Questions:
Some of the questions may seem obvious, but after beginning to research them they quickly became complicated because of the changing and subjective nature of the topic. Many of them do not allow a definitive answer.
What kinds of boundaries are there?
Where do they lie?
Do they lie in more than one place simultaneously?
Do boundary lines on maps equate with the experience of the 'edges' of a place?
Why do boundaries change and how does this affect the area?
Do boundaries matter? Why do we construct them?
Do the boundaries of Shieldfield as we understand them now (i.e roads and other man made structures) bear any resemblance to what was there before?
Sources Consulted
Primary sources consisted mostly of maps from the local studies section of Newcastle Central Library and first hand experience of the area. Secondary sources are referenced throughout and listed in the column on the left. Conclusions were reached through solid evidence where possible (for example in Old Boundaries), and through persistent questioning and educated suppositions where no solid evidence was possible (for example in Dissolved Boundaries).
Research Commentary
The first thing I did after deciding to explore the borders and boundaries of Shieldfield was to think about the different types of borders and boundaries that would be relevant in this place. I initially came up with; Geographical elements such as rivers and other features of the land which would create natural edges, man made physical boundaries such as train tracks, roads and bridges, and man made social boundaries such as class, religion or ethnicity. I discluded looking too much at social boundaries as this would take the research away from the visual sources and into sociological territory which I was not keen to do and didn’t see as my role.
I knew from the names of buildings in the area that the name ‘Pandon’ was significant, but also was aware that Shieldfield was not close enough to where Pandon Gate used to stand for that to be its namesake. After asking the librarians at Newcastle city library if they had any topographical maps of Shieldfield in order to begin researching the geographical boundaries, I came across the ‘Hidden Rivers’ map and saw that the course of Pandon Burn ran down the western side of where I would define Shieldfield as being. The term ‘Pandon’ then became a useful search term and enabled me to find secondary material that I would not have found using the term ‘Shieldfield’. I found Eneas MacKenzie’s 1827 descriptive account of Newcastle using this search term, which proved to be useful in building a picture of what the area looked like at the beginning of its initial population growth, and also collated with maps of the time to aid my understanding of those.[1]
After asking in local studies for maps with any form of boundary marked on, I saw that there were various different boundaries that intersecting and shaped Shieldfield at different points over the years. I then looked on the Ordnance Survey website to see how many boundary lines they classify and saw that there were a variety of different administrative and electoral boundaries, all of which change and move with population growth.[2]
From my initial observations of maps of the area, it seemed that the eastern boundary had moved eastwards at some point between 1851 and 1894, which led me to try and pinpoint the date of the move, thinking that if I could do that then I could search council meeting notes fro that date and see why it moved. After much searching I could not get less than a 10 year margin around the date of the move and this is when I decided that although I was interested in documenting how borders and boundaries of Shieldfield had changed, it would not be of much use to the wider project of discovering Shieldfield’s identity to simply list how the ward boundaries have moved over the years. If I was to discover something of where the edges of Shieldfield feel like they are I would be more on the mark if I looked less at map-marked boundaries and more at how the sense of the edges might have changed and evolved over the years, using the other information that maps provide us with.
This eastern border still had my attention though so I began to look at the oldest maps I could find. This is when I found the 1770 plan of Newcastle by Charles Hutton. On this map a line punctuated with tiny numbers ran down the eastern side of where Shieldfield would grow to be. I had previously read a description of the boundaries of Newcastle in MacKenzie’s historical account of Newcastle, which had attached to it a report from the same year as Hutton’s plan entitled ‘An Account of the Bounder Stones in Newcastle upon Tyne’. It is a list of numbers, each with a description of location and condition of the stones. I magnified the map until I could read the numbers and then correlated them with the numbers in the account. It was then obvious that this line was the 1648 border not just of Shieldfield, but of the whole city, and it ran down where the northern half of Portland Road now stands, a road with a definite ‘edge’ feeling to it.
I was encouraged by this and studied the map further. By now I was familiar with the street plan of Shieldfield and it was obvious that two of the cart tracks on the 1770 map correlated with the location of Portland road and Shield Street today, so I decided to see if there were any other similarities between the two maps. I traced the boundaries of the fields on the 1770 map and then mapped the shape onto a current map, and saw that the field boundaries translated into today’s street plan. Then I began to see on other maps made during the development of Shieldfield that the land must have been sold field by field and that is why the street plan barely varies from the network of hedges that used to divide the fields before people lived there.
Initially I had wanted to present my research border by border, and work around the edge of Shiedlfield. This is what I did in my presentation, but after transferring the information to the blog it became clear that this was not the most effective way to divide the information. I did not find anything of great interest in the north or south borders apart from a few questions that arose about whether the southern border is Newbridge Street or Simpson Street, but of course the answer to this is always subjective and can not be explored much further than supposing where different ideas about the location of the border may be.
I had always wanted to include something about the universities effect on the shape, history and identity of Shieldfield as that is central to the whole project, so I decided to map the growth of the University onto a current map. It is well known that the University has had a big impact on the area, but when it is shown visually as I have done on the slideshow it is much more shocking. To research this part I simply mapped the location of University and University-affiliated buildings, student living areas and student thoroughfares onto a map and time lapsed the layers in an approximate chronological order. The university’s central campus first, then the accommodation belonging to the university (and under construction), then private builds, then private lets, then student thoroughfares (although the last two would have appeared at the same time). I felt that the student thorough fares are an important element as they carve up the area and claim certain areas of Shieldfield as belonging to students and others belonging to residents, but also highlight how the whole area of Shieldfield acts as a bottleneck pedestrian entrance to the university and the city centre.
