There is no trace today of High Friar Street, the ancient lane that for centuries threaded through the heart of Newcastle. It became one of the many casualties of the all-enveloping Eldon Square Shopping Centre.
The Erasure of a Historic Lane
The well-trodden route was simply erased and buried beneath thousands of tons of concrete, steel and glass. The early 1970s redevelopment swept away large swathes of Blackett Street, Newgate Street and Percy Street, along with the Green Market and two-thirds of the Georgian terraces at old Eldon Square, whose name the giant new retail complex would inherit.
High Friar Street began at Newgate Street, bisected Clayton Street, and emerged at Blackett Street - roughly where the modern-day Grey's Monument entrance to Eldon Square is now located. Old maps show it running almost parallel to Blackett Street - though it actually predated it by several centuries.
Origins in the 13th Century
Its origins lie in the 13th century, its name derived from the nearby Franciscan friary on Pilgrim Street. The narrow lane formed a pair with Low Friar Street, which sat slightly to the south and survives today. Near the modern Eldon Square entrance once stood the Ficket Tower - part of Newcastle's medieval town walls - demolished in 1825.
Beneath it was one of the city's many water pumps, or "pants", where local people gathered to fill pitchers and exchange gossip. High Friar Street's greatest claim to fame is as the birthplace, in 1797, of Richard Grainger - the visionary builder responsible for much of the elegant cityscape that defines central Newcastle today.
19th and 20th Century Life
By the 19th century, the modest lane was lined with warehouses, workshops, houses and a couple of pubs. Fast-forward to the 20th century, and archive photographs show a slightly run-down street of small independent shops, cafés, workshops and drinking holes.
One such bar was the Crown and Sceptre, which at one time had been owned by late-Victorian era boxer Will Curley. A 1968 Evening Chronicle eating out review described the place as packed with "gorgeous typists" enjoying a lunchtime menu of toasted sandwiches, hamburger and egg, rump steak with crisps, and even "canned soup for two" - all this despite calling High Friar Street a "rather forbidding alley in the shadow of Grey's Monument".
Another long-running advert during the 1960s was for "Steve Smith: The shooting man's shop" trading at number 42, offering guns, cartridges and air rifles, with "advice freely given on shooting matters" - thankfully clarified elsewhere as clay pigeon shooting.
Legacy of Eldon Square
The opening of Eldon Square Shopping Centre in 1976 signified a dramatic transformation of the city centre, for better or worse. Half a century on, memories of the older, more characterful Newcastle it replaced - streets like vanished High Friar Street - are slowly fading into the city's buried past.
