The Goat’s Head: The Origin of the name Gateshead and the history of the town

The town of Gateshead sits on the southern bank of the River Tyne. Although its contemporary identity has been almost exclusively absorbed by neighbouring Newcastle, the borough nonetheless has its own distinctive history that should never be overlooked. Gateshead is not merely a “suburb” or extension of Newcastle, but a large settlement in its own right. In this case, have you ever wondered, what does its name mean? What is the “Gate’s head?” Let’s find out.

First of all, to get our answers, we need to turn to a Mackem source. The Venerable Bede of Monkwearmouth, who documented the earliest history of the English people, referred to Gateshead in Latin as the Ad Caprae Caput, which means “The Goat’s Head”. Where he got that name from, and what it means, however, are up for debate. Was Gateshead a place of goats? Or as legends say, was there an emblem of a Goat’s Head on a former Roman bridge heading to Newcastle?

But there was also more to it than that, on this site, an enormous hill of course which overlooked the southern bank of the River Tyne, was another monastery, akin to Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, belonging to an Abbott named Utta.

Following the dissolution of the former Kingdom of Northumbria, and the unification of England, in the 10th century the land which become modern Gateshead become a dominion of the County Palatinate of Durham, which was ruled by the Prince Bishops. By the 13th century, the borough itself was created for the first time under the supervision of Bishop Pudsey. Pudsey would demand large forest clearings to the area’s east, these clearings became known as “Felling.”

The wood from these forests were also used to build ships on the Tyne. At this point in history, the Old English name of Gatishevede had subsequently emerged to describe the area. Inevitably, the early town began to emerge around the River Tyne itself, which was the primary centre for shipping and commerce. Despite being adjacent to Newcastle, attempts to formally annex it as part of the town ultimately failed as it remained wedded to the Bishopric of Durham.

The fact that the Bishopric of Durham held part of the River Tyne ultimately led to a rivalry with the town of Newcastle itself in the 16th century over shipping rights, especially as Gateshead began to emerge as a centre for coal mining. The dominance of Newcastle based merchants actively sought to restrict Gateshead’s commercial expansion and sought to supress its shipping rights in the same way they tried to do so with Sunderland, aiming to possess a regional monopoly over the shipping businesses of the River Tyne.

Because of this, Gateshead effectively became an economic subordinate of Newcastle, even as it emerged as a booming industrial town in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ultimately, it’s fair to say that Gateshead never escaped from its economic dependency on the larger Newcastle, and its leadership in the 21st century instead attempted to wed the two settlements together as “Newcastle-Gateshead”- leading many of Gateshead’s own attributions, be it the Millennium Bridge, the Baltic Flour Mill or the Angel of the North, as de-facto Newcastle icons.

But in the end one should not forget, Gateshead was first and foremost a land of County Durham.