Littletown Remains The Small Town Villagers Always Desired

By David Simpson

Historic times: Littletown Colliery Institute, built in 1907, was pulled down during the 1970s

Littletown came into being as a pit village following the opening of its colliery in 1831, but it never grew to the extent of neighbouring colliery villages like High Pittington and Sherburn Hill. There was one chapel, a pub and only a handful of colliery streets to house the miners.
The most northerly street was Moor View Cottages, once home to colliery officials and still standing today. These houses stood apart from four other colliery terraces that formed a quadrangle at the heart of the village. Here was Cross Street on the east side, leading to the chapel, Pit Row at the north near the colliery, Front Street facing out west across the main road towards Littletown House and Long Row at the south.

A large green field that effectively forms a village green now marks the site of the streets. If we face across the field towards the old chapel, we can imagine Front Street on the left alongside the main road and Cross Street on the right where there is now nothing more than a farm track leading to the chapel. Rather strangely this old track is still referred to as Cross Street on modern maps but there are no longer any houses.

All the old colliery terraces have gone. Plantation Avenue which now houses most of Littletown’s population is a street of mid twentieth century semi-detached houses built on the site of the former colliery terrace that was called Long Row in the 1850s and later referred to as Long Street.

At the corner of Long Street and the main road from Pittington to Haswell Plough stands the former Duke of York pub. Littletown’s first pub had been the Moor Hen and was in existence by the 1850s. One of its last publicans was Matthew Hepburn who was listed in a directory in 1894. It was in that year that Moor Hen was superseded by the newly built Duke of York, a little further along the road to the east. Three years after it was built, a trade directory states that the landlord of the Duke of York was Matthew Hepburn who clearly moved there from the earlier pub, which is no longer mentioned.

During this period the Littletown colliery manager was Wheldon Hepburn who was presumably a relative of the publican. The Duke of York continued to operate as a pub until quite recently, but it became a guest house only a few years ago and is now called Littletown Lodge.

A little farther to the south along the road from the former pub once stood yet another colliery terrace called Heather View. It was built later in the nineteenth century than the other terraces in the village and was separated from the Duke of York and the rest of the village by a school that stood in between. This was the Littletown Colliery School of 1874 and was built by the Earl of Durham.

It might be expected that glorious heather moorland could be seen across the road from Heather View and the village school but for most of their life they both looked out directly onto the monstrous Sherburn Hill Pit heap. The lower slopes of the heap were just across the road from the school and it was perhaps precariously close in view of the disaster that beset the Welsh village of Aberfan in October 1966 when a coal pit collapsed onto the village and killed 116 children.

Rooms with a view: Heather View, showing
the residents' view of Sherburn Hill pit heap

Sherburn Hill Colliery itself had closed only the year before this terrible event. In the interests of safety and scenery the Sherburn Hill heap was removed in 1969-70. It was as much a feature of Littletown’s landscape as it was of Sherburn Hill and it filled the countryside on the east-side of the road that linked the two villages. After a heavy snowfall the heap resembled an Alpine mountain and its height was such that views stretched out to sea from its summit.

Heather View and the school did not live to enjoy their newly uninterrupted view of the surrounding scenery for very long, as both were demolished during the 1970s. The Littletown Colliery Institute of 1907 was also pulled down during this decade of demolition. Situated near the pub, it once housed a reading room and billiard tables and was inscribed with the words Lambton Collieries Littletown Colliery Institute above the door.

These were by no means the earliest demolitions in the village. Front Street had been pulled down shortly before this time, so that all that was left of the village were better quality houses in Moor View Cottages and Plantation Avenue as well as the pub and old Wesleyan chapel.

The closure of Sherburn Hill pit, where many local miners worked, was a factor in the changes taking place at Littletown. Littletown Colliery had closed long ago, back in 1914 and Sherburn Hill’s colliery closure only served to emphasise the decay at Littletown. In fact in the sixties and seventies Littletown wasn’t perceived as a particularly desirable place to live. “Littletown isn’t a pretty place” wrote an Echo reporter on a visit in 1967, further remarking that people in neighbouring villages referred to it as the lost city. However, following the demolitions, the attraction of what remained was increasingly clear. Despite its lack of amenities Littletown’s lovely rural setting was quite clear and plans were put forward in 1985 for the building of 30 new houses opposite the Duke of York. However the people in this village of 54 people were strongly opposed to the plan and asserted their desire to remain little and so Littletown remains little to this day.