under this Creative Commons Licence.
On a quiet byway on the north bank of the River Tyne a few
hundred yards east of Wylam, lies a lucky survival of North-East history. For,
sitting sedately on a former waggonway out of the reach of motorised vehicles,
can be found a modest cottage whose claim to fame is that it is the birthplace
and childhood home of the ‘Father of the Railways’, George Stephenson.
It is nothing much to look at, made to seem all the more
modest due to the fact that four families lived here at the time of the famous
man’s birth – each crammed into a small apartment in the tiny two-storey abode.
Humble beginnings indeed for the the little chap with the big future, who
entered this world on 9th June 1781.
At the time of his birth, railways, of course, did not
exist. But waggonways did, and young George must have been used to the
horse-drawn affairs rumbling slowly past his window. In later years much larger
and noisier items would have trundled before the family home – though George,
by this time, was long gone, of course. Interesting, though, that it was
largely due to his own efforts that the transformation was made possible…
We are told in an 1857 account that… The lower room in the west end of this house was the home of the
Stephenson family, and there George Stephenson was born, the second of a family
of six children ... The apartment is now, what it was then, an ordinary
labourer’s dwelling; its walls are unplastered, its floor is of clay, and the
bare rafters are exposed overhead.
Bizarrely, the cottage is now painted white. Until around
the turn of the millennium it bore its original bare stone walls.
Institutionalised vandalism?
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