It was built 300 years ago as an almshouse for men who did some of the most backbreaking and dangerous work on the River Tyne.
Most recently it provided fun, if chilly, accommodation for students. Now a new chapter is to be written in the history of a building considered the most at-risk structure in Newcastle, with the announcement of £4.6m lottery money to convert it into affordable housing.
It is an ambitious project being watched closely by others across the UK, grappling with the problem of what to do with important but derelict and difficult listed buildings.
The project is being managed by the Tyne & Wear Building Preservation Trust in partnership with Newcastle city council, which is matching the money coming from the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF).
Keelmen’s hospital is Grade II* listed, just one step down from the Grade I listing held by buildings such as York Minster and Buckingham Palace.
The building, overlooking the Tyne and the Quayside, dates back to 1701, built for retired, sick and often destitute keelmen and their families. Until nearly 20 years ago, people had always lived there, whether it was the keelmen, people living in tenement housing or, until 2009, students.
Keelmen worked on flat-bottomed boats called keels, carrying coal from the banks of the river Tyne to ships too big to sail up the river. This was punishing, under-appreciated work, as depicted by JMW Turner in his great painting Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, currently on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington to Tate Britain for its Turner and Constable exhibition.
Martin Hulse, the trust’s chief executive, said they did an audit of heritage buildings in Newcastle about five years ago and Keelmen’s hospital jumped out as being in most need of saving.
“We are here to rescue heritage at risk, that’s how we get our joy,” he said. “This is a really well-known building but it has been forgotten. You talk to people and they remember it but don’t really know it has been empty for nearly 20 years.”
The plan is to begin work in March and have the first people living in the planned 20 units by Christmas 2027. The feeling is that if it can be done in Newcastle, then why why not elsewhere? Similarly minded authorities and organisations around the UK were watching the progress of the project closely, said Hulse.
The building was paid for by the keelmen themselves, initially giving one penny a tide from the wages of a crew.
The keelmen used the building for about 200 years, with 19th-century residents warned that they were not allowed to have chickens or dogs roaming free. There were a number of rules in place with a one-shilling fine for “being disguised with drink at a funeral”; and a sixpenny fine for any “great rudeness of their wives” or “speaking disrespectfully of his Majesty, or any of the royal family”.
The lease expired in 1899 and the building became tenement housing, with families packed into tiny flats. There was gas but no electricity – even in the 1960s, when a German charity, hearing of the desperate English conditions, offered to pay for a TV room. A lounge was created but there was nowhere to plug in a television.
In 1989 the building was successfully converted into accommodation for students at what was then Newcastle polytechnic, now Northumbria University.
Katie Liddane, who works for the trust, has talked to students who lived there, with many of them remembering the alternating smells of soap and animal bone char from nearby factories.
It was definitely cold, students recall, but they also had fun – including a rave in the courtyard – and many made friendships for life, Liddane said.
Some were convinced the place was haunted, she said. “Students have described certain areas of the building being colder than others and feeling an icy presence walking through you and stuff. But I think you get a lot of that with old buildings, generally. What’s a spectral presence and what is poor heating?”
Students also got a rent reduction if they decorated rooms themselves – the reason one room still has walls painted banana yellow, lime green and postbox red.
Hulse said people often asked why they were not converting the building, from which you can see the Tyne Bridge and the shimmering Glasshouse music centre over the river, for commercial or cultural use. “It just always felt to me that it should be residential,” he said. “When you come here, you can just feel it.”
He was echoed by Helen Featherstone, the director for England, north at the heritage fund, who called it a “hugely significant” project.
“There’s something really important about renovating derelict historic buildings for social housing, it is so much more environmentally friendly than building new properties,” she said. “It’s really important that we can do this and bring disused buildings back to life.”
