New book tells the story of 2,000 years of Bishop Auckland's buildings

The book, illustrated with colour pictures that show Bishop in its best light, tells the story of 2,000 years, of how it expanded from a small two-row village into a bishop’s seat of power and became a busy market town before transforming once more into a railway hub with its own industrial quarter that made it the capital of the coalfield.

As the 1969 Bishop Auckland Official Guide and Industrial Handbook boasted, the town was “without doubt, the principal shopping centre for the whole of south-west Durham”. It was a place of shops, pubs, hotels, cinemas, theatres and even an ice skating rink.

The book is called Bishop Auckland: The growth of a historic market town, and it is by three Historic England researchers: Clare Howard, Jayne Rimmer and Jules Brown. It is published as the town as just beginning to write a new chapter of its history as it transforms itself once more into a place for heritage tourists.

Flicking through the book, here are 11 historic snippets that caught our eye:

Newgate Street follows the path of the Roman road of Dere Street. Picture courtesy of Historic England

1. Bishop Auckland grew up on the Roman road leading to the fort at Binchester. Perhaps the settlement of Weardseatle – meaning a guarded seat above the Wear – became the location of the bishop’s palace, with the town’s first two streets nearby. They were Fore Bondgate and Back Bondgate, the home of bondsmen who were tied to the bishop.

The book says: “The survival of the mediaeval layout of the town – particularly the convergence of the main routeways within the market place, vestiges of early village tenement plots and the juxtaposition of the town with the bishops’ manor, which had been preserved for over 800 years – is remarkable and remains easily readable today.”

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2. A chapel in the market place dates back to at least 1391, although the existing Church of St Anne was built in the 1840s.

The book says: “The marketplace was the focal point of the town, holding a weekly market on Thursdays in addition to two annual fairs for the sale of cattle, sheep, swine and horses. At the centre of the wide, open space was a covered Market Cross standing between Fore Bondgate and the church. It took the form of a market hall with shops and tollbooth and it was probably similar to the one at Barnard Castle. Due to decay, it was replaced in 1797 with a market house located in a new square tower added to the chapel of St Anne. The town's stocks were probably positioned near to the western end of the new tower, along with the public pant (or fountain) which supplied drinking water piped from Auckland Castle Park.”

3. Without an official town hall, Shepherd’s Inn, with its large meeting rooms, in Fore Bondgate – now Sam Zair’s café (above) – became one of the most prominent buildings in the town. “It boasted a lead-covered roof terrace from which guest were able to view the Auckland racecourse on the north bank of the River Wear,” says the book.

Then it adds: “To the rear of the building, running below Finkle Street, was an interesting feature known locally as the Doctor's Tunnel. Local lore has it that a doctor who held a surgery at the Shepherd’s Inn requested that his poorer patients waited in the tunnel to be seen, while the wealthier patients entered by the main entrance on Fore Bondgate.”

The tunnel only disappeared about 50 years ago, and people remember it as a dank and haunted place.

4. The arrival of the railways from 1843 changed the nature of Bishop Auckland as seven lines eventually converged on the town. Not that everyone was happy about this. For instance, in 1885 the Bishop Auckland & Spennymoor Branch Railway was built across the edge of Auckland Park.

The book says: “Bishop JB Lightfoot requested that the bridge carrying the driveway to Auckland Castle over the new line should be built wide enough so that he could not see the railway, which he considered a blot on his landscape, when travelling by road between Bishop Auckland and Durham.”

5. As the town spread out towards the station, new industries moved in. One of the first was Lingford Gardiner and Company who set up in Railway Street in 1861 to repair colliery locomotives and build pithead gear.

“By 1894,” says the book, “the Lingfield Gardiner and Co site included iron and brass foundries, machine and fitting shops, engine erecting shops, a pattern shop and store, forges and a boiler shop. In the 1890s they also expanded into the manufacture and design of bicycles, patenting a model called the Rational Umpire Spring Framed Cycle (above). The company operated until 1931.”

St Anne's Church with the Town Hall alongside. Picture: English Heritage

6. As Bishop Auckland grew in the middle of the 19th Century, so it needed a suitable town hall, which was built in the early 1860s. “The unusual multi-purpose town hall combined a covered market, shops and Turkish baths on the ground floor with office and lecture rooms above,” says the book. “It is a fine and imposing building built in the gothic revival style with northern French and Flemish influences.”

The fabulous Yorkshire Penny Bank in Newgate Street. Picture: Historic England

7. Bishop was once bursting with banks. The Bishop Auckland Savings Bank was the first, in 1860, and it is now the mining art gallery. Opposite it was the Backhouses branch, built in 1871 by Darlington architect GG Hoskins and it is now part of the Spanish gallery. Down Newgate Street, an empty grey stone building still says “Lloyds Bank” over the door. It is opposite what the book calls the “eclectic and polychromatic York City & County Bank”, latterly HSBC but now abandoned. It has a lovely Arts and Crafts style drainhead on it, with the date “1901”. But best of all is a third empty bank nearby. “The Yorkshire Penny Bank is constructed of dressed stone in a mixture of baronial, Tudor and Elizabethan styles,” says the book. “The corner turret dominates this area of Newgate Street and incorporates its construction date (1898) and the date when the Yorkshire Penny Bank was established (1859).” It is an impressive building. Will it be brought back to life?

8. There are so many fabulous, but fading, buildings in Newgate Street. Specsavers, (above) on the corner with Victoria Avenue, was once The Royal George Hotel. “It was described in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer in August 1876 as one of the largest hotels in the town, containing a dining room, coffee room, sitting room, smoke room and commercial room and 50 bedrooms, with stabling for 30 horses, coach houses and a lawn behind,” says the book.

Newgate Street in 1953, with Woolies on the left and the King's Hall Picture House on the right. Picture courtesy of Tom Hutchinson

9. Although Doggarts dominated the Market Place, most other major chains were to be found in Newgate Street. “In 1922, Woolworths opened a new shop in No 84, their 116th store in the country,” says the book. “They were viewed by many town councils as a desirable new employer, and their shops were regarded as a great draw to the High Street. The two storey design is typical of their stores at this time of rapid expansion, with a salesroom on the ground floor and a storeroom above. The store was modernised and reopened in December 1960 with a bold new shop front boasting a bank of four metal framed doors flanked by small display windows, known as ‘see-through shop fronts’.” Now Boyes occupies the store, but you can still see through the see-through shop front.

The former Woolies in Newgate Street with its "see through shop front"

The old cinema in Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland, in 1963 before it was converted into a supermarket

10. Bishop was the coalfield’s capital of entertainment, and the first purpose-built cinema was the King’s Hall Picture House in Newgate Street, built in 1914. “It was an innovative, mixed-use scheme which contained a curving arcade of five shops leading to the picture hall at the rear of the block, backing onto Kingsway,” says the book. “It showed silent films as well as having a stage for live variety performances, a library, ballroom and restaurant.”

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11. But it wasn’t just cinemas. The Olympia Skating Rink opened in Railway Street in 1909. “It was advertised as the finest skating rink surface in the district’ with a rock maple floor, four roller skating sessions a day, a cafe serving afternoon teas and music provided by a military band. Demonstrations were given by a Professor P Hall, ‘the world's renowned teacher of scientific and ornamental skating’. By 1912 it also operated as a music hall and hosted Saturday night boxing matches. It later became a billiard hall and then a motor garage but has now been demolished.

The book is crammed full of more snippets about the buildings that make up the character of the town and which, hopefully, are on the verge of regeneration because many of them look rather forlorn now.

The book costs £12 and is available from the Liverpool University Press site: just put “Bishop Auckland” in the search box at the top of the home page and it will come up under “books”.

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