Smith's Dairy Café and the Cycling Boom

At a time when the roads in Northumberland were notoriously bad, the road between Newcastle and Ponteland was exceptionally good and made Ponteland a “Mecca” for the many cycling clubs around Tyneside, particularly during the cycling “boom” years between the Wars. Tea Rooms, temperance hotels, pubs and cafés were established to cater for the thousands of visitors to the village.

One of the most popular of these was Smith’s Dairy Café which stood on the West Road with a veranda overlooking the river and steps at the rear leading down to it and a pretty rustic footbridge where Ponteland Park now is. The café opened in 1922 by Mrs. Catherine Smith.

Dairy cafés were places where people could enjoy simple meals and refreshments, with a strong emphasis on dairy products such as milk, tea and coffee with milk, ice cream, cream teas and milkshakes. They were especially popular as a non-alcoholic venue suitable for respectable women, teetotallers and the young focussed on fitness who would not go into pubs. This was the same demographic which enjoyed cycling, making them enormously popular with cyclists. Along with fresh fruit pies and cakes, in keeping with their name they served ice-cream with milk from their own cows and home-made butter in the cooking.

When the St Matthew’s Church was being built at the end of the 1940’s, church services were held in the café as a temporary measure until the church was completed.

The business was taken over by the original owner’s daughter and continued until 1965 when it was pulled down so that the land behind it could be turned into the park.