31/03/2024
ESH Winning and Waterhouses were model colliery villages designed by the Quaker firm of Joseph Pease and Partners in the 19th century. Then, in the 20th century, the miners went one better, with a grand design of their own in the shape of Esh Winning Memorial hall.
The Peases wanted the houses in the two villages to be more substantial than those of other colliery settlements and, unusually, each house had a large garden for growing vegetables and fattening pigs.
The Peases gave great attention to drainage and sanitary conditions, and took interest in the education and welfare of its workforce. Schools were built for youngsters and a Miners’ Institute provided reading rooms and recreational activities.
However, this building was eclipsed by the memorial hall built in Brandon Road in 1923. This hall, now a Grade II-listed building, commemorated the local miners who lost their lives in the Great War. Built in Edwardian style with several rooms that are now boarded up, it had its own cinema, concert hall, library and swimming pool but was perhaps a little grand for a small community.
Unsurprisingly, it experienced financial difficulties in the late 1920s. Nevertheless, the building continued to operate a cinema and ballroom for decades to come.
Pease and Partners were a major source of funding for the hall, contributing £3,000 to the total cost of £10,000 but the local miners raised the rest through subscription.
On the opening day, Peter Lee, a prominent mining leader (from whom the town of Peterlee is named), unveiled a plaque, but the Peases, though invited, chose not to attend.
It was a wise move, since the family were no longer popular in Esh Winning.
Miners were angered by their attempts to increase working hours on top of poor wages during the economic depression.
Things reached a head in the 1926 General Strike when the firm employed blackleg workers and billeted police to evict striking miners from their homes. The secretary and treasurer of the memorial hall were among those evicted. After clashes with police, these two prominent figures were arrested and imprisoned in Durham Jail for a month. Despite the high ideals, few of the 19th century model terraces built by the Peases remain as they were removed. like many other Victorian miners’ houses deemed unsuitable for 20th century living.
Most of the planned village of Waterhouses lay in what is now woodland, north of the Deerness Railway walk.
Some adjoining woodland paths mark the site of former streets like North, West and East Terrace. The colliery had stood nearby.
Today, Waterhouses is a small village, consisting of Station Street and the main thoroughfare called Russell Street. This road continues west into neighbouring Hamilton Row which is likewise named from the Hamilton- Russell family of Brancepeth Castle.
Esh Winning has seen the growth of new housing estates in recent years, but much of the older colliery village has gone.
Like Waterhouses, there was a North, West and East Terrace all located in what is now empty land north of Esh Winning Industrial Estate.
The industrial estate itself occupies the site of Esh Winning’s Colliery.
South Terrace, a later addition, was built in the 1870s or 1880s, and still exists, while Lymington Terrace, further south across the River Deerness, formed a separate hamlet. It was named after Viscount Lymington, Newton Wallop, who married a member of the Pease family.
The terrace probably housed workers for a neighbouring brickyard. The terrace lay near the later streets of Woodland Place and West View that form the Lymington of today.
The three main roads in Esh Winning are Fair View, Durham Road and Newhouse Road. All dating from the 19th century, they intersect to form a triangle.
Durham Road and Newhouse Road join at the market place, where the post office and Stags Head pub have stood since the 19th century.
A cinema called the Pavilion stood behind the pub and the road called Station View led south from the market place to the site of another railway station.
Though situated in Esh Winning, this was Waterhouses’ passenger station and should not be confused with a smaller goods station that existed at Waterhouses itself. The passenger station closed in 1951.
At the northern end of Esh Winning, near the junction of Fair View and Newhouse Road is the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs.
Situated alongside a stream called Priest Burn, both are reminders of the area’s Catholic links. The church may stand near the site of an earlier Catholic chapel called Newhouse, established in the 1650s.
The priests of Newhouse served Catholic landowners in the area, though Mass was often held in secret. According to records, one Newhouse priest called Ferdinando Asmall, who died in 1798, lived to the age of 103. In 1800, Newhouse chapel fell into ruin and its priest moved to a new chapel further north at Esh Laude near the village of Old Esh.
Situated on a hill to the north near Langley Park, Esh is a quite separate, much older village whose name simply means ash tree.
Esh Winning was named from the successful “winning”
of coal in the neighbourhood of Esh.
Newhouse was without a priest until the mid to late 19th century, when many Irish labourers came to work at Esh Winning.
Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, dating from 1881, was built to serve the settlers who seemed to come to Esh Winning from almost every county in the Emerald Isle.
They included my greatgrandfather, from County Monaghan, whose family settled here.
Most residents came from County Durham, but “immigrants”
came from other parts of England, including a significant number from non-mining areas like Suffolk.
Several Methodist churches were built and for a time the villages prospered, but they suffered hard times when Esh Winning Colliery temporarily closed between 1930 and 1942 for economic reasons.
Waterhouses suffered a similar closure from 1927 to 1929. but both reopened.
Waterhouses Colliery finally closed for good in 1966 and that at Esh Winning in 1968, but the communities happily live on to enjoying the fresh air of the lovely Deerness valley.
Esh Winning and Waterhouses are featured in David Simpson’s book The Durham Villages.
