Blackies Valley, or Little Dene, almost filled in

Image: © Chris Morgan Taken: Unknown

The Little Dene, sometimes known as Blackies Valley, formed the boundary between the City and County of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Gosforth in the County of Northumberland until local government reorganisation in 1973 brought Gosforth into Newcastle, part of the new Tyne and Wear. The houses on the left are on Rectory Road in Gosforth, all built in the 1950's. On the right are terraced houses, mostly Tyneside flats, at the bottom of Newlands Road in Newcastle probably built in the early 1920's - later than most of the rest of the pre-WW1 High West Jesmond estate. At the bottom of Newlands is a bungalow that had just been built on part of the land that had belonged to The Tyneside Direct Supply Aerated Water Company Limited (the company founded in 1931 and wound up 1981) - the pop factory. As kids we could buy ice lollies from their office. Door to door deliveries of pop were made to all areas from this small site behind the houses. On bonfire night we'd collect broken wooden pop bottle crates to make a bonfire in the valley (before it was filled in) in the foreground. The traditional bonfire carried on for many years on the more sanitised flat area - until health and safety considerations put a stop to it. The picture was taken from Lodore Road, at the bottom of Albemarle Avenue. The valley had been culverted and filled in by this time and top soil was about to be spread over the surface. Today you can hardly see the houses on Rectory Road for the trees that have grown up. I remember clambering on the scaffolding as some of those houses were built. There had been allotments on that side of the valley previously, the last two or three on the steeply sloping sides of the valley surviving until shortly before it was filled in. This is now a grassy play area

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