Battle Hill, Wallsend From Old To New In Photos

I don’t know if I can join this thread now – am writing on March 27th 2020, and from the distance of New Haven CT USA {I teach at Yale UNiversity in the States] – but I’ll try. My name is Paul Kennedy [or Paul M Kennedy], author of many history books, including THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS [google], but I was born in Willington Quay in June 1945 and grew up close to Battle Hill [and farm] for many years, went to the St Aidan’s Primary/SEcondary Catholic schools, then St Cuthbert’s Grammar School in Newcastle, then UNiversity of Newcastle [BA History 1966], then south, to a D.Phil/doctorate at Oxford in 1970, then an academic career..

I lived in Ravensworh STreet [going down to Wallsend Slipway] til 11, then Greenside Avenue from 11 til 21, then to the south.. When I was a lad my parents used to take us for walks every Sunday afternoon, up Churchill Street, a cross the [1930s-built] Coast Road, and into the countryside; there was nothing but old [pre-Stephenson] trolleyway-tracks, the Battle Hill Farm, and the water meres.. great for birders [or shooters], or dodgy “pitch-and-toss” gambing groups in an age before betting shops were legalised. Later I went walking and birds-egg-collecting on my own or with another couple of boys. We disappeared for hours at a time, came back all scratched from the hawthorns, and our parents didn’t seem to mind [girls were differently treated..] I say all this because I have a distinct memory of the field in which horses grazed just to the south-east of the Farm [ie towards the top of Churchill Street] having a very distinct mound or hump to it, and being told that that was indeed the “Battle Hill”, though in fact a small hummock, albeit from the top of it you could look a long way south, over the Tyne cranes..and if you were in a fight with the Vikings best to be standing on it, I thought… Later on, when doing an A-level Geography special paper at St Cuthberts, I wrote on the old railway-lines and trolley-ways of the area [using especially Richardson’s marvellous classic HISTORY OF WALLSEND maps… and my memory was that both the 1801 {?] and 1901 [or 1920] updated Ordnance Survey maps of the Battle Hill Farm area had something like “Battle Hill” [site of battle between Northumbrians and Danes, c. 845a.d.]

Is that a total fancy on my part? I still tease my Scandanavian friends today that they owe me some post-imperial reparations monies.. though it’s possible that the locals won. Nobody could defeat those 1970s town planners, though.

Paul.Kennedy@yale.edu

As it happens battle hill is named because it was an old settlement of thatched bottle houses and not because of a battle as so many assume. Originally called bottle hill , other settlements similar include walbottle and shilbottle however spelling has been lost over time,(quite common in those times)