It was reported on 20 January that after the building has lain empty for 16 years, a £4.6mn lottery grant has been awarded to assist with the redevelopment of Newcastle’s historic Keelmen’s hospital, which was built to house keelmen on the River Tyne in the 18thcentury. The hospital is an important building as it is Grade II* listed.
The story of a building of this historic building is now to have a new chapter written having been “considered the most at-risk structure in Newcastle, with the announcement of £4.6mn lottery money to convert it into affordable housing”.
Others across the UK are said to be watching the ambitious project closely, as they too deal with the problem of what to do with derelict, but still important listed buildings.
Newcastle City Council is managing the project in partnership with the Tyne & Wear Building Preservation Trust. Newcastle City Council is said to be “matching the money coming from the National Lottery Heritage Fund
People lived in the building for over 300 years from when it was opened for sick keelmen and their families until closing as a student accommodation in 2009.
Who were the keelmen?
So what did Waterman or Keelmen actually do? It has been noted that Watermen were the vital second link in a three stage chain for the transportation of coal.
Once the coal had been mined, it was brought by coal waggons to loading staiths on the banks of the River Tyne, drawn by horses over wooden rails or waggonways, until the invention of the steam railways by George Stephenson in the early 19th century. Indeed it was the technology of the wooden horse-drawn waggonways which the later steam railway innovators were building upon. Dunston Staiths can still be viewed today and are an excellent example of such staiths.
At the staiths, the keelmen loaded the coal onto their keel boats. It is reported that, “until the late 18th Century, Keels had open holds and the cargo of coal was simply dropped into it. This was laborious to unload, however, and gradually a wooden cargo structure appeared on their decks which held the 21.2-tons of coal which constituted an agreed load”.
The keelmen then sailed their boats down river, which at time was quite shallow, to the mouth of the Tyne. Here Sailing Colliers would be waiting, lying moored in deeper water and the keelmen would load the coal onto the colliers. This job usually took about an hour and a half for the keelmen to do. Once the ships had enough coal in them, they took it to other parts of the country, especially London and also abroad.
More on the Keelmen’s Hospital
The beginnings of the Keelmen’s hospital can be traced back to the late 17th century, when working families had very little infrastructure to support them and this was most needed by families who had lost their main breadwinner, if they lived in poverty or destitution. Consequently, the parish or the wider community had to offer charity, in the absence of any form of welfare state.
So it was that “in 1700, the Keelmen petitioned to the town for a parcel of land to erect a hospital for their own, self funded. By hospital, really it meant an almshouse where the sick, destitute or widowed were provided accommodation and nourishment through a pot raised by fellow keelmen. The order granting this land was provided in October of this year and construction was completed in 1701”.
The Keelmen’s Hospital was built in 1701, but was not as a hospital in a way that we would recognise today, but rather it was an almshouse. Almshouses provided shelter and food and shelter for the poor of Newcastle, but the Keelmen’s Hospital was set up especially for sick and retired keelmen and their families.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the building provided shelter, medical care and food for sick or retired keelmen and their families. However, as the coal trade declined on the Tyne into the twentieth century, the hospital began to take in residents with other occupations, such as mariners and sailors.
It is also noted that, “from the late nineteenth century onwards, the building was converted into tenement housing for the city’s poor. This continued into the mid-twentieth century until the living conditions there were deemed inadequate. In the 1970s, there were plans to convert the building into sheltered accommodation for the elderly, but these plans did not materialise. Then, from 1989 – 2009, the building was converted into student accommodation for what was then Newcastle Polytechnic, now Northumbria University”.
An important part of our North East heritage
This is good news that the Keelmen’s Hospital is to be converted into affordable housing and it is good news on two counts.
Firstly, it will help to protect an important part of our local heritage on Tyneside. Not only will it help to save part of our mining heritage, without which the region would be a very different place today, but it is also an important reminder of the way that North East working people in the past worked together to look after each other. We sorely need this kind of reminder today. Secondly, it is also good that the hospital is to be converted into affordable housing. At a time when such housing is in short supply, it is reassuring to see that in Newcastle, such housing is being provided to those who need it. Just as alms were provided for the sick keelmen and the members of their families when the building was first built back in 1701.
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