Achi news desk-
“Messrs Backhouse and Co are destroying one of the few relics of olden times left in South Durham,” he thundered on November 17, 1877. “They are pulling down the Queen’s Head Inn at Barnard Castle in order to secure a site for their new site. banking site.
“Although the change will improve the architectural appearance of Barnard Castle, it will destroy the links that cluster around the Long Room which for 60 or 70 years served as the Town Hall and theater of the small town.”
Everything changes. We’ve recently looked at how Barclays – the bank that will succeed Backhouses – has just ended its 190-year association with Northallerton, and the same break is to be taken at Barnard Castle where the townspeople and advisers are now trying to create a banking center following an announcement that their Barclays branch, the last bank in Barney, will close on or before January 17, 2025.
READ MORE: 190-YEAR ASSOCIATION WITH NORTHALLERTON ENDED BY BANK
The building of the bank, in an ideal location opposite the Butter Market on the corner of Market Place and Newgate, was controversial 150 years ago because it replaced the pub which had been the town’s main meeting place.
Dances, wedding receptions and public meetings had been held for generations in Prickett’s Long Room – named after the owner – at the Queen’s Head, as well as theatrical performances. In 1806, 19-year-old Edmund Kean staged a one-man show there of excerpts from Shakespeare’s Richard III, a play for which he would become famous throughout the world as he was considered the best actor of his generation until his name be destroyed. through his adulterous behavior.
Backhouses – founded in Darlington in 1774 and the most reliable bank in the North East with branches in most towns – brushed away all that history, and employed their resident architect, GG Hoskins, and builder Joseph Kyle to creating a Gothic bank.
Hoskins is responsible for many of the mansions and public buildings in Darlington that give the town character, and Kyle, the builder of the Bowes Museum and terraces at Galgate, is just as important to Barney.
The bank was completed by the end of September 1879, with Backhouses giving each worker a bonus of five shillings rather than the usual end-of-project celebration dinner.
The Darlington & Richmond Herald seems to have forgiven the bank for erasing history as “a new and handsome building” and “for a solidity of material workmanship that will rival any structure erected at Barnard Castle in modern times”.
Alan Wilkinson, in his 1998 history of Barney, calls it “stunningly modern” as it still stands out from all the more traditional buildings in the Market – but what future does a 146-year-old Gothic bank palace have when the bank that built it no longer wants it?
Hoskins began his career in the mid-1860s as a clerk at the new Backhouses bank, now Barclays, in the heart of High Row. He probably designed the stables at the back which can be seen from Bells Place car park. He also designed Backhouses branches in Middlesbrough, West Hartlepool, Sunderland and, above all, Bishop Auckland, now a Spanish art gallery.
He also designed Darlington library, a technical college, a sixth form college, Elm Ridge mansion and everything from Middlesbrough Town Hall to The Fleece Inn in Richmond.
READ MORE: THE HIDDEN MEANING IN THE BRICKWORK AT DARLINGTON STREET
