Leazes Park

Lore & Background

The creation of Leazes Park was a drawn out process. In September 1857, 3,000 working men petitioned Newcastle Council for ‘ready access to some open ground for the purpose of health and recreation’ and a year later a special committee was set up to try to find a location for a park. Aldermen Harle and Hamond took up the challenge and campaigned for a park and eventually succeeded in having Leazes Park created on a part of the Leazes Town Moor. On 23 December 1873, Leazes Park was officially opened by Alderman Sir Charles Hamond. It became the first public park created on Tyneside.

In Their Own Story

The bus had barely stopped when the noise hit. Not a sound, exactly — a pressure, a wall of it, pressing against the chest. He'd been a boy when he first walked through those gates, his father's hand rough and warm in his own, the smell of the terraces already seared into his memory: wet wool, chips grease, the particular cold of a Newcastle November. Thirty years gone and the ground was the same. The same low, concrete lip where the crowd stood. The same way the floodlights made the pitch look like a green sheet laid on a table. He hadn't played a match there in a decade, but the rhythm of it was in his legs, the half-turn to watch the keeper, the instinctive lean forward when the ball swung into the box. The crowd breathed out. Breathed in. And for ninety minutes, the West End was the whole world, and nothing else — no job, no argument, no tomorrow — existed except the next pass, the next chance, the next roar that would shake the fillings loose in his teeth. He pressed his forehead against the cold rail. He was home.

Reader's Guide

John Fulton, the Town Surveyor, laid out Leazes Park similar to other parks being built in Britain at that time. The layout centres on the lake. The Bandstand was added in 1875 and a balustrade stone terrace in 1879. Later, the whole park was surrounded with metal railings. A second lake was created in 1893 but this was filled in by 1949 and the area used for a bowling green and tennis courts. The grand Jubilee Gates were added in 1896 to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and a Palm House was built. In 1908 a bust of Alderman Sir Charles Hamond was erected (which is also grade II listed) as the centrepiece to the terrace and the park was then complete. The park continued to develop with deer, aviaries, tennis, and croquet until the 1980s when it was in need of refurbishment. The refurbishment became possible when the park was awarded £3.7 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2001. The restoration project was completed in 2004.

Did You Know?

• Leazes Park is the oldest park in Newcastle upon Tyne, opened in 1873.
• The park contains a lake above the course of the Lort Burn.
• It was the first public park created on Tyneside.
• The Jubilee Gates were added in 1897 to commemorate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.