The Hartlepools, part I: Destruction and Construction – the History of Housing in Old Hartlepool to 1967

Readers of a certain age will remember the Hartlepools. The towns’ football club (note the strategically placed apostrophe) took that name until 1968. Nowadays we talk of Hartlepool – the unified borough created from old Hartlepool and West Hartlepool in 1967 but the earlier title evokes the rich and complex civic and housing history that will be discussed in the posts that follow. The Headland, Hartlepool, with thanks to Stuart Hodgson, the Hiking Photographer (from his Hartlepool Headland to Crimdon walk). Old Hartlepool’s history can be said to date to 647 when a monastery was founded on its Headland peninsula. The monastery disappeared but Hartlepool became a town of some significance, incorporated by King John in 1200 and graced by the impressive St Hilda’s Church that survives to the present. Five hundred years later, it was little more than a fishing village but the reopening of its Old Harbour in 1835, triggered by the expansion of the Durham coal trade, revived its fortunes.…

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