The world’s biggest grain warehouse had its own fleet of ships bringing grain directly from America. It’s pictured here in 1951, the second photo shows the Dakota Hotel, which currently occupies the site near the Millennium Bridge.
It was built by Newcastle Corporation and leased to the Newcastle Grain Warehouse Company to ensure that the city and its suburbs had a ready and reliable supply of grain to feed themselves. This was a big task, but everything about the Newcastle Grain Warehouse was on a gargantuan scale.
The digging of its foundations began in the summer of 1876 and took almost a year. Construction of the six-storey warehouse began in May 1877, and it was said to have consumed more bricks than any other building in Britain at the time. The ground floor contained a railway station where grain was loaded onto trains so it could be distributed throughout the region.
The warehouse was ready to receive its first cargo in October 1879, when a steamship called the Lovaine arrived from Baltimore in the USA. It would take more than one ship to feed this monster of a building, so the Taurus Line was established with a fleet of six large steamers that brought grain directly to Newcastle from New York. They also provided one of the first scheduled passenger services between the two cities.
The grain was hoisted from the ships by hydraulic machinery built at William Armstrong’s Elswick Works, you can see some of this equipment protruding from the front of the building in the first photo. More hydraulics were used to lift and move the grain between the warehouse’s floors. There was also a vast basement with a sloping floor to drain water seeping in from the river.
The building was severely damaged in 1902 when a fire broke out on the top floor and worked its way downwards. It reopened for business and helped feed Newcastle during two world wars, but by 1970 it had fallen into disuse, and there was a proposal to convert it into a maritime museum. The scheme failed to gain approval and the warehouse was demolished shortly afterwards.
The last trace of the world’s biggest grain warehouse was erased in 1986, when the vast hole in the ground that had once been its basement was filled in and landscaped ahead of the Tall Ships Race visiting Newcastle that year. An office block was later built on the site, which has since been converted into the Dakota Hotel.