Two cliff edge weapons pits recorded by Phase 2 of the North East Rapid Coastal Zone Assessment. Recorded as slumping. Risk = intermediate. Threat level 7.

Yevgeny Zamyatin 1884 - 1937. Eminent Russian writer, lived here 1916 - 17. His early novels were based on Newcastle. His 1921 masterpiece 'We' (a novel set in a dystopian future police state) was a major influence on Orwell's '1984'. Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was an author of science fiction and political satire. 'We' was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Zamyatin smuggled it to the west for publication. He was born in Lebedyan. He studied engineering in St. Petersburg from 1902 until 1908, where he joined the Bolsheviks. He was arrested during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and exiled to Siberia. He escaped and moved back to St. Petersburg. In 1906 he moved to Finland to finish his studies. He returned to Russia and wrote fiction as a hobby. He was arrested and exiled again in 1911 but amnestied in 1913. In 1913 he published 'Uyezdnoye' (A Provincial Tale). In 1914 he published 'Na Kulichkakh' (At the world's end). He also wrote articles for Marxist newspapers. Zamyatin graduated as an engineer for the Imperial Russian Navy. In 1916 he was sent to the UK to supervise the construction of icebreakers at the shipyards in Walker and Wallsend. He returned to Russia in late 1917. In 1931 Stalin allowed Zamyatin to leave the Soviet Union. He settled in Paris with his wife. He co-wrote Jean Renoir's 1936 film adaptation of Gorky's 'The Lower Depths'. Yevgeny Zamyatin died in 1937 and is buried in Cimetiere de Thiais, south of Paris.

Home of Thomas Burt (1837 - 1922). Northumberland Miners' leader 1865 - 1913, M.P. for Morpeth 1874 - 1918, the first working class M.P. He lived in this house from 1892 until his death. Burt became secretary of the Northumberland Miners' Association in 1863, then, in 1874, was returned to parliament for Morpeth. Burt stood as a Radical labour candidate with Liberal support and formed part of a small group of Liberal–Labour politicians in the House of Commons in the 1880s and 1890s. After the 1892 General Election, Gladstone appointed Burt as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, in which capacity he served until 1895. Despite the emergence of the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee, Burt remained loyal to his backers in the Liberal Party and refused to join. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1906 and continued to represent Morpeth in Parliament until 1918. From 1910 to 1918 he was Father of the House in the House of Commons. Burt resigned as general secretary of the Northumberland Miners' Association in 1913. Thomas Burt was born at Murton Row near Backworth on 12 November 1837. His father Peter Burt was a coal hewer for Backworth Coal Company. At the age of 10, Thomas was a trapper boy at Haswell Pit. He is buried in Jesmond Cemetery. His memorial was re-dedicated on 12 April 2014. The Stephenson Railway Museum located near Murton Row, where Burt was born has a steam train which the named 'Thomas Burt' in his honour. The aged miners' homes at Choppington, under construction at the time of Burt's death were named the Burt Memorial Homes. The Northumberland Miners' Association named their Trade Union Offices building Burt Hall. The building - in Northumberland Road, Newcastle upon Tyne and now used by Northumbria University - was opened in 1895 and bears a plaque stating the hall 'was built by the miners' in recognition of valuable service rendered by Thomas Burt M.P. as general secretary for 27 years, and to commemorate his appointment as secretary of Board of Trade in 1892.' A block of flats in Bethnal Green, East London, is named after Thomas Burt.

Home of the author Sid Chaplin (1916-1986). He worked in the pits as a teenager. In 1946 he won the Atlantic Award for Literature for his collection of short stories 'The Leaping Lad'. In 1950 Chaplin started writing full time for the National Coal Board. He later wrote for The Guardian and had his own column from 1963, Northern Accent. His acclaimed works about the North-East include 'The Thin Seam' and 'The Day of the Sardine', 'The Watchers and the Watched' (1961-2). In 1968 Alan Plater based his musical 'Close the Coalhouse Door' on Chaplin's early writings. In 1976 Chaplin contributed to writing the TV series 'When The Boat Comes In'. In 1977 he was awarded an OBE to services to arts in the North East. 'In Blackberry Time' was published after his death in 1987. In 1997 the Chaplin family deposited his papers with Newcastle University's Robinson Library Special Collections.
Novels
My Fate Cries Out (1949)
The Thin Seam (1949, 1968)
The Big Room (1960)
The Day of the Sardine (1961, 2004)
The Watchers and the Watched (1962, 2004)
Sam in the Morning (1965)
The Mines of Alabaster (1971)
Short stories
The Leaping Lad (1946, 1970)
On Christmas Day in the Morning (1978)
The Bachelor Uncle and Other Stories (1980)
Misc
The Smell of Sunday Dinner (1971) [essays]
A Tree With Rosy Apples (1972) [essays]
In Blackberry Time (1987) [anthology]

Ove Arup 1895 - 1958, engineer and philosopher, was born here on 16 April 1895. He founded Arup Group Ltd (engineering, design, planning, project management and consulting services for building). Ove Arup is considered to be among the foremost architectural structural engineers of his time. His parents were Danish veterinary surgeon Jens Simon Johannes Arup and his Norwegian wife Mathilde Bolette Nyquist.

One of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century lived here in 1945 while working at the Royal Victoria Infirmary. Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 - 1951.

Jack Common (author) 1903 - 1968 was born here in the upstairs flat. His autobiographical books are "Kiddar's Luck" (1961) and "The Ampersand" (1964). He attended Chillingham Road School and Skerry's College in Newcastle. He became a speaker in socialist circles at the Royal Arcade and began submitting articles to left-wing journals. He moved to London in 1928.

Chas Chandler, founder member of the 'Animals', manager of Jimi Hendrix and Slade and co-founder of the Newcastle Arena lived in this house 1938 - 54. He was born Bryan James Chandler on 18 December 1938 and died on 17 July 1996. After leaving school he worked as a turner in the shipyards.

A stone-lined well of exceptional quality. It was 7.8m deep and 0.75m wide. The lowest 2m had been excavated through bedrock. It had a rounded base. The stone lining was made of dressed stones. Four dressed blocks of the stone well-head were located at the base, suggesting demolition or destruction, and a near complete Buff White jug of likely late 13th century date, broken into many pieces. The fill was waterlogged from a depth of 3.80m. A finely dressed stone that would have formed the top course of the wellhead was recovered from a nearby ditch. The fill at the top of the well shaft contained clay pipe and brick. A complete cattle metatarsal was found in the well - estimated withers height of 1.12m, which is within the usual range for medieval cattle. A new born puppy was represented by bones recovered by hand and from sampling. Partial skeletons of juvenile domestic fowl and fragments of eggshell. Dated C14th.

Excavated in 2005 in advance of open cast coal mining. Before the grange was constructed a north to south boundary ditch and ridge and furrow was created. The ditch had a steep sided profile with a rounded base and was 1.14m wide and 0.60m deep. It was deliberately backfilled with mixed silty clay. No dating evidence was recovered from it. The furrows were filled by brown sandy silt. They were 1.60m wide and 0.04m deep. The ditch may date from the later 12th century, possibly representing an earlier access route to Prestwick Carr, which was later superseded by a cobbled road. In the mid 13th century a rectangular enclosure was constructed on a slight ridge. It was probably a grange (farm complex owned by monasteries). The grange was enclosed by ditches, with the main complex measuring 55m by 40m . The remains of at least two buildings survived in the interior. One of the buildings may have had a stone foundation or dwarf wall. The other was constructed on a frame of timber posts and contained a hearth stone. The enclosure also contained a stone-lined well of exceptional quality. Another enclosure was added to the south side and contained a large rectangular timber building, possibly a barn. There was a sunken cobbled area against the interior of the southern ditch, which might have been a purpose built retting pond for soaking bundles of hemp stalks to extract their fibres for use in manufacturing coarse fabrics, ropes and sails. Charred hemp seeds were found within the enclosure, associated with the latest phase of activity on the site. The grange was accessed by a substantial metalled road with wide flanking drainage ditches. In the field immediately north of the grange there was a causeway over the road ditches. West of the road there was a penannular gully that may have been a drainage feature around a stack-stand for drying peat. The fields west and north of this contained traces of east to west aligned ridge and furrow. Documentary evidence suggests that the grange was probably associated with Newminster Abbey, a Cistercian abbey on the outskirts of Morpeth. The Newminster Cartulary states that a grange at Horton and its turbary (the award of the right to extract peat) were provided with a stone road. The end of the grange in the second quarter of the 14th century (based on pottery evidence) was abrupt and possibly violent, as destruction deposits were recorded. The site may have been a victim of the plague, or a Scottish raid (in 1327 the township and turbary of Mason, 1.5 km to the south-east, was wasted by the Scots). Following the abandonment of the site, a ridge and furrow field system was created over it. The grange may have been re-established on higher ground at 'Old Horton Grange' 1 km to the north. Finds included 12th to mid-late 14th century pottery, a corroded mid 13th century 'short cross' silver penny issued by Henry III (c.1242-47), a worn 'Long Cross' silver penny issued by Edward I (1301-10). 250 pieces of wood were recovered (objects include a few stakes from a wattle structure, a peg and a ladder rung) and a leather sling pouch, which is a rare find and worth specialist study. Animal bones included cattle, sheep, pig and horse. Dated C13-14th.