Station Cottages, Built for the Railway

This block of houses now overlook a large car park to the west of Ponteland’s village centre. When they were built around 1905, they overlooked the railway sidings at the back of Ponteland’s railway station. These were the houses provided by the North Eastern Railway Company for the Station Master and four of the railway employees.

In the 19th and first half of the 20th century, it was very common for employers to provide key members of staff with housing; everyone from a Bank Manager, policeman, coal miner, farm worker or in this case railway porter, was provided with a house for him and his family to live in.

This practice originally sprung out of necessity. There simply was not enough houses for working class people to live in and if an employer needed someone to work for him, he had to provide a house. As the 19th century progressed, employers realised that this gave them considerable control over their workers. There was much less likelihood that a worker would strike for more pay when there was the threat of he and his family being evicted if they did so.

The railways were an industry where this was very common. For the employees of the North Eastern Railway Company it was almost universal. Every town and village with a railway station had its railway cottages or station master’s house. In Ponteland these were a small, brick-built terrace of five houses, two-up, two-down, apart from the end terrace house which had an extra bedroom.

The railway station closed to passenger traffic in 1929 but the station was still kept busy with goods traffic which continued to 1967.

Employee provided housing went into sharp decline, particularly after the Second World War, when the alternative of council housing was available and employees began to appreciate the freedom of living in a house which was not dependent on their job. Companies also realised that maintaining housing stock was expensive and administratively burdensome and totally separate from their core competencies. Almost all the housing was sold-off or often transferred to local housing as additional council housing. That was what happened in Ponteland where these houses were transferred to Castle Ward District Council. They modernised the houses in 1973.

These are now the last tangible link with an industry that once played an important role in the village’s development.