City street transformed by shopping centre 'of the future'

WE step out into the Newcastle city centre of the late 1960s and find ourselves looking westward along Blackett Street.

- By DAVID MORTON

The street was built between 1824 and 1826 by Richard Grainger, following the line of the north section of the old town wall. It was named after a distinguished Novocastrian, John Erasmus Blackett, who was Lord Mayor of Newcastle four times in the late 18th century.

Fast forward to the dawn of the 1970s and change was in the air, with sections of the city centre earmarked for transformation as post-war Newcastle looked to the future. Five and a half decades after our photograph was taken by Laszlo Torday, much of what we see on the right of the image remains, with changes being mostly cosmetic - but what was on the left has gone.

In the early 1970s, the buildings here would be swept away to make way for the giant retail complex which had first been envisaged by Newcastle City Council leader T Dan Smith and his chief planning officer Wilfred Burns a decade earlier.