This Jacobean mansion stood on the corner of Sandhill and the Quayside and was known as Cosyn’s House. It survived bombardment by Scottish artillery in 1644, the Great Flood of 1771, and the Great Fire of 1854. It’s pictured here in 1897, at the end of a long and colourful life.
The title deeds for the building go back to 1610 when Newcastle was a frontier town in the centuries-long wars with Scotland, and was surrounded by one of the strongest town walls in Europe. The house’s first known occupant was John Cosyn, who was Newcastle’s Controller of Customs during the Siege of 1644, when a Scottish army spent several months pounding the town with their cannons before they finally broke through the defences and captured it.
Its later occupants would have been able to watch the old Tyne Bridge being swept away by the Great Flood of 1771. But they’d have had to do this from the safety of the upper floors, as all the buildings on the Quayside were inundated with water. The house took a direct hit from the explosion in Gateshead that began the Great Fire of 1854, launching burning timber and huge lumps of masonry across the river. This started a blaze on the Quayside that destroyed most of the neighbouring buildings and killed 53 people.
Cosyn’s House was bought by a shipowner called Thomas Robson in the early years of the nineteenth century, who had the first steam-powered vessel on the Tyne. The poet Thomas Wilson was a clerk there, he was the author of one of Tyneside’s finest works of literature, The Pitman’s Pay. Robson’s business decamped from the house when new office buildings were built on the Quayside after the Great Fire.
He rented the house out and it became Ye Old Queen Elizabeth Restaurant. It obtained a drinks licence in 1886 so that diners could enjoy a beer with their meals, but the restaurant’s owners used the licence to trade as a pub instead. This contravened the terms of the licence, which it lost in 1895, after a policeman said he’d visited fifteen times in one month and never seen a bite of food eaten there. The business closed down shortly afterwards.
The house was still owned by Robson’s family, but was in such a dilapidated state that nobody else wanted to rent it. The front rooms had taken the full force of the explosion in 1854, which had damaged its frame and left the floors uneven, so Thomas Robson Junior decided to demolish it in 1897 and replace it with modern offices.
It’s unlikely that Cosyn’s House would have survived much longer anyway, the replacement building was pulled down just thirty years later when the north tower of the new Tyne Bridge was built in its place. But one of the chimney pieces from Cosyn’s House is still with us, it was saved from the demolition and reused in the 1930s restoration of Bessie Surtees’ House, around the corner on Sandhill.