Tynemouth Guide
Tynemouth Front Street
16. Clock Tower and Drinking Fountain
Built in 1861 with a donation from a London businessman. Venetian Gothic style, which reflects Tynemouth’s status as a wealthy port.
Buy a Tynemouth Clock Tower Mug Here
17. Harriet Martineau
(1802-1876). From a wealthy Huguenot family, she was a pioneering Enlightenment thinker, feminist and abolitionist. She was at the centre of intellectual society of the day, was a friend of Princess Victoria and famous in Britain and America.
She both educated the masses in political economy and sociology and influenced government policy through illustrated pamphlets, which outsold the works of Charles Dickens. She was plagued by ill health throughout her life and retired to Tynemouth for five years to convalesce in 1840.
Among her circle were Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Carlyle. She was also aquainted with Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Charles Dickens.
Tynemouth Guide
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No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
Photograph: Lee Stoneman
Photograph: Lee Stoneman
No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
