Newcastle Quayside Market

Patter-merchants at a centuries old Quayside Sunday market in Newcastle.

In the late 60s soap box preachers, spielers, tipsters and three-card tricksters still ply their trade in the raucous open air Quayside Sunday market in Newcastle, a clutch of Tyne bridges high overhead. A writer in the Chronicle once likened it to a ‘saturnalia’. This atmospheric newsreel item celebrates the dying art of market pitchers who draw big crowds on the waterfront.

The Quayside market was first noted in historical records of ‘the town’ in 1736. The architectural critic Ian Nairn described it in 1978 as almost a ‘mirage’ with ‘its spirit intact, against all the odds’ and peppered with larger than life characters such as the Jokerman. It was then still redolent of the days when fortune tellers, escapologists and strongmen entertained the masses, but the declining Quayside area was threatened with demolitions. Grand plans for re-development came and went in the 1980s until architect Terry Farrell won the commission in 1991, and laid the foundation for the vibrant cultural quarter of today. The traditional market did not survive and the patter-merchants are long gone.