Thousands of passengers still pass through this place every day - but it's changed a bit since our main photograph was captured 60 years ago.
This was Pelaw railway station during the notoriously harsh winter of 1962. Sixty years later, you'll find a much-revamped Metro station at the location. The railway station opened in 1843, just six years into the new Victorian age. It underwent changes in 1850 and 1857, and by 1879 was a stop on the line that linked Newcastle and South Shields. There were further changes to the station in 1896, a time at the turn of the 20th century when Pelaw was becoming home to the Co-operative Wholesale Society.
The Co-op built an almost mile-long string of factories along Shields Road on what had been fields between Heworth and Bill Quay. (You can see some of the imposing red-brick buildings on the far right of our photograph, which comes courtesy of the Armstrong Railway Photographic Trust). They included a drug and drysaltery works, as well as engineering, cabinet-making, printing, tailoring, shirt, clothing, quilt and bedding factories.
