Stowell Street: how a supermarket started Newcastle’s Chinatown

Stowell Street was built in 1824 as a row of new town houses. It was cut through the old Blackfriars precinct, named after a judge, Lord Stowell, with the old town wall running behind it. For the next 150 years it wasn’t known for much.

A supermarket went first

Newcastle’s first Chinese restaurant, the Marlborough Café, opened on Scotswood Road in 1949. Fourteen more had opened by 1962, and none of them was on Stowell Street. The first Chinese business on the street was a supermarket: Peter Cheng’s Wing Hong store, which moved here from Westgate Road in 1978. Newcastle Chinatown’s own history page describes the street he found as “drab, cheerless and full of boarded up and derelict buildings”.

“When I came over my first impressions was that it was cold, damp and lonely because in the 1970s you would hardly see any Chinese on the streets.” (Jimmy Tsang, who arrived in 1974, in Newcastle Chinatown’s history)

Other businesses followed the supermarket. From 1988 they were allowed to put up signs in Chinese as well as English, and in 2008 the street lights were replaced with 22 Chinese-style lanterns. The arch at the St Andrew’s Street end went up between October 2004 and January 2005. It was built by twelve craftsmen from a garden construction company in Jiangsu province. It’s 11 metres high, painted with dragons and phoenixes in gold, green, blue and red, and two lions stand at its feet. It faces St James’ Park across the road.

Where to sit down

A few of the 1824 houses survive, at numbers 34 to 46, and they’re Chinese restaurants now. King Neptune is at 34–36. It says it first opened in 1986 and calls itself “the longest running Chinese restaurant in Newcastle upon Tyne”. Its menu goes from lobster, crab and scallops to Peking-style spare ribs and crispy duck with pancakes. At 38–42, Red Diner focuses on Cantonese and Sichuan dishes, which NE1’s Get Into Newcastle guide sums up as “big on spices”.

For dim sum, Sky at number 20 names dim sum as its main speciality and recommends its early-afternoon dim sum. Little Asia does Chinese hotpot, where you cook at the table. Happiness 2 is, says the same guide, about “traditional recipes with a modern twist”. 12 Muqam serves Uyghur food, from China’s Xinjiang province.

Lunar New Year is celebrated in and around the street every year, usually in late January or early February. Any other week, go at lunchtime, start with dim sum, and walk it off along the town wall.