The Making of the Darras Hall Estate

Today Darras Hall is the most exclusive and expensive residential district in the North East of England. Many well-known people from the area live or have lived on the estate, including a number of professional footballers, prominent business men and other well-known personalities.

For such a successful estate, the project had a rocky start and for the first forty years of its existence, it looked like it had been a failure. It was not until the 1960’s that the development really started to accelerate and the Darras Hall we know today started to emerge.

The project was the brainchild of one remarkable man; Joseph Whiteside Wakenshaw. He was born in 1853 in Newcastle and never married, preferring to live with his two sisters. A staunch Methodist, he was a vegetarian, teetotaller, non-smoker, but described as tolerant of others. Like many of his class and upbringing, he abhorred the dirt, the mechanisation and atrocious living conditions created by the Industrial Revolution and wanted to improve the life of those around him. He dreamed of moving into the countryside and living off the land. He was no socialist however. He combined his idealism with a strong practical and business sense.

Around 1890 he founded the Northern Allotment Society to promote living off the land. Its initial aim was to secure garden plots for town residents where they could grow their own produce. They obtained plots on the Town Moor and in 1892 they decided to buy an estate in Wickham and to divide it up between themselves. This became the prototype of what they would later do on a much larger scale at Darras Hall.

The estate was divided into lots with the cost of the estate split between each lot. These were divided between the original 17 subscribers. The Society undertook to build new roads connecting the plots so that the land would have development value but in exchange the subscribers had to bind themselves to extensive rules and what they could and could not do with the land. This became the pattern for other small developments they undertook on the outskirts of Newcastle. By 1894, as the Newcastle Daily Chronicle observed, despite its name, the Society had moved beyond just providing allotments and had evolved into an agency “providing anybody with a “country seat” at cost price”.

By 1907, when two adjacent farms on the outskirts of Ponteland came up for sale, the Society was ready to embark on its largest project up to that date. The two farms were Darras Hall and Little Callerton with together with Callerton Moor amounted to a total acreage of 1025 acres. The Society had an initial 132 subscribers for the scheme and bought the land for just under £60,000. The land was then split into 185 plots of approximately 5 acres each. Each plot was then put up for auction amongst the subscribers raising an additional £20,000 which was used to cover the cost of roads, fencing, water supply and sewerage, transforming agricultural land to development land. Each subscriber could then build on his plot but they and any subsequent purchaser were bound by the rules of the estate.

The scale made this a very ambitious project and it could not have been expected that the development would happen over-night, however the Ordnance Survey Map of 1913 shows that despite all the plots being laid out, fenced and served by a road network and even a railway line, only a handful contained a house. One year later, the outbreak of the First World War compounded the problems almost all private housebuilding was put on hold for the duration. The years following the First World War were economically very challenging for the North East with the coal industry suffering from international competition leading to industrial strife in the 1920’s and then the Great Depression of the 1930’s followed by another World War halting private house building. An aerial photograph taken in 1947 shows the estate with only a scattering of buildings. Some of the plots were being used as market gardens, a purpose which would have pleased the original subscribers.

Things began to change in the 1950’s. As building restrictions and labour and material shortages which had been imposed by the Second World War began to ease, small houses and bungalows started to be developed on the estate. It was during this period that motor cars were much more affordable and were no longer confined to the wealthy. This brought the estate within the reach of someone who worked in Newcastle and did not want to rely on commuting by bus every day.

The Ordnance Survey Map of 1960 presents a very different picture to thirteen years earlier. The 5-acre plots were now mostly subdivided. The estate rules still governed the type of building which could be erected, so each is a detached or semi-detached property set short distance from the road to ensure privacy and usually provided with a large back garden.

Development continued throughout the 1960’s with the type of houses being built on the estate becoming larger as it began to attract wealthier purchasers who valued the nature of the estate with its good transport links and rules protecting it against unwanted developments.

The wealthier the estate became the more attractive it became to other wealthy purchasers who wanted to isolate them and their families from poorer neighbours and to demonstrate to their friends and families that they had “arrived”. By the late 1980’s, the boom had become well established. The family homes of the 1950’s and 1960’s began to be demolished and replaced with mansions featuring indoor swimming pools and cinemas.

By 1990, eighty years after its inception, all the plots had been filled. In 2024 three of top ten most expensive houses sold in the North East were on this estate.