The then, now and nearly of High Row

Darlington had been like it for a millennium or two. On top of a slope rolling down to the Skerne was the best place in town to live - close enough for convenient water, but high enough to avoid annual floods.

On the slope grew the markets that sustained the town financially and the church, dedicated to St Cuthbert, which sustained it spiritually.

Very little changed - even the building of a town hall to oversee the collection of market tolls and then a covered market were natural progressions.

In fact, the slope on High Row suited the people's purposes pretty well. It was where they sold their animals - horses, cattle, pigs, sheep and geese. The animals' pens could only be erected on open ground - steps and balustrades would have got in the way.

But those were pre-tarmacadam days. Roads were mud. Boggy, sticky mud when it rained; horrible, stinky faeces-ridden mud when it rained after Monday's market.

Little wonder that King James IV, staying in an inn in Tubwell Row in April 1617, peered out of his window, saw the open sewer running down the middle of the muddy road, and dismissed the town as "Darnton in t'dirt".

To ameliorate the road surface, High Row was cobbled in the early 18th Century.

The shape of the stones caused them to be nicknamed "petrified kidneys".

The cobbles didn't, though, alter the slope of High Row. Pressure to do that only came about after February 1878, when the council effectively banned livestock sales in the town centre and opened the cattle market near Bank Top.

The only sale that stayed on High Row was that of the geese. But it wasn't a popular sale.

"Few people have greater esteem than myself for the rich savoury aroma which streams from the roast goose," said the Darlington and Stockton Times (D&ST) in September 1884 in an extremely eloquent article.

"In every other respect, however, I look upon the goose as a mistake in the order of creation.

"Neither ornamental nor particularly useful, except on the table, is this creature; but viewed, heard and smelt from the High Row on any Monday about this time of the year, I think it appears in each characteristic in its very worst aspect.

"This, of course, is not its fault, but its misfortune. It is our misfortune also.

"There is a peculiarity about the smell of a live goose which in the aromatic sphere must be placed at the antipodes of that delightful appetising emanation arising from the goose roasted.

"To the High Row promenader, this smell is most offensive."

He urged that the geese follow the other creatures out of town and, once they were removed, discussions began about re-landscaping High Row.

Discussions lasted at least 15 years, and included a council-sponsored competition in 1897.

A prize of £20 was offered for plans for between "the High and Low Flags". Eight plans were entered. The winner was a Mr Roberts, of St John's Crescent on Bank Top, who entered under the pseudonym of "Labor omnia Vincit" ("Labour conquers all things").

The one plan from this era that survives comes from the pen of James Pigott Pritchett (1830-1911) who, as regular readers will know, was one of the most eminent architects of his day. He built 100 Gothic churches across the North-East (St Laurence at Middleton St George being one of them) and the Arts Centre, in Vane Terrace, Darlington.

Pritchett's plan shows - possibly for the first time - High Row divided into two by a restraining wall.

The D&ST described the plan as inconvenient and objectionable, and made an impassioned plea for the "higgledy-pigglety" cobbles to be relaid.

"They have been trampled with cattle, torn up for gas and water pipes, worn with traffic for generations, and it is questionable if any stones are now in position as originally laid," said the paper.

But such voices of conservatism were shouted down. High Row was changing - not only had the animals gone, but the trams were coming.

Horse-drawn trams had first run unsuccessfully in the town in 1864.

A couple of more permanent routes were run by the Stockton and Darlington Steam Tramway Company from 1880 and, in 1899, the town was granted permission to electrify them and extend the network.

But if electrified trams were to run on cobbley, sloping High Row alongside the horse-drawn traffic of the Great North Road (the old A1 ran along Grange Road, through the centre of town and out via North Road until the motorway arrived in the mid-1960s), the street would have to be redesigned.

The borough surveyor was put on the case, and came up with what we see today - three tiers which appear to be a modification of Pritchett's two-tiered plan.

In May 1900, it was announced that instead of the planned reddy-orangey terracotta, the wall and the steps would be built of purpley-grey granite, from Newry in Ireland.

Another of the borough surveyor's modifications of 1900 were "the underground conveniences opposite the end of Post House Wynd" - extant but no longer operational, covered by incongruous boarding with a model of Locomotion No 1 plonked on top.

The borough surveyor is not named in any contemporary Press reports but, at a guess, he was George Winter - the same surveyor who laid out the terrace in South Park, the paths in North Lodge Park, and who designed all municipal buildings such as schools for 30 years from the turn of the century.

High Row was completed at a cost of about £3,600 during 1901.

Various tram drivers' sheds and bus passengers' shelters have been added and removed over the generations, but the lay-out, the balustrading and the urns have remained for 103 years.

Now the council plans to change all that at a cost of £6.5m, although judging by recent letters pages in The Northern Echo, opposition among townspeople appears to be growing.

Published: 29/09/2004

Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505062.