Where was William in Trimdon?

“The house was condemned, boarded up, no electric, no water, when my mam and dad broke in because she was pregnant with my older brother, Dennis, and they had nowhere else to go,” says Brenda, who now lives in Trimdon Village. “They were squatting in the house until the National Coal Board put some electricity and water on for them.

“My brother was born there, so was my sister Ann, and so was I. I was three, and Dennis eight, when we moved up to Jasmine Crescent in Trimdon Village.

“All I can remember is looking at the pitheaps from the house, but that’s about it.”

So where was William Street? Some people have told Brenda it was part of the village front street; some others have said it was off it somehow. Can anyone help?

The difficulty here is that so much of Trimdon Grange was demolished from the 1950s to the 1970s. In Memories 306, we showed a fantastic Edwardian postcard view of the thriving front street, lined with houses. The photographer was looking north on the B1278, known as Salter’s Lane, towards the Dovecote Inn which stood beside the railway level crossing, opposite Trimdon Grange colliery.

The colliery, where Brenda’s father and grandfather worked, was sunk in 1845 beside the Ferryhill to Hartlepool railway. It worked irregularly and unprofitably until it was bought in 1880 by Walter Scott of Newcastle, who invested heavily in it, causing a boom in the area.

In fact, two types of boom. Firstly, there was a population boom with many of the terraces on the postcard springing up as at the colliery increased to 700. This caused a pub boom, as in this little stretch, there was the Welsh Harp, named in honour of the thirsts of the Welshmen who sank the pit, the Colliery Inn and the Dovecote Inn.

The second type of boom was, of course, the Trimdon Grange explosion of February 16, 1882, in which 74 men and boys lost their lives (as Memories 70 told in 2012).

The colliery went into decline in the late 1930s, although it continued to employ hundreds of men in its coking ovens into the 1960s. The last shift finished on February 16, 1968, and left behind was the largest pitheap in Durham, 150ft high, towering over the terraces of the Grange (today's front cover shows the heap dwarfing the village in August 1969).

Pitheap and terraces were gradually removed during the 1970s, and now the only building on our Edwardian postcard which obviously survives is the curious Dovecote Inn.

It may have been a farmhouse/hostelry long before the colliery boom, and it was certainly rebuilt at the end of the 19th Century in a very distinctive style – our postcard suggests that one of its turrets, which now ends at the eaves, once had a cupola on top of it.

The Dovecote is so distinctive that it gets a mention in Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s 1953 guide to the best architecture in the county. Pevsner says that it was “a very odd early 20th Century design, possibly modified from a late Georgian building, standing alone now that the colliery village has gone”.

If you have any information on the whereabouts of William Street, or about the Dovecote or Trimdon Grange in general, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk