Further Reading & Research
If this website has inspired you to do some further research then there are plenty of fantastic, free resources available online and we have listed some below. We have also included some academic articles and books for further study.
Online Resources Newcastle
Newcastle University Co-Curate
A remarkable resource which seeks to bring together together online collections, museums, universities, schools and community groups to make and re-make stories and images. Here are some of our favourite links below.
Newcastle University Collections Captured:
A fantastic resource freely available to the public highlighting some of Newcastle University’s fantastic archival collections. These collections also house old broadside ballads and execution sheets.
Newcastle Libraries Flickr:
This Flickr resource includes an amazing collection of images, maps and creative commons archive for Newcastle and covers many centuries. Here are just a few of the albums linked below.
Skyscraper City - Remembering Historic Newcastle
A crowd sourced repository of memories, photos and stories from members of the public.
Tyne and Wear Archives Newcastle Gaol:
The Tyne and Wear Archives have put their fantastic collection of mugshots online and free for use.
Criminal Faces of North Shields
Stories behind the mugshots (curated by Brenda Anderson)
Online Resources Crime:
Broadside Ballads Online:
Broadside Ballads Online presents a digital collection of English printed ballad-sheets from between the 16th and 20th centuries, linked to other resources for the study of the English ballad tradition. This Oxford University resource is available for public use and includes many great ballads regarding crime and punishment over four centuries.
Digital Panopticon
Although specifically relating to convicts who passed through the Old Bailey in London, the Digital Panopticon is an incredibly rich resource and freely available datasource for people interested in criminal history and the punishment of transportation in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
Durham Prison History
This Durham University project website has a useful overview of the history of nearby Durham Prison.
Prison History
Based in the Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice at The Open University, Prison History aims to transform our understanding of incarceration in the British Isles from the early modern period to the twentieth century through the publication of new, interactive resources.
Richmond Castle Cell Block Project
Richmond Castle Cell Block is a £550,000 investment to investigate, identify and resolve the risks facing the building and its graffiti. Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the project is working with local volunteers to research over 2,000 graffiti inscriptions to build a picture of who was in the building and why.
Word on the Street
The National Library of Scotland's online collection of nearly 1,800 broadsides lets you see for yourself what 'the word on the street' was in Scotland between 1650 and 1910. Crime, politics, romance, emigration, humour, tragedy, royalty and superstitions - all these and more are here.
Books on Newcastle Crime:
Maureen Anderson, Executions and Hangings in Newcastle and Morpeth (Barnsley, 2005).
Roger Cooter. When Paddy met Geordie: The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle, 1840-1880 (Sunderland, 2005).
John J Eddlestone, Murderous Tyneside: The executed of the Twentieth Century (DB Publishing, 2012)
Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch eds. Execution in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual (London, 2020).
Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton. Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law: The Problem of Law Enforcement in North-East England, 1718-1800 (London, 1998).
Barry Redfern. The Gallows Tree: Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century: Northumberland and Berwick-upon-Tweed (Newcastle, 2013).
- Victorian Villains: Prisoners from Newcastle Gaol, 1871-1873 (Newcastle, 2006).
Articles/Chapters:
Patrick Low. “The Changing Presentation of Execution in Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1844-1863”, in Law, Crime and Society, 8:1 (2018), pp. 38-52.
Helen Rutherford, Unity or disunity? The trials of a Jury in R v John William Anderson: Newcastle Winter Assizes 1875 in Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century. ed. / James Gregory; Daniel J.R. Grey. 1. ed. London : Routledge, 2019. p. 242-258 (Routledge Studies in Modern History).
Clare Sandford-Couch and Helen Rutherford, ‘13 yards off the big gate and 37 yards up the West Walls’. Crime scene detection in mid-nineteenth century Newcastle-upon-Tyne’, in Constructing forensic objectivity from 1850 (Palgrave, 2020)
Clare Sandford-Couch and Helen Rutherford, ‘‘all that they had heard, all that they had read, all that they had seen’: questions of fairness and justice in the trial of George Vass’, in Fair and Unfair Trials in the British Isles During the Age of Public Criticism 1820-1940: Microhistories of Justice and Injustice. Eds. Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Theses & Dissertations:
Low, Patrick (2021) Capital punishment in the north east of England 1800-1878 and post mortem punishment 1752-1878. Doctoral thesis, University of Sunderland.
Mollon, P “Newcastle Upon Tyne and its New Gaol, 1823-78: A Case Study”, MA Dissertation, Sunderland Polytechnic, 1992. (available via Newcastle Library).