The Bigg Market is one of the most ancient parts of Newcastle and the pair of merchants’ houses in this photo are its oldest surviving buildings. They were built around 1750 and would have been quite grand in their day, the one on the right was once occupied by a Lord of the Manor.
The area is known far and wide these days for its nightlife but it was once famed for its markets, which had been held here since mediaeval times, attracting buyers and sellers from across Northumberland and Durham. The old Half Moon next door was one of Newcastle’s principal coaching inns with a daily service to London, so this busy part of town would have been a good place for a merchant to live and do business.
The first occupants of the two houses are unknown. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century the taller house on the left was owned by a saddle merchant called James Reid, who had a showroom on the ground floor. The house on the right was owned by Daniel Oliver from 1820, who lived above his grocery shop. A cheesemonger called Alexander Bertram took over James Reid’s premises in the 1840s, his and Daniel Oliver’s descendants were neighbours there for the rest of the nineteenth century, carrying on the same businesses.
We have to jump forward to the late twentieth century to find the most famous occupant of these two old houses. Abdul Latif opened The Rupali Indian restaurant on the first floor of the house on the right in 1977, and was a master of self-publicity. He claimed to serve the hottest curry in the world, which gained him plenty of coverage in the local and national press; and he was teased relentlessly in the pages of Viz, which he took in great humour.
Mr Latif became a Lord in 1994, but this wasn’t in recognition of his services to the curry industry. He dished out £5,500 at an auction for the title of Lord of Harpole, which related to an obscure manor near Ipswich. The Sunday Sun dubbed him “the Poppadom Peer”, and he continued to lord it over the Bigg Market until his death in 2008.