This photo was taken in 1880 at the lower end of Westgate Road before it turns left towards the Castle. Every building in the picture was demolished over the following decade, beginning with the Black Bull’s Head on the right, which caught fire three years later.
Westgate Road is one of the oldest streets in the city, running from the Castle to the West Gate in the town wall. The end that approached the Castle was called Bailiff Gate, the most distant building in the photo was standing on the corner of it. Bailiff Gate was pulled down when the railway line next to the Central Station was expanded and Westgate Road now turns where the building with the Dutch gables is on the left of the photo, opposite the horse and cart.
Condemned prisoners were paraded from captivity in the Castle along Bailiff Gate and up Westgate Road to be hanged outside the West Gate, many of these grisly processions would have been witnessed through the windows of the Black Bull’s Head. The pub is listed in the earliest street directory for Newcastle in 1778 but was clearly there a good while before that; the line of the road and the footpath had been bent to accommodate it.
The historian R.J. Charleton gives a first-hand account of this part of Westgate Road when the photo was taken. In his 1883 book ‘Newcastle Town’, he says it was a dirty and squalid place where disreputable characters hung idly about the street corners. “There is too”, he adds, “the strange, low public-house called the Black Bull’s Head, its front wall bulging out over the footpath in a most alarming manner, like some old toper, lingering out in a decrepit and dropsical old age the remnant of a dissipated life.”
A fire broke out in the pub in September of that year which nearly cost the landlord John Eddy his life. He and his family were dragged out of the building in their night clothes by the police and the interior of the building was gutted. That day got even worse for John, he had to make his annual appearance before the licensing magistrates in the afternoon. He was told the pub was being closed down because the building was a danger to the public, based on an inspection before the blaze.
However, the magistrates said they’d renew the licence if it was completely rebuilt. Thomas Till from the Crown & Thistle in the Groat Market had bought the Black Bull’s Head a couple of years previously. He pulled it down and replaced it with the Midland Hotel, which opened in December 1884 with his wife Clarissa as the landlady. The Midland traded until 1985 when local leisure magnate Joe Robertson transformed it into a cocktail bar called Berlins, named after the songwriter Irving Berlin. It has been called Tokyo since 2004.