Riverside
A wide pathway, suitable for walkers, runners and cyclists stretches for a couple of miles westwards beyond the city centre. Adjacent to this pathway are a number of heritage panels, some works of art, inherited from the Gateshead Garden Festival (1990) and Newcastle Business Park. This part of Newcastle’s and Elswick’s riverside is rich in history, but there is scant evidence for it today beyond the heritage panels and the naming of the streets in Newcastle Business Park.
Armstrong’s Works
Their size, their completeness, their tremendous productive energy, their variety of blast furnaces, foundaries, machine shops and chemical laboratories, teeming with human life, reverberating with the shriek of steam, the clang of hammers, and the whirr of machinery, overhung by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, presents a picture of…
Hydraulic Crane
The origins of the use of hydraulic power go back as far as the seventeenth century but it was William Armstrong who brought hydraulic power back to the fore with his invention of the hydraulic crane. Hydraulic power is the transmission of energy though the use of water or other incompressible fluids. Armstrong experimented with…
Lord Armstrong
William George Armstrong, son of Alderman William Armstrong, corn merchant, was born on November 26th, 1810 at 9 Pleasant Row, Shieldfield, Newcastle. Although trained for the legal profession and practising as a solicitor until the age of 37, his real interest lay in machinery and engineering. As a young man he visited Watson’s Engineering Works…
River Tyne at Elswick
Everywhere from the dancing waters of the harbour to the ebb and flow of the throbbing city industry, resource an expansion, coal staiths, shipyards, engine shops, dry docks, chemical works, forges, electrical lighting laboratories, warehouses, merchants’ offices, steam ships, railway trains, without end, without number from Shields to Scotswood, there is not its like in…
Ships for the World
The name Elswick became synonymous with naval technology and shipbuilding. the opening of Elswock Shipyard, which stood on this site, was the culmination of the creation of an industrial empire. Armstrong entered into shipbuilding by cooperating with C.W. Mitchell’s yard at Walker in the construction of a gunboat for the Admiralty in 1868. This followed…
Armstrong Gun
The Armstrong Gun, the Armstrong Gun,What a wonderful thing is the Armstrong Gun, Sir William’s invention astonisht them all,Wi’ a bolt for a shot instead of a ball.Nae spungin’ or rammin’ or servin’ the vent,Such things are no needed to serve its intent,n a neat little chamber breech end of the bore,Place the powder and…
Scotswood and Elswick
The social significance and the effect upon Newcastle of the employment created by Lord Armstrong on these river banks cannot be overestimated, At its zenith, around the turn of the century, the Elswick and Scotswood works employed over 20,000 people. This workforce together with their families and the many small trades, industries, shops and the…
