The lower end of Pink Lane is pictured here in 1924, this prime bit of land opposite the Central Station remained undeveloped and covered in advertising hoardings until the 1960s.
Pink Lane was created when the Central Station was built in 1850. Newcastle Corporation had high hopes that Westgate Road would become the town’s principal shopping street—before Northumberland Street had taken off—and Pink Lane was supposed to provide quick access to it from the station.
But the left side of Pink Lane still had remnants of the Town Wall, which created a bottleneck at the lower end, hampering its development. The Corporation tried to rectify this in 1885 by agreeing to the demolition of the Wall and the Gunner Tower, so that the Tyne Improvement Commission could build their headquarters there. That’s the tall building in the photo with the fire escapes.
The Gunner Tower had a tenant called James Cuttriss, a photographer who used it as a studio. He’d already had a run-in with the Corporation when he built a wooden shed next to the tower without planning permission, and he refused to leave the tower when the demolition began. He was eventually ousted when his staff deserted him and his studio was reduced to a pile of rubble.
Cuttriss moved his business into the shed and began selling picture postcards, a common sideline for photographers. Newcastle had six postal deliveries each day back then—people could conduct conversations with each other across the town in much the same way as they would in later years by telephone or email.
Postcards provided a cheap and convenient means of doing this, and the people of Newcastle bought vast numbers of them. Picture postcards were also popular with visitors arriving in the city from the Central Station, so Cuttriss had a good spot for his business. However, his wares got him in trouble with the authorities again.
In November 1904, the police seized 21 obscene prints from his shop – he’d been charging customers a penny to look at them. He appeared before Newcastle Police Court, agreed not to do it again, and was ordered to pay ten shillings in costs. He died in 1912 at the age of 73, and his business was taken over by a pair of photographers called Crowe & Bell.
They occupied the shop in 1924 when the photo was taken—although curiously enough, Cuttriss’s name is still on the side of it. The site was eventually developed in 1963, when Gunner House was built there.
Part of the Gunner Tower has been preserved on Pink Lane and has a commemorative plaque, but it’s not something James Cuttriss would have recognised. An archaeological survey in 1964 concluded that this semi-circular structure is probably a fake, created in 1885 with rubble left over from the demolition of the tower.