This busy scene was photographed around a hundred years ago on New Bridge Street, with Blackett Street beyond. The colour picture shows the same scene today for comparison. The black and white photo is undated, but there are some clues in it that help narrow things down.
The building on the far left was occupied for many years by the house agents Watson & Sons, who rented the ground floor shop to the jeweller J.J. Grant in 1922, giving us a starting date. The gold clock on the front of Northern Goldsmiths was installed in 1935, which closes the timeframe. So the late 1920s would be a reasonable guess for the date of the black and white photo.
The recent widening of New Bridge Street gives us a better view of the Northern Goldsmiths building, on the corner of Blackett Street and Pilgrim Street. It was built in 1892 by a property developer and Newcastle councillor called Thomas Cooke, who bought and demolished a drapery shop on the spot that was owned by the Mayor of Newcastle.
It was a speculative build, but Cooke soon found tenants. The upper floors were taken by the photographer Richard Emerson Ruddock, whose Grand Studio was reputedly the largest and most lavish in the country. He specialised in portraits of local dignitaries and the landed gentry, and would have found plenty of customers in the shop below.
This was occupied by the Goldsmiths & Silversmiths Company, giving the building its name, Goldsmiths Hall. They became known as Northern Goldsmiths and are still there today, the business uses the whole building and has expanded into the one next door.
The YMCA can be seen in the distance behind the tram in the black and white photo, but is absent from the colour one. The building was demolished in 1973 at the YMCA’s own request. They had built new premises on John Dobson Street and asked the Council to knock their old building down, instead of incorporating it into the shopping centre, as had originally been planned.
Northern Goldsmiths still dominates the corner as it did in the 1920s, although the variety of traffic has changed dramatically. The trams and horse-drawn carts of the first photo have gone and the newly widened road is mostly used by buses, but the black and white scene is instantly recognisable a century later.