne in Newcastle. The area was famous for Paddy’s Market, where old clothes and shoes were sold every Saturday morning, but someone was also selling large joints of meat from the table next to the girl.
The photographer is unknown but the picture can be dated to April 1896 by a poster in one of the windows. It’s advertising a performance by ‘The Most Marvellous Chin Balancers In The World’, Monsieur & Mademoiselle Rofix, who topped the bill at the Palace Theatre on Percy Street that month. Monsieur Rofix was able to do remarkable things with his chin, including balancing a loaded cannon on it, which was fired by the Mademoiselle.
The girl was probably selling lemonade and has several bottles cooling in a bucket by her side. Lemons could be bought cheaply from the fruit boats that came up the Tyne, ice was available from the refrigerated warehouses nearby. The meat came from the butchers in the Grainger Market where it had been deemed unfit for their customers, it was sold in bulk to captains looking for cheap provisions to feed a crew on their next voyage.
The buildings in the background were demolished about ten years after the photo was taken, but Paddy’s Market was still going in the 1980s.