After 153 years, farewell to our Priestgate printing palace

It has moved on to pastures new – for now, at least.

Times change. Technology changes. When the current printing palace was opened in 1917, there was a three course celebratory meal for lords, MPs, mayors and other VIPs in the nearby King’s Head Hotel. Before the starter arrived, an Echo photographer took a group picture of them sitting at their tables, looking hungrily at the camera.

He then dashed back to the new printing palace, developed his film, printed off 100 copies of his picture, dashed back to the hotel and, before the dessert had been served, handed every VIP a hot-off-the-press pin-sharp photographic souvenir (below) of the occasion.

How they must have marvelled at the march of technology! Who would have thought that such speed was possible? What would those VIPs have made of the tech of 100 years later when everyone has a camera – full colour and not boring black and white – in their pocket and spends their whole life zipping pictures – many of them moving – around the world every few seconds.

A fabulous picture looking across from the Echo's first premises over the monumental mason's yard on the corner of Priestgate and Crown Street towards Peases' Mill with St Cuthbert's Church in the background. It looks as if Peases' Mill has just burned down, which would date the picture as 1893

By contrast, the Echo was first printed on a secondhand press in a rented former boot and shoelace factory on the corner of Priestgate and Crown Street in Darlington on January 1, 1870. It’s neighbour on the corner was a monumental mason and the old thread factory looked across the road to Peases’ Mill – Darlington library was not built for another 15 years.

The Echo's first building on Priestgate had once been a boot and shoelace factory

It seems the proprietor of the paper, John Hyslop Bell, who was in the employ of a company of local Liberals including members of the Pease family, had chosen the location so it was close to the General Post Office for quick access to the telegraph network.

It was to this humble factory that the Echo’s second editor, WT Stead, 22, reported on his first day in 1871. His dynamism would establish the paper as a nationally important campaigning voice and one night out in Priestgate, having put the following morning’s paper to bed, he discovered a prostitute crying in the gutter. This inspired him to launch a campaign against child prostitution which led to him being responsible – partially, at least – for the world’s first child protection act which raised the age of consent to 16, as it is today.

A monument to Stead, who died on the Titanic, is outside Darlington library, opposite his old office. It is a cheese press from his old home which is now beneath the Hummersknott estate. He tethered his pony to the press every night after a hard day’s editing – nowadays, of course, such is the advance of technology that the Echo editor no longer travels on horseback but in the back seat of an artificially-intelligent car that drives itself to his home.

The North Star's newspaper palace on Crown Street was designed by Darlington's finest architect, GG Hoskins, and is now a couple of shops opposite Wilko's. With the Echo being just 100 yards away, this was the Fleet Street of Darlington...

With Stead making the Echo such a powerful Liberal influence, the Conservatives countered by, in 1881, opening the North Star newspaper in a purpose-built office about 100 yards from the Echo’s home. Because of the offices’ proximity, this corner of town became known as “the Fleet Street of the north” – well, certainly “of south Durham and North Yorkshire” anyway.

The Priestgate/Crown Street corner which the Echo bought in 1908. Its first office is on the left

As the paper grew, in 1908, the company bought the corner of Priestgate and Crown Street and devised plans to build a true printing palace. Work started in 1914, but ground to a halt when the First World War broke out. Instead, the morning Echo started the Evening Despatch newspaper to bring the latest 24/7 rolling war news to the people from the presses.

The Priestgate palace taking shape on the corner with Crown Street on January 6, 1915. We love the workmen's cabin in the middle of the road on the left

The Priestgate palace taking shape on May 15, 1915

Good progress had been made by the time this picture was taken on August 6, 1915, but wartime shortages delayed the building's completion for two years

The £3,000 palace – the first ferro-concrete building in Darlington – was finally ready for its opening day –September 13, 1917.

The VIPs and 200 staff, plus curious onlookers, gathered outside on the corner as the editor, Luther Worstenholm, presented a silver key to the chairman of the directors, Arnold Rowntree, the MP for York, who somehow opened the grand corner door – somehow because the door was actually only openable from the inside – and everyone cheered.

It was as sumptuous a palace as the war years allowed, with a fine staircase (above) leading up past stained glass windows to comfortably furnished offices fitted out in mahogany and equipped with telephones. There was even a pneumatic tube connected direct to the Telegraph Department of the Northgate Post Office so a telegram could reach the sub-editors only half-a-minute after it had been written out at the post office.

But the throne room was the press hall, where machinery two storeys high printed up to 120,000 copies a night.

The most tumultuous time in Priestgate was in 1926 when a General Strike was called from May 4. Four million workers went out, but the Echo decided to carry on printing so it could inform its readers of the latest, vital news. From midnight, people began queuing in Priestgate so they could get the first edition quite literally hot off the press.

But the most militant strikers were not happy. “In some of the pit towns and villages, aggressive spirits…stopped newsagents from handling newspapers, stole and burnt their supplies, and invented all sorts of devices to blockade The Northern Echo vans,” reported the paper. “Sandbags, carts, wire ropes, railway sleepers, broken glass, sticks and stones were pressed into service.”

Crown Street in the 1940s. Here the riot occured in 1926

In Priestgate, the scene turned ugly. Flying pickets tried to prevent the papers from leaving the palace, so the police drew their batons and charged, and with the presses running 18 hours a day, the public from Hull to Northumberland, from York to Kirkby Stephen, were kept informed until the strike collapsed on May 15.

The driving force who created the palace was managing director Sir Charles Starmer (above), who acquired dozens of northern newspapers in places like Birmingham, Sheffield and Bradford – including, from 1927, the weekly Darlington & Stockton Times – which he ran from Darlington. So with the presses running morning, noon and night, and the company employing 400 people, Priestgate needed expanding.

This coincided with Sir Charles’ second spell as Darlington mayor in 1933 – he’d been mayor in 1907 and was briefly Cleveland’s MP in the 1920s – in the midst of the Great Depression. He wanted to reflate the local economy with big infrastructure projects that provided work for local men. He ploughed the council’s money into doubling the size of Darlington library in Crown Street, and he ploughed his business’s money into expanding the Echo office up Priestgate – in both cases, the new section so accurately matches the old, you can barely see the join.

An older Sir Harry Evans returning to the Priestgate palace

It was to this palace in the 1960s that a young Sir Harold Evans came to make his name – forcing ICI on Teesside to control its emissions for the first time, getting the cervical smear free on the NHS, campaigning against inflammable nightdresses, winning a posthumous pardon for a wrongly executed man, tackling the high prices of vegetables on Darlington market.

And it was to this palace on May 27, 1970, that Princess Anne came to unveil a plaque celebrating the Echo’s 100th anniversary.

But it was also a homely place. There is barely a family in Darlington that has not had a connection to Priestgate. It was a place of succession where son followed father and often grandfather into work; it was a place where an apprentice printer caught the eye of a lass in the all-female typing pool and a new family began.

Primarily, though, Priestgate was a palace because black and white print was king.

But then colour presses and computers came along and Priestgate was dethroned.

To get colour pictures on its pages, the Echo had to pool its resources with other papers to buy a £3.5m colour press, which was placed in York. The Priestgate press was decommissioned on June 30, 1990, after 120 years of rocking the corner site with its mechanical rhythm, shaking the street and filling the air with the smell of ink and the deafening sound of machinery in motion – although, in an emergency, on April 10, 1992, it was cranked back into life to print 7,000 late black-and-white copies of John Major’s surprise general election victory.

Computers meant there was no need for the stereotypers, compositors, engravers, typesetters, linotype operators, wiremen and presshands of the hot metal days.

And then computers gave people new ways in which to access their news, recruit their staff, sell their goods and advertise their services.

The Northern Echo as a brand has moved with the times – while still producing its much-loved newspapers, you will find it all over social media and in a couple of months last year its website recorded a staggering 10 million hits. You’ll even find Memories has its own YouTube channel.

But the Priestgate palace has stood firmly still on its corner. Now its time has come to move on.

Darlington council has bought it via the Towns Fund and has plans to turn its ground floor into an adult skills centre in conjunction with Darlington college, while the upstairs will become offices.

“It is a key and iconic building, an important building for the town centre,” says Chris Mains, the Towns Fund Programme Manager. “Its 153 years of Echo history are the foundation which allows us to develop it and then market it as commercial office space which may, once the redevelopment is complete, again include The Northern Echo.”

In a phrase from the old inky days of the press: “Watch this space.”