Benwell

Benwell
Benwell
Coordinates	54 ° 58 ′  N , 1 ° 40 ′  W Coordinates: 54 ° 58 ′  N , 1 ° 40 ′  W
Basic data
Country	United Kingdom
Part of the country	England
Metropolitan Borough	Newcastle upon Tyne
	North East England
Newcastle upon Tyne

Benwell is now a borough of Newcastle upon Tyne in the metropolitan area of Tyne and Wear , north east England.

history

Benwell is near the Roman fort Condercum on Hadrian's Wall . Condercum Road is still a reminder of this today . In the archaeological researched temple of the fort there are three altars dedicated to the god Antenociticus .

A first mention of the place, namely Bynnewalle ("behind the walls", "at the walls"), took place around 1050. At the time of the first written mention, Benwell Manor was part of the Barony of Bolbec . The estate was divided in the 13th century, the largest third was owned by the Scot family, wealthy merchants and Benwell's most important taxpayer around 1296. The Scotswood Wildlife Park, founded in 1367, goes back to this family .

Around 1540, at the time of Henry VIII , the Benwell Tower , a three-story tower with battlements, was transferred from the possession of Tynemouth Abbey to the Crown in the course of the monastery dissolution. In the 16th century, Benwell consisted of two rows of houses on either side of a country road. In the early 17th century, families of coal merchants set the tone in the village, exploiting the nearby Tyne coalfields.

In the area of Benwell Lane , Ferguson's Lane and Fox and Hounds Lane there are still buildings from the early 19th century that show the townscape of that time. The Benwell Tower was rebuilt in the 18th century and finally rebuilt in 1831 in the Tudor style .

Known residents

• The steel industrialist William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong (1810–1900) was born here. He developed the first industrially manufactured breech-loading cannon and was thus a competitor of Alfred Krupp . He later founded the College of Physical Science , the predecessor of what is now Newcastle University .
• Joseph Wilson Swan (1828–1914) invented a filament lamp in 1860 and founded a jointly operated company in London with Thomas Alva Edison in 1883 after an initial legal dispute and built an incandescent lamp factory in Benwell.
• The Russian spy Rudolf Iwanowitsch Abel (1903–1971) was born as William Genrikowitsch Fischer in Benwell. He betrayed American nuclear secrets to the USSR, was arrested and exchanged for the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers , shot down in 1960 .

Picture gallery

• 

  Hadrian's Wall at Benwell

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  Temple of Antenociticus

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  Benwell Tower

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  Condercum Road

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  Benwell Lane

Web links

• Street map of Benwell on Google Maps
• Benwell on timarchive 2
• Condercum