This is the west side of the Sallyport Tower, a view you can’t get today as it’s obscured by buildings. It was built around 1290 as part of Newcastle’s Town Wall, which was one of the strongest defensive walls in Europe, a necessity in the days when this was a frontier town during the wars with Scotland.
The photo isn’t dated but there’s a clue if we look closely at the posters on the wall. They’re mostly illegible but you can make out the word “Enolin” on one of them, with “Second Prize” underneath. Enolin was a brand of toothpaste and this was an advert for a competition they ran in April 1921.
The Roman Wall passed through this part of Newcastle on top of a hill or “knoll”, and the area was known as the Wall Knoll. When the medieval Town Wall was built over a thousand years later, this defensive building upon it was called the Wall Knoll Tower, one of several names it has been known by over the years.
The tower had a small gate next to it called a ‘sally port’, through which the town’s defenders could sally forth and fight their attackers hand-to-hand. There was plenty of close fighting during the Siege of Newcastle in 1644, but there was nothing the defenders could do to stop the tower’s upper floor being destroyed by the Scottish artillery located on the other side of the River Tyne.
It was later leased to the Company Of Carpenters Or Shipwrights’ Society and became known as the Carpenters’ Tower, they rebuilt the upper part in 1716 and created a hall where they could hold their meetings and functions. Nowadays it’s known as the Sallyport Tower, although it’s hired out for weddings and parties by a company which has recently rebranded it ‘The Secret Tower’.
There are a couple of other features of historical interest in the photo. The large brick building to the left of the Sallyport Tower is Garth Heads, it was built in 1870 by a local ship owner as tenement housing for industrial workers, and is one of the earliest examples of philanthropic housing in the city. It is currently occupied by students.
The wooden building with the sloping roof below Sallyport Tower was the workshop of Henry Pooley & Son, manufacturers and repairers of industrial weighing machines. Pooley’s claim to fame is that they built what was once the biggest weighing machine in the world, which was installed in Palmer’s shipyard at Jarrow in October 1890. It was tested by placing weights totalling 100 tons on it, and was so accurate it could detect the removal of a few ounces.