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Brief History of Aycliffe
(click here to take the tour by car)
During the Ice Ages, the whole Aycliffe area was covered by a thick layer of ice. This ice had ground its way across from Norway, and - as it went - it had picked up vast quantities of clay. When it eventually melted, it spread this clay all over Aycliffe.
For a while, the melting paused, and a particularly thick mound of clay (called a 'terminal moraine' and marked on the map by the pink line) was deposited at the melting edge of the ice-sheet. After the Ice Age, a lake (shown in blue on the map) pounded up behind this moraine, and one historian believes that it was still there in Roman times - so the main Roman road north (Dere Street) had to pass through Bishop Auckland, not Aycliffe.
This picture shows the area of the 'lake', looking south from the A689 near the motorway junction.
This picture shows the area of the 'lake', looking north from near Aycliffe Quarry.
If you want to know what the land was like during these long thousands of years, the Borough Council has kept a small piece of land at the top of Woodham Way - properly called 'The Moors', but colloquially known as 'John Clare's Bog' - which still preserves the character of the area in those days after the Ice Age.
In about 500 ad, the Saxons came into the area. They cut down the thick forests that covered the area (e.g. the 'elder hill ' at El don) and cut a clearing in the oak wood at Aycliife (which means 'oak clearing'). By this time, the River Skerne had dug a deep valley out of the soft clay, and the lake had disappeared to become a wide, flat, boggy area - but the Saxons could not live there. Their main road north passed to the east - through Middridge. And they built their village (and church) on top of the moraine, where it was dry (this is called a 'dry point settlement').
Ayclifffe church became very important, and two major conferences (called 'synods') were held there in the 8th century.
This picture shows the deep valley cut by the Skerne,
and Aycliffe Church on top of the hill.
In 1069, Saxon Aycliffe came to an abrupt end. The people of Durham rose up in rebellion against William the Conqueror, who had conquered England in 1066 - and William came north 'in great wrath' to defeat them. He killed many people, and destroyed their food stores, so that most of them died in the famine that followed.
The few remaining Saxons were herded into labour camps, and forced to work as 'villeins' (serfs) for the Normans. At Aycliffe, the Normans pulled down the old Saxon village round the church, and made the surviving villagers live in huts built in a square round a parade yard.
This aerial photo shows the location of the new village, about a quarter of a mile away from the Saxon church (marked with a circle). By this time, the 'lake' had dried out enough for the Normans to build a 'Great North Road' (now the A167) along its eastern edge - can you see the new road on the left of the photo?
Today, Aycliffe is a beautiful village, which regularly wins the Northumbria in Bloom contest...
...but in Norman times, it was
a concentration camp.
For many centuries, Aycliffe was a poor farming village, separated from nearby Middridge by open moorland. Very little happened until 1825, when George Stephenson built the first railway in the world - the Stockton and Darlington Railway - and it passed just to the east of Aycliffe, taking coal from the mines in the west of the county to the coal docks at Stockton. The railway did not change the life of Aycliffe people immediately, but - in the event - it was to change Aycliffe utterly and forever.
This photograph shows the station at Heighington Lane (now the Locomotion pub).
During the Second World War, Britain fought for her life against the Nazis. Our armies needed millions of shells and bullets. But how could we make them, with Nazi bombers raining down bombs every night on the cities in the south of England?
What was needed was a secret arms factory. It had to be built out-of-the-way in the north of England, far away from Nazi bombers. But it also had to be near a railway line, so that workers could go there to work every day, and so that the government could transport the shells and bullets to the soldiers.
And that was how - on a bleak moorland between two tiny villages in County Durham - the government came to build the Royal Ordnance Factory. Much of the factory was built underground (for safety), and an underground railway connected the factories. Some of the original buildings still survive today
Work in the factories was dangerous and nasty - the explosives could blow up, and gave the workers cancer. Many of the people who worked there were women, and the 'Aycliffe Angels', as they came to be called, were among the heroes of the Second World War.
In 1998 the Town Council placed a memorial seat and garden in front of St Clare's Church in memory of these wonderful, brave people.
In 1948, Newton Aycliffe was born.
How did this happen?
The 1930s had been a time of terrible economic depression in County Durham. Many of the local mines closed down. In the west of County Durham, many pit villages became derelict - the people were desperately poor, and the houses lacked even basic facilities like running water and an inside toilet. And yet these were the very people who were fighting and dying to save Britain during the Second World War! What, they asked, were THEY going to get out of the war?
The government asked a man called William Beveridge to produce a report on what he wanted Britain to be like after the war. In 1942 he produced his report. Five giants, he said, oppressed mankind - Poverty, Disease, Homelessness, Ignorance and Unemployment. To end this, once and for all, Beveridge proposed a state system of Social Security benefits, a National Health Service, Council housing, free education and full employment. He called it the Welfare State and it changed Britain completely and forever - we have these wonderful things even today!
The Welfare State was brought in all over Britain in 1948, but Beveridge chose one place especially which he wanted to be the shining example of how his new world would work. He needed a place with a lot of factory space for people to work, and a lot of open land to build houses. Where would he choose?
The moors between Aycliffe and Middridge were perfect - there was a huge ordnance factory that was no longer needed for the war, and there was plenty of poor farmland to build on.
So that is where Beveridge chose as his flagship new town - Newton Aycliffe. This man - the shaper of modern Britain - even came to live here, and had a house at the top of Pease Way.
Beveridge hoped that Newton Aycliffe would become the model for a new, perfect society
- this cartoon envisages the perfect world that Newton Aycliffe would become
(click on the cartoon for a larger version)
This picture - of the first houses in Newton Aycliffe - shows Beveridge's dream of a 'green' town, with space for children to play - although in 1948 it was a sea of mud! When the time came to replace these houses, the people insisted that they were rebuilt exactly like the originals.
Since 1948, Newton Aycliffe has grown and changed, since the early days of the first shopping centre at Neville Parade...
... to the building of the modern TESCO's, with the new Youth Centre and Town Centre Park beyond.
Want to know more about the history of Newton Aycliffe?
