WELCOME TO THE WALLSEND LOCAL HISTORY SOCIETY WEBSITE .
The aims of our Society are to bring together all those who are interested in Local History and in particular the history of Wallsend; to record information about the town and share it with others through meetings, archives, books, talks, local history trails, trips, exhibitions and the internet.
We meet every month [except January & August], 7:00pm-9:00pm, with a Speaker [see Speaker’s List To the Right] and refreshments, at St Lukes Church Hall, Frank Street, Wallsend. NE28 6RN
Membership 10 sessions for only £15 per year
Visitor Fees £4.00 / evening meeting
Wallsend Local History Society celebrated it’s 50th Anniversary, in October 2023, with a dinner at The Masonic Hall on Station Road, Wallsend, and hosted a series of events during the year to showcase our extensive archive material at Wallsend Library, Wallsend Festival, and St Peter’s Church Open Day.
We also compiled a book recording events in the last 25 years of the Society, which is available for sale to members, for £5:00.
In 2024 we hosted a number of events including a display of our Archive material in March as part of the Wallsend Library 10th Anniversary celebrations, a ‘Wallsend Shops Talk’ by one of our Archivists, Steve Allerdice, and also provided displays and talks in July in support of the Wallsend History Week by North Tyneside Council’.
Last year, in addition our monthly talks, we undertook a number of activities, including:-
Provided a number of images of old High Street Shops to North Tyneside Council to assist in their initiative to ‘Transform the High Street’ by installing the images on the relevant shop front shutters.
Created a Society Facebook Page [There are currently in excess of 1700 members].
To mitigate an ongoing issue of restricted storage space for our extensive Archives, the Society have disposed of a number of duplicate books at Tynemouth Station Book Fairs in June and October.
As part of the Wallsend Festival in July we delivered a talk on the Wallsend Colliery Pit Disaster 1835 in the Wallsend library, hosted walking tours of the High Street Shutter images and ‘Old Wallsend History’, and provided a display of Wallsend history in the Art Shop in the Forum.
One of talks last year was on ‘Playing for England, Wallsend’s First Lioness’ – Ken & Christine Hutchinson[Knox], The Talk covered the history of women’s football in Wallsend and for England. A digital book on the subject has been compiled and can be made available to members upon request.
This year, 2026, in addition to presenting our monthly talks, we will be continuing the reduction of our Archive by taking a stall at Tynemouth Station Book Fair in April to sell books that are not relevant to the Wallsend/Willington Quay/Howdon area.
We will also continue discussions with North East Museums (formerly Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums), for the transfer of a number of items from our Archive, to further reduce our Archive storage requirements.
Once you have taken a look around our website, please leave any comments in our Guestbook!
Born in Wallsend, living Down Under, in Canada or U.S.A.?
If you have a desire to see how your old street looks now, we’ll do our best to photograph it and post the image on our site.
If you have any photos of Wallsend which you could send or lend to us, we’d love to hear from you.
Why not join our group
Wallsend Local History Society……Only £15.00 for an
annual membership which entitles you to 10 meetings including talks from
guest speakers on local topics, walks and a Christmas party. You are
also able to access our local extensive local archive material!
Come along to enrol at our next meeting, all welcome.