Echo Memories: Among the inferno of Bakehouse Hill's ovens

All this happened in Darlington Market Square in 1594, as Echo Memories told last week.

In very olden times, the Market Square stretched from Houndgate to Priestgate - a huge open space bordered by High Row to the west and the Skerne to the east. Gradually, over the centuries, buildings and then streets encroached around the edges of the Market Square.

One of the last encroachments was Bakehouse Hill - where the baker kept his dungheap.

Buildings here were probably started by squatters, who saw the empty patch of land, moved on to it and erected a temporary shelter which slowly grew into a permanent house.

In 1741, a court case decided that no more buildings could spring up around Bakehouse Hill because too much common land was being eaten up by the developers.

This ruling seems to have emboldened those already on the hill to make their properties more permanent, because on September 12, 1780, the Newcastle Chronicle announced that "all those newly-erected tenements and shops, situated on the Bakehouse Hill" were up for auction.

The hill was originally known as Smithie Hill, and where there is a blacksmith there is a fire which can be used for baking. Until about 1820, the bakehouse was probably on the churchyard corner of Bakehouse Hill where the Pennyweight pub stands today.

The Pennyweight's cellars are rumoured to be the old ovens, and the word "pennyweight", which the pub took in 1982, is derived from baking. This was a public bakehouse and, in the days before every home had a cooker, anyone could bring their pie or loaf to the bakehouse for baking. They would hand over their pie, pay for its baking according to its weight (hence pennyweight) and a little flag would be stuck in it so you knew which was yours.

About 1820, the bakehouse moved to the other corner, opposite the Covered Market. The ovens were beneath where T Pease had his wine shop for most of the last century.

Two ovens protruded under the Market Square. One was where large vats of pease pudding and brawn perpetually boiled (and probably innards, too).

The second was where the bread and pies were cooked - so deep and unventilated, it must have been a veritable inferno.

In an early piece of health and safety legislation, an Act of Parliament in 1875 closed down underground bakeries which had ovens under public thoroughfares. This was the end of baking in Darlington's Bakehouse Hill.

How the town centre was saved

In the 1960s and 1970s, a variety of hideous plans to destroy the character of Darlington's town centre were proposed in the name of progress. Architect Ian Dougill was one of the leaders of the resistance movement.

BOTH the Shepherd Plan and the Tornbohm Plan, which featured in Echo Memories on November 13, were thwarted by the opposition of townspeople and those with an affection for Darlington who united to take on the council.

In 1970, the council changed political hue, but both Conservative and Labour administrations were equally culpable and keen on the plans.

Yet, for the townspeople, it was always touch and go, a case of dedicated, unpaid volunteers standing against whatever big guns the council and developers could muster. At stake was the very identity of the town that had evolved over hundreds of years.

By the time of the Shepherd Plan public inquiry, in March 1971, the development appeared to be unstoppable.

We formed the Market Place Conservation Group to gather together the opposition, gain publicity and prepare evidence to present to the inquiry.

Articles and letters were placed in the local and national Press and professional journals. Expert societies and individuals were enlisted in an attempt to expose the true nature of the proposed development.

The sustained effort culminated in thousands of protest signatures being handed in to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in London.

The Shepherd Plan failed on a technicality - it required the demolition of Bennet House, one of Darlington's finest Georgian buildings and a listed building - but the intense scrutiny of the inquiry revealed just how grossly damaging it would be to the town centre.

The crux of the opposition argument was that a development on this scale overwhelmed any sense of historical continuity.

Round two was the public inquiry into the Tornbohm Plan in June 1973, which, although it redressed some of the excesses of the Shepherd Plan, still involved demolition and rearrangement of open spaces on a drastic scale.

Just before the inquiry began, the conservation group asked the Housing Ministry to do a new survey around the Market Square of surviving old buildings. The survey was the key moment, because several more buildings were listed, which made the Tornbohm Plan impossible.

By now, the mood in the country was changing, swinging away from brutal redevelopments towards sympathetic regeneration - ideas like placing developments behind existing street frontages, as both the Dolphin Centre and the Cornmill Centre show can be successful.

Darlington council has never acknowledged the debt it owed to those who fought and defeated the plans of 1971 and 1973, even when it received a Civic Trust Award for the restoration of the Covered Market and the Old Town Hall.

This award brought a wry smile of satisfaction to those who had campaigned in the 1970s, because without them there would have been no market or market square upon which to bestow such an honour.

The last round in Darlington's 20-year struggle was the final stage of the inner ring road, which would have connected Bondgate with Victoria Road. It came to public inquiry in 1989 and the case for the road was put by Durham County Council, which in those days was the highways authority.

The Department of the Environment inspector's report in 1990 forcibly rejected the proposal - it was the first time a road had been turned down on purely historic and environmental grounds - and marked an end to an era where so many townscapes had been harmed by insensitive development throughout the country.