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NEWCASTLE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY*

THE THESIS OF A ‘LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY’, which has been so influential in altering traditional periodisation, conceives of the social, political, economic, and cultural developments of the later decades of the seventeenth century, as creating a viable political and social order which largely endured until the 1830s. Contrary to historians, who have been eager to ante-date the changes to the economy and society of Britain associated with an ‘Industrial Revolution’ and have seen the eighteenth century as a preparation for parliamentary reform and extensive urbanisation, it posits a pre-industrial economy that was viable and dynamic in its own right, and a social order which demonstrated considerable cohesion in that, despite acute social tensions, ‘acceptable compromises could be negotiated, compromises which safeguarded the social fabric’.1 Continuity in constitutional and political spheres and in the social hierarchy, rather than stifling economic and cultural change, provided the context for innovation and development. Few towns in Britain better exemplify this than Newcastle, a town which saw little change in its institutions and social fabric, but increased in prosperity and became a thriving cultural centre with a ‘polite society’. Continuity was most basically expressed in the physical town, which remained between 1688 and the 1830s largely confined within its medieval town walls, only cautiously venturing beyond them in the early nineteenth century,2 while the Keelmens’ crowded Sandgate remained the only substantial quarter outside the old boundaries. The walls, themselves, remained intact, if somewhat dilapidated, until, after the 1745 Rebellion, the lingering feeling that they might yet be needed for defence disappeared, and the demolition of the section along the Quayside began in 1763.