Surveyor General’s Map (1766)

“A Sketh of Tynmouth Castle in the County of Northumberland
Of the Spanish Works ; also of Tynmouth Town, and Tynmouth Park
Surveyor Generals Office 1^st March. 1766”

This map was created less than a decade before the Fryer Map, when George III was on the throne, Mozart was touring Europe for the first time, and trouble was starting to brew in the American colonies.

We can see that the Castle and the Spanish battery are linked as one big fortification, with a wall extending all the way down from the Castle following what is now Pier Road. One of the Castle fortifications is also jutting right across the moat and into the bottom of Front Street. Note also the land behind Huntingdon Place is marked as “part of East Mill Field”.

There is an interesting a relic from this decade in the village today. No 9. Huntingdon Place, next to Queen Victoria Park, features probably the finest doorway in Tynemouth. The porch has two ionic columns, topped by a pediment inscribed with the year 1760. The roof of the porch has a balustrade around it and the structure is encased by 18th century Flemish bond brickwork.

It is thought that this whole doorway was purposely moved to its present location, as the house it leads into, famous as Garibaldi’s residence, was not built until the 19th century. The doorway may have originally stood at the shipowner’s house with the octagonal lookout roof on Percy Park Road. This is just speculation, but the brickwork looks very similar.

Looking at the map, Percy Park Road is not yet cut through into Front Street, so such a grand entrance may have looked quite out of place where it stood, at the top of Percy Street but on the edge of cow fields going down to the sea, described on the map as the “Great East Domaine”.

Maybe after Percy Park Road was built in the middle of the next century and the Duke’s housing plan in the village started to take shape, the doorway was transplanted a short way to the centre of the village, to a spot more fitting its grandeur and less obstructive to passers by.