In October 1866 William Affleck, developer, purchased part of the Shipcote estate. The land between Prince Consort Road and Alexandra Road was sold to him on condition that good quality houses were built to accommodate no more than two families. This was to deter multi-tenanting and over-crowding. The houses were to be Tyneside flats. The streets were named after cathedral cities (Peterborough, Worcester, Chichester, Lichfield, Ely, Lincoln, Ripon, Exeter and Hereford). The plans for Ripon Street were drawn up for George Lucas in 1876 (TWAS T311 56 1876). They were plain brick 'houses' with simple detail arouhnd doors and windows. They have neither front forecourts nor projecting bays. They are typical of the type of Tyneside flat built by private speculators for rent from the 1860s. Tenants tended to be skilled artisans, craftsmen and tradesmen. Of the 78 flats in Ripon Street in 1897-8 only two were rented by unskilled labourers. Most were tenanted by policemen, engine drivers, joiners and fitters etc. The flats had water closets - an improvement on ash closets.

1962 by David Brown. South bell-tower with porch and organ gallery. Circular baptistery.

Former parochial school. 1824, stuccoed, one-storey, with three arched windows in arched recessed panels to north and south.

Equipped with a variety of house types, commercial buildings and sacred and secular institutions, this was a classic example of a Durham mining settlement. Brick terraces laid out north to south in parallel streets, single-pile in Donkins, Davison and Topping Street; double pile in Fenwick and Wells Street. Superior houses for officials in The Terrace.

1975-6. Rectangular, two-storey, with the exposed black-painted columns of the frame defining narrow bays. White lightweight cladding broken horizontally by modular strip windows in conflict with the vertical elements.

Emerson House (Child Benefit Offices) was designed and built by the Corporation for the P.S.A in 1974-5. A vast and potentially unwieldy building, broken up by use of the octagon. Long blocks, two-to-four storey, bent into adjoining semi-octagons. The south block, three sides of an octagon, ends in an eight-storey octagonal tower. Repetitive facades punctuated by blank angular service towers. One of these on the south side of the north block links two low, glass-walled, almost free-standing octagons, one in the courtyard, the other in the angle between the two main blocks towards the road. One houses the plant, the other the staff facilities. Stark white facades, slightly modelled. Demolished 2002.

22 small Advance factories begun in 1968. Two-storey brick workshops behind one-storey offices lit by strips of windows. The nursery factories are similar but on a smaller scale. Spicers (Stationary) Ltd. 1968-9 is a long two-storey building clad in brown horizontally-profiled metal cladding. Regular façade broken by a tall brick central projection with a monopitch roof angled sharply down to the flat roof-line, its frame, open on the ground floor, forming the portico.

The first secondary school opened in 1969. Mostly burnt down and rebuilt in 1978-9 as a standard brick structure. A geophysical survey was conducted at the site of the former school and grounds by Archaeological Services Durham University in 2019. Made-ground comprised of demolition deposits associated with the former school and recent services were detected.

1976 extension to the school of 1969 by Mathews Ryan Partnership. Three brick-built workrooms, each with a monopitch roof and one glazed wall and a clerestory, grouped round a new entrance hall lit by full-length slit windows.

A traditional church in modern forms by a well-known local architect, retaining much of its original mid-1960s character.

The church was built shortly after the designation of Washington as a new town in 1964, principally to serve the new Coach Road Estate. The architect was Anthony J. Rossi of Consett, who built a number of churches in the diocese about that time.

The church is a modern design, on a traditional longitudinal plan. There is a tall nave and sanctuary with a continuous ridge roof, tall narrow flat-roofed side aisles to the nave and a northeast Lady Chapel. The church is built with a steel portal frame with buff brick facing to walls with concrete detailing, clay tiles to the main roofs and asphalt to the flat roofs. As with several of Rossi’s church, the west front is of striking form, here with a central doorway and central and side window openings following the form of the main gable, whose roof is brought forward to form a tall canopy supported on four tapering piloti. Both walls of the nave are ‘pleated’, with six narrow west-facing windows carried up to the flat aisle roofs. Above the aisles the nave has a clerestory of metal strip windows. The sanctuary side walls have two triple mullioned windows set in a single rectangular frame. The east wall of the sanctuary is blind.

Internally the nave reads as a single large space, although the verticals of the steel frames stand clear of the walls, forming narrow flat-ceilinged passage aisles. The internal walls are plastered, the ceiling is panelled between the purlins of the main roof trusses. At the west end of the nave is a gallery. At the east end is a simple tall gabled opening to the sanctuary which is raised up three steps. A lower opening of similar form leads to the Lady Chapel on the north side of the sanctuary. The building is clear-glazed throughout. The sanctuary was apparently adapted to meet the requirements of the new liturgy immediately after the church was finished and some of its furnishings may be of that date, as are the benches in the nave.