The changing face of life in Witton Gilbert

By 1861, when the population had grown to 2,098, this was no longer the case as the growth was largely due to the birth of the colliery village of Sacriston.

Other neighbouring villages also had their impact on Witton Gilbert’s population as many miners came to live in the village. The colliery at Langley Park and Sacriston’s Charlaw Colliery rented houses for miners in Witton Gilbert, while the Bearpark Colliery owners built four streets of 80 houses in the village.

These were located east of Front Street at the bottom of the Clink Bank, where a playing field now stands alongside the village bypass.

This intriguing area was named from an earlier association with gipsies who regularly camped there.

Clink alluded to tin items that gipsies sold from door to door.

The four streets on the clink were demolished after the First World War, owing to subsidence, and many residents moved to Bearpark, while others moved into new estates or what were then overcrowded yards like Best’s Yard adjoining Front Street.

Bearpark Colliery had operated a small drift east of the four streets and operated another across the River Browney nearer to Bearpark.

Another drift, managed by Langley Park Colliery, operated at Kaysburn just west of the village, but there was no actual Witton Gilbert colliery.

Pubs, schools and churches were essential services for expanding villages in 19th century Durham and Witton Gilbert was no exception.

Front Street pubs included the Three Tuns, Witton Gilbert Hotel, Oddfellows Arms, and Black Lion, but only the Travellers Rest and Glendenning Arms stood the test of time.

Brickwork at the gable end of the Travellers Rest suggests this building was an expansion of an earlier structure and the inner bricks look vaguely Elizabethan.

Further west, the Glendenning Arms takes its name from a 19th century proprietor and it seems this pub was once a thatched building.

The thatched roof was blown off in a gale during the 19th century and the dislodged chimney stack apparently added a distinctly sooty flavour to the puddings that Mrs Glendenning calmly served to her guests.

Religion came to Witton in Norman times with the establishment of chapels near the old leper hospital that we noted in a recent Past Times.

One chapel became the parish church in the 1400s but the next churches in Witton did not follow until the 1800s with the opening of two Methodist chapels in Front Street.

Other religious orders were probably represented in the village before that time but Canon Peter Smarte, a staunchly Protestant curate of Witton in the 1620s, fiercely opposed Catholics in the neighbourhood.

Quakers were also wellestablished in Witton Gilbert by the 1700s when a family of Quaker farmers called Mason resided in the village and established a Quaker burial ground.

It stood on the north side of Front Street across from Snook Acres Farm and headstones could still be seen in the early 20th century.

A little school existed in Witton Gilbert from about 1730, followed by a larger National School built in 1845.

The National School was on the south side of the Durham-to-Lanchester road, east of Front Street, near Clink Bank, and was extremely overcrowded.

In 1895, a larger school was built close by. Unfortunately, like the nearby streets, it suffered subsidence and in 1918 it was replaced by a hut, built in the lane called the Coach Road which leads towards the former leper hospital.

The hut and a small Wesleyan schoolroom at the western end of Front Street served the community’s needs until the 1930s when a new school was built in Sacriston Lane.

In 1965, a fire largely destroyed the Sacriston Lane School, forcing pupils to resort to the hut while the damage was repaired.

The present Witton Gilbert Primary School still incorporates parts of the 1930s building that survived the blaze.

One other school that should be mentioned in connection with Witton Gilbert is the Earls House Industrial School for Boys.

Now Earls House Hospital, it was built in 1885 along the main road, south of Witton Gilbert, and was a kind of remand centre for 150 boys educated under strict guidelines.

It became a sanatorium in the 1920s and a hospital in 1953.

Earls House was the name of a farmhouse that occupied land belonging to the Earl of Angus back in the 15th century.

The northward expansion of Witton Gilbert began in the early 1900s with the development of buildings along Back Lane, or Sacriston Lane as it came to be known.

Some older buildings along this street include Tile Shed Cottages that recall a brick and roof-tile factory that once stood nearby.

Housing estates now dominate Witton Gilbert on either side of Sacriston Lane.

The earliest developments occurred from about 1919 with the building of streets at Fair View, Chester Gardens and Hillside that extended northwards towards Rose Lea and the Crescent, that still form the most northerly edge of the village.

In the 1960s and 1970s, estates developed at Norburn Park in the west and in the Whitehouse Farm area, above Front Street, where a private estate has developed with street names like Brookside, Glebeside and Burnside.

I have, incidentally, a connection with this area as my wife grew up in Glebeside.

When she and her family left Witton, a new family called Darwin moved into the house of her childhood. The Darwins lived there for many years before moving on to Seaton Carew and moved ultimately – perhaps via canoe – to Panama where they achieved their share of fame and notoriety.

Streets like Glebeside and Brookside are of course relatively modern streets and it is Sacriston Lane that links the older parts with these later areas of the village. It is Sacriston Lane that has now more or less replaced Front Street as the focal point of Witton Gilbert village.

While Front Street may be home to a farm and the pub Sacriston Lane is the home of the village shop and village school as well as a modern pub and it is this street that clearly represents the most recent stage of Witton Gilbert’s growth and development.