Croudace St slopes right to left up the hill. In the top right hand corner, Lambton Lodge, the home of Thomas Croudace can be seen. This house is now part of the hospital complex.
The former Red Lion Inn (corner of Morehead St and Newcastle Rd) can be seen in the 1904 photograph, and in the lower photograph.
Site of Electric Light Generating station?
I believe that the empty site in the middle of this picture is the where the generating station for the electric lights in Lambton was located. The generators were situated between Young St (now Newcastle Rd) and High St, in a former quarry. The electric lighting scheme sent the council bankrupt, and the generators were sold off in 1904 and the building housing them demolished. An earlier photo of the generating station from 1890 (below) taken looking north from Young St/Newcastle Rd shows a long thin rectangular building behind it, and I believe this is the same rectangular building that can be seen in the photo above.
Lambton Electric Light Generating Station 1890. Photo by Ralph Snowball. Newcastle Libraries Online Collection 001 001174.
A close up from another photo of Lambton from 1900 (below), looking north, shows buildings that match the photo above.
Location of Lambton electric light generating station.
I have created an annotated version of the panorama photograph with the following streets marked …
High St
Hill St
Young St (Newcastle Rd)
Morehead St
Howe St
Croudace St
Grainger St
Noble St
and the following items of interest marked …
Post Office
Mechanics Institute
Lambton Park Rotunda
Lambton Colliery railway bridges over the tramway and Howe St
Exchange Hotel (now Lambton Park Hotel)
Old Stone House in Howe St
Red Lion Inn
St Johns Church of England
Congregational Church
Site of Lambton Electric Light generating station
Lambton/Jesmond tramway cutting
Lambton Lodge (home of Thomas Croudace)
Lambton Public School
Annotated panorama of Lambton in 1904. Click on image for larger version. (6MB)
Technical note to myself: The annotations were done using Visio 2013, but unfortunately Visio doesn’t handle exporting to raster image formats when there is a large image involved – it just gives a horribly unhelpful “Visio is unable to complete exporting” error message. To get around this, I exported to SVG format, then used the CloudConvert online image conversion site to convert the SVG to a JPG file.
3 thoughts on “Then and Now 10 – Lambton Panorama”
I recently discovered my third great grandfather had the licence for the Red Lion Hotel/Inn briefly back in 1878. I’d actually been curious about that building on the corner as I live in Lambton, and now I know what it is. This family history caper is fascinating. Thank you for your work on this!
This is great work I have seen all these photo’s and also read your work on the old Electricity Station in Lambton, I am very interested in the History of Lambton as some of my family came from Lambton and I worked there for a few years and got to know it well. I grew up in Birmingham Gardens. You have done a great job in putting this all together congratulations.
I recently discovered my third great grandfather had the licence for the Red Lion Hotel/Inn briefly back in 1878. I’d actually been curious about that building on the corner as I live in Lambton, and now I know what it is. This family history caper is fascinating. Thank you for your work on this!
This is great work I have seen all these photo’s and also read your work on the old Electricity Station in Lambton, I am very interested in the History of Lambton as some of my family came from Lambton and I worked there for a few years and got to know it well. I grew up in Birmingham Gardens. You have done a great job in putting this all together congratulations.
Thank you for your kind words.