The limits of our explorations were where our little legs could go to really
My name is Anne Leathem. I was born in Leybourne Avenue, Forest Hall in 1960.
Anne (left) and sister in the garden
We didn’t have a car or anything at that point and Leybourne Avenue was a very quiet road off West Lane. There were not very many cars parked on it and we could play out quite happily in the road, which we did with our friends. I suppose our horizons were quite narrow because we didn’t tend to go into Newcastle or anything, so the limits of my experience really were as far as West Moor to the west, down to Forest Hall to the south, across as far as Killingworth Bank to the east and then up to Killingworth Village with occasional forays a bit further up to the north. But I knew all of the paths and the roads and so on, but not necessarily the names and how to get from one place to another.
Mam always had a dog and we used to walk quite a lot with the dog. So the limits of our explorations were where our little legs could go to really. Walking up from Leybourne Avenue, up West Lane you would come to St John’s Church. The churchyard was very different at that point, there was a wall and all of the graves were lined up and there were paths between them, but it became more and more overgrown as I suppose the people who had relations buried there either moved or died themselves. Eventually, a lot of the graves were taken down and the area was mown and I think that was part of Killingworth Village being in the Britain in Bloom competition. My great-grandfather’s grave is in that churchyard somewhere, but I’ve not been able to find the stone. He died in 1918 in the Spanish Flu epidemic which took place, so my great-grandmother was a widow from 1918 onwards and she didn’t die until the 1960s. That’s quite a long time to be by yourself and as it was, she had 5 children, quite young children, when she was widowed.
Anne’s mum at the front gate
Walking up past the church, if you turn to the left and go down the side of the church, the building that used to be the old vicarage is there and then the path comes to a halt at the George Stephenson High School. But that path my mum used to refer to as “The Sedgies” and would talk about walking through there to Dudley and Burradon to visit relations and she used to take myself and my sister in our pram, pushchair or whatever there as well. Carrying on up through Killingworth Village, the village hasn’t changed a huge amount, but when you come to where The Plough is, opposite there, there used to be a farm and we used to go to bonfires there at Guy Fawkes and I can remember getting cinder toffee and baked potatoes. There used to be a path that went from there right up to where the Wagonway is at the top of Killingworth now. It runs between Hillheads egg farm and the road that goes round the village and down towards Backworth. And my mum used to refer to the path that went up there as the Green Lane. There were no houses after Killingworth Village, it was literally just fields and there were horses in some of them. Now obviously, Killingworth New Town is there, though it wasn’t at that point.
If you carry on through Killingworth Village, just after Killingworth Hall, which is on the right-hand side going towards the top house, the pub at the top of the bank, there’s a path that goes down and connects down onto Great Lime Road. And that path we used to call The Croft. It’s just a cinder track and at that time it ran between the playing fields that were St Joseph’s, the catholic school, field that was on West Lane opposite the churchyard. There were market gardens as well in between that and Killingworth Bank going towards the East. The fields are now very overgrown and it’s woodland, but they did used to cultivate some flowers in there and I can remember there being Michaelmas Daisies certainly and occasionally there will be an odd patch of them still through the wooded undergrowth.
There were always horses in the fields that were nearest the top of Killingworth Bank and I guess that one of those horses possibly belonged to Bobby King, the fruit and veg man because he lived up in those houses. The path used to run by the side of where Willow Dene nursery was and as you went over the bridge at the bottom you could see chickens that they had running around there. There were various cuts going down to Forest Hall. One went through Letchwell and there were pigeon lofts on one side and allotments which I think are still there. And there was a school at the bottom of that, which has gone now. St Mary’s catholic school was on the other side of that track. The other entrance to that track is virtually opposite the entrance to Elm Grove and Leybourne Avenue and there’s another branch which goes off towards Glebe Road. We used to cycle a lot so those tracks were very useful short cuts to get to Forest Hall when we were walking or cycling and mum would have used those every day to go and do her shopping to save going round Glebe Road or round Forest Hall Road, Clousden Hill. Obviously there was no traffic down there either.
This memory is part of a longer memory entitled “Forest Hall, Killingworth and West Moor in the 1960s-70s”.