Newcastle's fabled Paddy's Market did exist

Newcastle's fabled Paddy's Market did exist - and this is where it took place

Generations of Tynesiders have used the phrase 'Paddy's Market' to describe a place or situation that is untidy or chaotic.

Back on September 7, 1915, one British soldier wrote to the Evening Chronicle describing the state of the World War I front line in those very terms. In less harrowing circumstances, how many parents over the years have chastised their children for having a bedroom resembling the infamous market?

Paddy's Market did exist in Newcastle - while Glasgow had a well-known market of the same name. Local newspapers from the turn of the last century also reveal there were Paddy's Markets in Ashington, Chester-le-Street, Stanley and elsewhere around the North East.

Our archive photograph shows the Newcastle market at the turn of the last century taking place on the Quayside. Impoverished Tyneside folk would have been familiar with this scene at Sandgate, not far from where the Millennium Bridge arches gracefully over the River Tyne today.

Cast-off clothes, shoes, ties, boots, ribbons and bows were sold or bartered for here every Saturday morning. Hard-pressed folk in the Victorian and Edwardian eras weren’t just able to nip up to Primark or Marks & Spencer for an item of new clothing when they needed it. Old clothes were recycled and would be worn again and again.

The modern-day site of the former Paddy's Market, Newcastle Quayside (Newcastle Chronicle)

For most people, fashion and image weren’t even a consideration - but survival and keeping warm was. The 1898 painting Paddy's Clothes Market, Sandgate, by Ralph Hedley, which is held by Newcastle's Laing Art Gallery, vividly conveys the poverty that was commonplace at the time.

This market for second-hand clothes is believed to have been started in the early years of the Victorian age by Irish people brought over to break a Tyneside miners’ strike. In its earliest days, it is said clothes would be laid out on straw, on upturned crates, or on the old Town Wall. The influx of poor Irish continued during the 19th century, making the Quayside and its cheap tenements their home – and Paddy’s Market, a place they got their clothes.

In 1960, at a time when there were unfounded rumours that the market might close, traders told how generations of their families had worked there. One trader reckoned the market had existed for 100 years, another for 175 years, and another "for centuries". One told the Chronicle: "If they were to close this market, a lot of poor people would suffer badly."

In the early 2000s, one man told the Chronicle of his memories of working at Paddy’s Market in 1967. “It was on its way out even then,” he recalled. “There were only about 12 stalls on the Quayside, all selling mostly clothes.

“I was doing it for a couple of years. I used to empty houses in those days and you would get garments and bits and pieces. The people who would come for stuff were destitute really. They had nothing. We used to sell shirts for half a crown (12 and a half pence in today’s money).”

He added: “I once sold a suit to an Irish lad, a navvy, for £2. He went downstairs to the toilets on the Quayside and he put it on, and he looked a treat. I said 'here’s a shirt to go with it, free'. But he wouldn’t take it. They had nothing but they were proud people.

“If you made £12-£14 from about 7am until midday, when we packed up, it meant you had had a good morning. Some would just be selling off an orange box with a few clothes on it, or even a box of rags. It was just people trying to make a few quid. They reckon before the war there were 20 or 30 times more stalls than in my day.”

The Paddy’s Market tradition seems to have tailed off during the 1970s as real grinding poverty gradually became a thing of the past. Newcastle, of course, once hosted – and continues to host – a whole range of markets: Grainger, Bigg, Green, Cattle, Groat, Fish, Cloth and more. One or two remain, the rest have vanished. The Quayside still hosts a popular weekly market every Sunday.

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