North Tyne Pier

Before the building of its piers, entering and leaving the River Tyne was a hazardous business, and many ships were tragically lost at its mouth. In 1854, the Tyne Improvement Commission duly launched a programme of works that included the development of protective north and south piers.

The original plan was for relatively short piers, but when the Tyne was proposed to be one of the new national “harbours of refuge” in 1859, engineer James Walker revised his designs, lengthening the north pier to 2,900 feet.

There were setbacks from numerous damaging storms. Walker’s foundation designs for the north pier were strengthened in 1894 by his successor Philip Messent. After the structure was then dramatically breached by a storm in 1897, its sinuous shape was also deemed to be a weakness, so in a further redesign by John Wolfe-Barry (probably best known for building Tower Bridge in London), the original was demolished and a new pier was built on the straighter line we see today. The north pier differs from the south not only in this straight design, but also by being constructed on two levels, having a taller lighthouse, and having a tunnel that runs through it as a service conduit.

The project was eventually completed in 1909, fourteen years after its southern twin. Messent was hailed as a local hero. Bathers at Tynemouth’s Priory’s Haven were less enamoured, however; complaining that the works had ruined their “delightful watering place”.

The pier and its lighthouse became a Listed Building in 1986, and they are now looked after by the Port of Tyne Authority. Perhaps they are helped by the good luck charm pressed into the mortar by a builder’s daughter all those years ago – a tiny china doll, one worn fragment of which still survives today.

Research and text by Dave Pritchard