The first photo was taken in 1901 at the junction of Westgate Road and Elswick Road and shows the Big Lamp. The streetlight was only there for fifteen years, but this part of Newcastle still bears its name. The second photo shows the same view today for comparison.
In 1887 the Newcastle Watch & Lighting Committee agreed to erect a gas lamp at the top of Westgate Hill. It remained there until Newcastle’s horse-drawn trams were replaced with electric ones, when it was decided to light the city’s streets with the electricity generated for these new trams.
A lever was pulled at the tramway’s power station on the evening of February 25th 1902, and Newcastle was illuminated by 150 electric arc lights mounted on top of the tram poles in the middle of the streets. Gas streetlights were now redundant, and the Big Lamp was pulled down. There was a proposal the same year to replace the Big Lamp with a Big Clock, which came to nothing.
The Big Lamp’s name lived on as a stop where passengers were transferred to different trams before completing their journeys to the West End. Westgate Hill proved a formidable obstacle to the early electric trams, and customised versions were needed to tackle the steep incline. Passengers got on these ‘slipper trams’ – named after their slipper braking system – at St John’s Church near the bottom of Grainger Street, and then boarded a ‘normal’ tram at the top of the hill.
This white-knuckle ride terrified the ticket collectors as much as the passengers, which was great for fare dodgers, many of whom were able to jump off at the Big Lamp without paying. Buses ply the same route today instead of trams. But if you ask for the Big Lamp the driver will know exactly where you mean, despite the fact there hasn’t been a big lamp there for well over a century.
There’s another local landmark in the photos, which has a much longer association with the neighbourhood. The Bay Horse Inn is behind the Big Lamp with its owner’s name, Robert Deuchar Ltd, on the front. A building called the Quarry House appears on Isaac Thompson’s map of Newcastle from 1746, which later became the Quarry House Inn. It changed its name to the Bay Horse in the 1830s, shortly before it was demolished.
Much of the stone used in the buildings of Grainger Town was dug out of the ground here, then Buckingham Street was built over the quarry by property developers in the 1840s. A new Bay Horse was included at the end of this terrace facing Westgate Road, the pub you can see in the first photo. The Bay Horse in the second photo was built on the same spot in 1939, and closed down in 1993.