North East Quadrant
Road and house construction started at the junction of Eden Lane and Yoden Road. To this day, some residents still consider these as the first houses built in Peterlee – Thorntree Gill being considered more as an extension of Horden Colliery than a true part of the new town.
After the departure of Berthold Lubetkin, Grenfell Bains was drafted in as Architect Planner to develop the new Master Plan and oversee development of the North East Quadrant. Bains at the time filled the position at Newton Aycliffe, another of the first wave new towns located 20 miles south west of Peterlee.
As the dates of these aerial photographs testify, building work was already well underway in the North East Quadrant by the time the Peterlee Master Plan was published in September 1952. Indeed, as surviving residency agreements and rent books also testify, houses in this part of Peterlee were already occupied, such were the pressures on the Development Corporation to have something tangible to show for their efforts.
This rent card belonged to Norman Raine and family who moved to Peterlee from the small village of Shadforth – Shadforth is located approximately 7 miles due west of Peterlee.
The practice of coal deliveries being dumped by the side of the road for residents to collect by bucket and shovel was common practice in the east Durham colliery villages.
In Farewell Squalor, C W Clarke includes a photograph of Pyman Street in Wheatley Hill, adding the caption “SLUM CLEARANCE: Observe the method of delivering coal”, infering such practices would become a thing of the past in the new town. As this image shows, it was a practice that clearly continued in Peterlee, at least in the early years of the new town.