Shilling House

Many people will pass this strange fortress-like house, brazenly bold amidst the humdrum 1930's semis on the bus into town, standing proud. A piece of art deco architecture ahead of its time as a tester on the West Road, complete with crenelations and rectilinear windows and an apparently astoundingly structural garden to boot at the back as this line drawing from Andrew Cadey Architectural Illustrations demonstrates!

A house constructed from concrete, and just shy of 100 years old, the Shilling House was developed as a demonstration house for the Newcastle Daily Chronicle in 1925. Modern in appearance, the house, designed by Michael Bunney and Clifford Makinns, is considered to be one of the earliest examples of modernist architecture in the UK and was built to extol the virtues of building with the nonconformist properties of reinforced concrete.

However, in 1925 a major mining disaster befell the West End of the city when 38 men and boys were drowned and poisoned in a horrific accident at The Montague Pit. The unfortunately named Paradise Pit nearby flooded the Montague, killing the miners outright. Hundreds of mourners lined the streets in Elswick to pay tribute to the men and boys killed in the tragic disaster, seen in these images from The Evening Chronicle newspaper.

The families of these men were grief stricken. Many wives and mothers were only able to identify their loved ones through recognising sewn-on buttons or patches on the men's trousers as they were hauled out of the darkness. Families were plunged into huge financial difficulty, many fearing for their homes, however, an imaginative way to alleviate this angst and offer support to the wives and families came from the proprietors of the Newcastle Chronicle who decided to raffle the Shilling House to provide financial assistance for the families.

A ticket to enter the competition was one shilling (5p in modern money) hence being known as the Shilling House and was by Mrs Margaret Hayes.

I pass this house often on the way to work and visited it with my mam as a child. She had a work colleague who lived there. I remember being slightly terrified of the de rigueur deep purple walls and open-plan staircase. We just had magnolia woodchip!