The scruffy building on the right was the former home of Newcastle’s most revered architect, John Dobson. He assisted Richard Grainger in the rebuilding of the town centre and built this house on New Bridge Street for himself in 1825, but it had become a doss house by the time the photo was taken almost a century later.
It’s easy to date the photo thanks to the posters plastered all over the house, one of which is for a play called ‘Money’ that was being performed at the Tyne Theatre in May of 1911. Improvements in printing techniques made posters a cheap form of advertising and entire buildings were often covered with them; they appear on lots of photographs from this period and provide us with a great slice of social history.
We can see many household products advertised here that were popular at the time, but the most interesting sign is for Donnelly’s, who owned several doss houses in Newcastle. It’s offering single rooms to rent in Dobson’s old house for sixpence a week, which an advert in the Evening Chronicle said were suitable for “married couples or two respectable men”.
Thousands of people in Newcastle lived in this sort of accommodation before the days of affordable social housing. It was common for a bed to be rented to several people who would take turns sleeping in it if they were working a night shift or a day shift, and they’d often end up sleeping in it together. One of Tyneside’s most famous songs, Joe Wilson’s ‘Keep Your Feet Still Geordie Hinny’, is about a man in a doss house who is unable to sleep due to the fidgeting of another man in his bed.
We can also see a sign offering the building for sale, so its days as a doss house were numbered. It was briefly occupied by a manufacturer of stained glass windows and was going to be demolished in 1921 and replaced with a cinema. These plans didn’t happen, but Dobson’s house suffered further ignominy by being incorporated into the Oxford Galleries dance hall in 1923.
The Oxford was a huge shed attached to the rear of Dobson’s house, it eventually became Tiffany’s nightclub and then had a variety of names before being pulled down. The house has survived and is a Grade II Listed Building.