Dating and Location of Buildings

Fieldwork, and the examination of commercial directories and church records have revealed the presence of 65 buildings (with three examples of re-siting) in County Durham. For the purposes of this survey the pre-1974 boundaries of the county have been used. The survey is based on the examination of the 65 buildings located, although it should be noted that this may not be the total number of corrugated iron public buildings originally erected in the country. The printed sources used, particularly the directories, do not for instance give details of the date of construction, or the material used, for every religious building. Also greater detail is frequently given to Anglican churches than to nonconformist chapels. Allowing for this bias in the documentation, a variety of building types have been discovered, and these are catalogued here.

Fifty-four sites are found in the central area of County Durham within the exposed coalfield. Nine are located in the concealed coalfield to the east. Tow others are found by theTees - Port Clarence and Preston-on-Tees - lying south of the Butterknowle Fault, in a region of Permian and Triassic sandstones. Of those within the exposed coalfield, the majority are in high rank areas, with coals of 88-89% carbon, in mining villages with collieries worked by a variety of coal owners. Some were built in villages where many of the male inhabitants worked in nearby mines, like Craghead, close to Hedly & Co.'s South Moor Collieries, and Utrick Ritson's Burnhope colliery; or Hill Top, near the pits of John Bowes and Partners, and the South Garesfield Coal Co. Others include Oxhill, East Stanley, Catchgate, and Bishop Auckland. Windlestone has been a mining village until the Peases closed the pit on 1874, and Chilton's mine was exhausted prior to 1894. Dunston was associated with the coal shipping trade, although many men were also employed across the Tyne at Armstrong's Elswick works. The economy of settlement at Consett, Tudhoe, and Port Clarence was more closely linked to the iron and steel industry. The Consett Iron Co. had, from 1864, developed into a highly integrated business, with ten collieries, cokeyards, and iron ore mines at Bilbao in Spain (in association with Dowlais Iron Co., Krupps and Harra). Tudhoe's forges and mills were linked to Weardale Iron Company's furnaces at Tow Lane, until the operation was transferred to Cargo Fleet on the takeover of the company by Sir Christopher Furness. At Port Clarence, Isaac Lowthian Bell's blast furnaces were established in 1854. In addition to iron, this latter area became important for glass making and the pumping of brine. Gateshead's industries were largely dominated by engineering, chemicals, brass working and brewing. Near Sunderland, Roker's workforce were employed in marine engineering, shipbuilding, and in glass manufacture.

Of the 65 sites, 52 are datable precisely or to within a decade; with one erected in the 1860s, 15 in the '70s, three in the '80s, 13 in the '90s, 19 in the first decade of the 20th century, and one in the following decade. Of those less precisely dated, four were constructed before 1894, and five before 1914, one other is of uncertain date, and three were cases of re-siting. In each decade up to 1910, the majority of the datable examples are found in the southern half of the county. An increase in the number of buildings in the northern half occurs in the 1890s, and particularly from 1890-1910. The greatest number erected in a decade in the concealed coalfield - four - occurs in the 1870s.

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