CRADOCK STREET in Bishop Auckland is like Westbrook Villas in Darlington. It doesn’t look much until you turn into it and then you find an amazing collection of late Victorian villas.

Cradock Street is off Cockton Hill Lane, and, at first, it looks like a typical terrace, with front doors onto the pavement, but then it opens out into a dozen or so villas, their two-tone brick architecture locked away behind fences, front gardens and beautiful mature trees.

Cradock Street, off Newgate Street in Bishop Auckland, begins as a typical terrace

John Heslop grew up in Westlea Avenue, which is a turning off Cradock Street, so he knew it well.

“In my day, Cradock Street ended at a pedestrian crossing over the Bishop Auckland to Barnard Castle railway,” he says. “Many happy hours were spent trainspotting and placing lumps of coal and coins on the rails to be flattened.

“Cradock Street was gas lit, the columns being staggered on opposite sides of the street with pitch black areas in between. Wolf Cub meetings were in the Baptist Chapel on Cockton Hill Road and, walking home on dark nights, I followed a zig-zag route between the gas lamps.”

Cradock Street then becomes tree-lined and populated by late Victorian villas

He remembers that the villas of Cradock Street were home to doctors, a headteacher and a motor dealer. Milburns the butchers had a large property with big grounds here.

In centuries gone by, the Cradock family – only one d – were a big deal in Bishop Auckland and beyond.

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The Reverend Joseph Cradock, vicar of Gainford, was related to them. A notoriously unpopular cleric, in 1603, he built the magnificent Gainford Hall, but he was arrested mid-service in Durham Cathedral by his enemies, and it seems likely he was murdered by his own wife, who despised him as much as anyone.

In 1603, Anthony Cradock and his servant, Michael Langstaffe, were imprisoned for assaulting the Bishop’s Bailiff, at South Church.

In 1619, Joseph Cradock was referred to as the Bishop of Durham’s Vicar-General, and in 1628 a Joseph Cradock was made a governor of Bishop Auckland Grammar School.

And between 1648 and 1672, William Cradock was one of two men in Bishop known to have issued their own coins.

After Charles I was executed and Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians took over running the country, coins with the ex-king’s head on them were frowned upon, so trusted local people took to issuing their own brass tokens which could be exchanged in their area for goods worth a farthing or halfpenny or perhaps even a penny.

Thousands of pieces of this “private money” were issued across the country, some traders even minting heart-shaped tokens.

In Bishop Auckland, Michael Stobart struck coins which still had the king’s head on them whereas William Cradock’s tokens bore his coat-of-arms.

The villas near the bottom of Cradock Street in Bishop Auckland

By 1672, Charles II had regained the throne. He issued his own coins with his face on them, and he began cracking down on the local currencies.

The Cradocks then fade from the history of Bishop Auckland, although a field off Cockton Hill Lane continued to be known as “Cradock’s Close” until it had Cradock Street built on it in the early 1870s.