Here’s the newly completed Pearl Assurance Buildings at the bottom of Northumberland Street in 1904. The first half dozen years of the 20th century saw the biggest building boom in Newcastle city centre since the days of Richard Grainger.
There’s a sign on the front offering premises in the buildings for rent, and two tenants had already moved in. Jaeger opened their first Newcastle store there selling woollen underwear, and next door to them you can see Thomas Cook’s travel shop, a local landmark that gave this part of town the nickname ‘Cook’s Corner’.
The boom wasn’t as big or coordinated as Grainger Town in the 1830s, when the town centre was almost completely rebuilt in one huge effort. By the beginning of the 20th century, individual buildings were springing up where and when the opportunity arose. A huge fire at the bottom of Dean Street created the space for Milburn House, one of the biggest office complexes in Europe at the time it was completed in 1905. Dean Street was changed further by the massive Cathedral Buildings around the same time.
The upper part of the city received several new buildings, some of them within a couple of hundred yards of the Pearl. The Laing Art Gallery around the corner on New Bridge Street was completed in 1904 and was a gift to Newcastle Corporation from the wine and spirit merchant Alexander Laing, an embarrassing one because the Corporation didn’t own any pictures to exhibit in it.
The gorgeous Emerson Chambers was built for another wine and spirit merchant the same year, to the west of the Pearl on Blackett Street. It was within sight of Mawson, Swan & Morgan’s new store on Grey Street, which was under construction at the same time. It’s also opposite the Eldon Grill, built by Alexander Laing’s brother Farquhar Laing a decade earlier; he was yet another wine and spirit merchant, so the city’s architecture owes a large debt to alcohol.
The same timeframe saw the building of the YMCA on Blackett Street, the Royal Victoria Infirmary, and a large extension added to the Co-op store on Darn Crook. The architect Benjamin Simpson had designed Emerson Chambers and created another masterpiece in the Bigg Market when Half Moon Chambers was completed in 1905. Work also began on remodelling the east end of the Quayside, where a new quay was to be built along the North Shore towards the mouth of the Ouseburn.
The Pearl Assurance Buildings were the victim of another building boom in the 1970s, they were pulled down and replaced with the concrete office block that stands there today. A few other monstrosities appeared around the same time, notably the buildings that straddled Pilgrim Street and Westgate Road on stilts, but both of these have recently been demolished. The widely disliked Town Hall at the bottom of the Bigg Market, the derelict Royal Arcade, and part of old Eldon Square, were lost in the same period.
Apart from this minor blip, Newcastle’s architectural heritage is pretty much intact and can match or beat almost any city in the UK.