Pages from Changing Places 2012

Introduction: the view from Bolton Street
Many readers of our first two books of historical photographs, Newcastle, the Missing Years and Recovered
Memories, have urged us to publish another volume. Some readers have asked for more photos from
the 1930s and 1940s - understandable given that period’s previous under-representation in the published
photographic record.
But others have asked to be shown some older photographs, especially some of those that came to us with
the Ken Magor collection of glass and film negatives we bought in 2010.
Still more have requested photographs from more recent decades.
This book is an attempt to offer something to please all those people. Changing Places is therefore a
miscellany, loosely built around the idea of illustrating examples of change in our city and region over time.
Some of the photographs in the book have been drawn from the Magor collection, but many have come
to us from a variety of other sources and we are indebted to many generous donors for particular images and
complete small collections of pictures that we believe deserve to be widely circulated.
Some of the photos have previously been published elsewhere, but we present them again in what we hope
is a sufficiently new context to give them a new or different relevance. In a few cases we have found ourselves
in possession of the actual negatives of familiar images and have chosen to reproduce them again, simply to
take advantage of the opportunity to show them to better advantage using modern scanning technology.
It would not be practical, unfortunately, to list by name every person who has helped us with information
or photographs. Many are acknowledged on the last page of this book. But the contributions of some people
have been so significant that they must be mentioned here.
Pete Smith, in particular, helped define the course of this publication when he contacted us to offer the use
of his grandfather’s negatives. Not only did he loan us those valuable items, he also brought us, unexpectedly,
a large box of negatives salvaged some years ago during refurbishment work at the Hexham headquarters of
the former Hunter Valley Co-operative Dairy Company Ltd, where he once worked.
For a journalist who spends part of every working day in Bolton Street, this view, circa 1905, from a Charleston
Studios souvenir booklet, is fascinating. So much has changed, yet the streetscape is still recognisable.
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