Then and Now: Newcastle's Grainger Street in 1912 and the same location today

The location is unmistakably Grainger Street, Newcastle. The year was 1912 - a time that’s slipped from living memory, a now-vanished world that was inhabited by our ancestors.

If the shape of the street and the topography of the buildings in our photograph remain reassuringly familiar 112 years later, the sands of time have well and truly slipped by. For folk at the time, the biggest story of the year was the calamitous sinking of the SS Titanic.

The luxury liner was 350 miles off Newfoundland when she hit an iceberg just before midnight on April 14. In the early hours of the next morning, the ‘unsinkable’ ship went down in the Atlantic Ocean, with 1,517 passengers and crew perishing in the icy waters.

• Read more: The vanished Newcastle pubs we used to love that have now called last orders
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On the home front, King George V was on the throne, having succeeded his late father Edward VII two years earlier. Resident in 10 Downing Street, meanwhile, was the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith who would remain in office until 1916, by which time Britain was engulfed in the global catastrophe that was the Great War.

Here on Tyneside, football fans to date have never had it so good, as Newcastle United approached the end of a near-decade of domestic domination, during which time they were crowned champions of England three times and competed in five FA Cup finals.

In a time before motor cars began to dominate the UK’s towns and cities, here in Newcastle, there would have been many horse-drawn vehicles on the streets. Indeed, there appears to be clear photographic evidence of this on the surface of the road!

And there were trams. We see one in our photograph trundling up Grainger Street, as well as tramlines on the road and a network of supported aerial power lines. Trams had carried passengers around the city since 1901, and they further extended out into the suburbs over the next couple of decades before, in 1950, the service came to an end and was superseded by buses and trolley buses.

As for the shops on Grainger Street, we see part of the frontage of Tyler’s boot store - while next door was home to one of Tyneside’s most famous retail names, Isaac Walton. The business opened in 1887 and over time occupied three different sites on the street. Generations of Tyneside customers would buy their clothes at the highly regarded tailors and outfitters - and it became the shop where children would be taken by their parents to have school uniforms fitted.

Venture there today and an attractive black and white doorway mosaic as you enter the Grainger Market is a vivid physical reminder of Isaac Walton's former presence. In 2024,from its current Westgate Road base, Isaac Walton Tailoring is still delivering bespoke, top-end clothing.