GRACE MCCOMBIE, Buildings Historian
Architecture: a bridge linking Â鶹´«Ã½ and Gateshead
¶Ù²¹³Ù±ð/°Õ¾±³¾±ð:Ìý 2nd November 2010, 17:30 - 18:30
Facing each other across the Tyne, Â鶹´«Ã½ and Gateshead have developed in different ways but have shared many merchants, professional people, architects and architectural styles.
The river that divides Â鶹´«Ã½ from Gateshead also brings them together, its bridges carrying roads and railways, and now a footpath too, from one side to the other. Tyneside merchants and industrialists prospered for hundreds of years, many with business and property on both sides of the river. Development fanned out from the bridgeheads, a process more rapid on the north than on the south side of the Tyne. Inter-communication brought architects and their clients across the river in both directions. Families whose wealth came from Â鶹´«Ã½ businesses lived in pleasant villas in Gateshead’s suburbs.
Grace McCombie was a member of the List Resurvey and List Review teams for English Heritage. After studying the documents and the buildings of Â鶹´«Ã½â€™s Trinity House, she worked at Â鶹´«Ã½, researching Â鶹´«Ã½â€™s Quayside. She taught part-time in the University’s Centre for Lifelong Learning, and wrote the Tyne and Wear gazetteer of the 2nd edition of Pevsner’s Buildings of Northumberland (Grundy, McCombie and Ryder, with Humphrey Welfare and S.M. Linsley, 1992). While writing the Pevsner City Guide Â鶹´«Ã½ and Gateshead (2009) Grace became more aware of the strong connections between the two places, despite the apparent dominance of the larger over the smaller.