The S&DR Darlington Lime Depot
A rare survival of a once common building type.
Introduction
When the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR) opened for business in 1825, the company expected to deliver almost as much of the coal and lime it transported locally as the amounts it sent for coastal export via staiths on the River Tees . To facilitate this ‘landsale’, as it was known, the company constructed depots at road crossings along its line. There, wagons with bottom-opening doors were run onto elevated stages with clear space between the rails and their contents dropped into a series of open-fronted bays beneath the tracks for bagging and sale to local businesses and the general public.
...the company expected to deliver almost as much of the coal and lime it transported locally as it sent for coastal export.
The extant Darlington Lime Depot building at Hopetown Lane opened between 1840 and 1847, apparently to replace or augment earlier facilities that existed further south. It is now the sole surviving example of a building type once common on the S&DR and more widely and has been listed at Grade II since 2006 . In 2019 Historic England commissioned Archaeo-Environment Ltd to record and investigate the building further as part of its S&DR Heritage Action Zone initiative (HAZ).
History
Although we lack definite evidence, the early coal and lime depots at Darlington were almost certainly co-located alongside each other as was typical on the S&DR; this arrangement is known at Heighington, Eaglescliffe (Yarm) and Stockton, for example, to name just three other depots.
The first Darlington depot comprised an enclosed yard at the end of a short 0.6 kilometre-long branch which left the S&DR main line at Hope Town and terminated adjacent to Darlington High Northgate for easy access by the public. It is shown and named on the earliest series of detailed maps of the S&DR that we have, surveyed by Thomas Dixon in 1839. In the key that accompanies the Darlington sheet, the number ‘9’ is identified as simply ‘Coal Depots and Yard’, but it is likely the three short sidings depicted at the northern end of the yard functioned at this time as ‘lime drops’.
The red circle added to the image below is the position of the extant Hopetown Lane lime depot building. On this 1839 map, we can see a rail spur approaching the plot where the building was later to stand suggesting that construction was planned but not yet started. The depot is shown, however, on a subsequent plan of 1847 by Joseph Sowerby, giving us a build date of between 1839/40 and 1847. The new installation thus spatially separated out the handling of the two bulk cargoes, coal and lime.
A programme of expanding or replacing depots took place after the S&DR amalgamated with the North Eastern Railway (NER) in 1863. As part of this programme the coal-handling side of the 1825 High Northgate depot was replaced with larger facilities on the other side of the River Skerne (Ordnance Survey 1898).
This was certainly more conveniently situated to service the expanded rail network created by the merger, but a replacement depot may also have been needed due to increasing commercial demand for both coal and lime: coal, for example, was used not just as a fuel but increasingly to manufacture town gas; lime was needed for mortar and as an agricultural fertilizer, but also as a purifying agent to scrub sulphur dioxide from town gas and stop it smelling when burned.
The Darlington Gas Works had opened in 1830 but was taken over by Darlington Corporation in 1854; the Works stood just the other side of the River Skerne from the lime depot (Thomas 2020).
The Hopetown Lane Lime Depot seems to have been used for its original purpose for only about 30 years.
The Hopetown Lane Lime Depot seems to have been used for its original purpose for only about 30 years . By the mid-1870s the building had been repurposed and adapted for light industrial uses that have included welding, blacksmithing, storage, and as a garage. In recent years it has lain vacant and is now boarded up to prevent vandalism.
Architectural Description
The Depot is a two-storey structure constructed of brick with sandstone ashlar dressings, all beneath a slate roof.
It is built into higher ground, with two storeys facing Hopetown Lane but only a single storey to the rear. The ground floor is subdivided into four bays or cells by internal brick partitions.
Each bay was originally self-contained, although doorways were later inserted between them to facilitate the building’s re-use; each has a cobbled floor, now mostly concreted over. The ground floor seems to have been designed to be open fronted as the existing double doors are secondary. However, since quick lime reacts violently with water to produce slaked lime it is inconceivable that there would not have been some means of protecting the contents from the weather right from the start, at the very least perhaps a tarpaulin sheet that could be dropped down to keep out wind and rain, otherwise lime could not have been stored here for any length of time.
At first-floor level, a rail spur entered the north-west end of the building through an arch in the gable, allowing lime wagons with bottom-opening doors to be brought in and their contents dropped into the cells below. A corresponding blocked arch in the south-east gable appears to be decorative only, and the wagons must therefore have left the building the same way they came in. Inside the building the rails were carried on two large waybeams , supported on sandstone pads set into the tops of the brick dividing walls.
There was open space between the rails and lime attendants standing on timber flooring either side of the track (see image below) would have manhandled the wagons into position and operated levers to open the bottom doors and allow the lime to fall through into the cells below.
Although the first-floor frontage of the depot is now boarded and pierced by windows, there is evidence that it originally consisted of a series of louvred timber panels set between cast-iron columns with decorative capitals that supported the roof beams, thus affording the attendants ventilation but also some protection against the weather.
Subsequent to the Archaeo-Environment report, Historic England has commissioned a reconstruction drawing showing how the building may have looked and operated; this is reproduced here at Figure 6.
Significance and national context
Coal and lime depots are a specialised type of goods-handling facility that existed on the S&DR from the first year of operation. The company did not construct dedicated depots for handling more general forms of goods traffic until 1826, opening what it called its ‘Merchandising Warehouse’ in Darlington in 1827 (Archaeo-Environment Ltd 2016, 12). This stood on the other side of High Northgate to the first Darlington Coal and Lime Depot. Unfortunately, the building is no longer extant, but it did survive long enough to serve as the prototype for the Goods Warehouse that the Liverpool & Manchester Railway erected a few years later in 1830 at their Liverpool Road station in Manchester, which is recognised for its historic importance by being listed at Grade I (NHLE 1282991).
The Darlington Merchandising Warehouse was converted into a passenger station in 1833 when goods handling transferred to the newly built Goods Shed (See Bev Kerr's article in , this issue), and was demolished in 1864.
All this illustrates how fundamental the S&DR was to the development of the modern railway in Britain in so many ways. What the company trialled was copied widely – undoubtedly being improved upon by other railway companies in the process and subsequently - but many ideas originated with the S&DR (see also Eric Branse-Instone's overview, in this issue).
The importance of the Darlington Lime Depot
Nationally, lime depots are underrepresented in heritage records.
Nationally, lime depots are underrepresented in heritage records , with only one example other than the Hopetown Depot listed specifically for its association with lime: that which the NER constructed at Goathland Station, North Yorkshire , in about1865. Many more examples of coal depots that employed gravity to deposit coal into bunkers are listed, but even where historical map evidence suggests these originally existed in tandem with lime-handling facilities, it is only the coal bunkers that have survived and are today designated (for example, the Maiden’s Walk Coal Drops in Gateshead. Hopetown Lime Depot has recently been purchased by Darlington Borough Council, and it is hoped a sympathetic future use may be found for it that preserves its historical importance as well as showing off surviving original features identified by a programme of careful research and recording.
About the authors
Marcus Jecock FSA
Caroline Hardie
Further information
Dixon, Thomas 1839. Plan of …the Stockton and Darlington Railway Extending from the Weigh House near Darlington to the Fighting Cocks. TNA RAIL 1037/456
Ordnance Survey 1898 County Series 1:2500 sheet Durham LV.6. Surveyed 1896. Southampton: Ordnance Survey.
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