The London Lead Company Baths and Wash Houses at Middleton-in-Teesdale

Before the baths, it was Middleton’s Lead Company school

The story starts in 1818, more than forty years before the school building on Alston Road that many people now associate with the London Lead Company. Education had become an important part of the way the Company organised life around its mining communities, and Robert Stagg was later credited with helping to establish the Company’s school system. Middleton was one of the places where that work began early, with a schoolroom erected in the village in 1818.

That first school served Middleton through the opening half of the nineteenth century, when the London Lead Company was becoming increasingly involved in the lives of its workers and their families. Education was only one part of that involvement. Housing, medical care and other forms of welfare would become part of the Company world too, but the schoolroom was one of the earliest physical signs of it here.

By the late 1850s the old school was no longer considered good enough for what Middleton needed. The Company’s mines were producing strongly, and plans were made for something larger and more modern.

The new school opens in 1861

The replacement school was erected on Alston Road in 1861. The decision had support at the very top of the Company, with Octavius Wigram, then governor of the Court of Directors, favouring a more commodious and modern building. R. W. Bainbridge was authorised to spend around £2,000 on the project, and Middleton received the substantial stone school that still survives today.

That building went on to have a remarkable history of its own long after the Lead Company years, but its opening also created a new question for the old schoolroom at Hude. It had been serving Middleton since 1818, but the children no longer needed it.

The Company found another use for it.

From schoolroom to baths and wash houses

The baths and wash houses were established in 1869, eight years after the new school opened. A nineteenth-century description of Middleton, published only a few years later, records baths and wash houses being provided in that year for workers at the neighbouring lead mines and for the public.

The connection with the old school becomes absolutely clear in 1878. Looking back over sixty years of Company education, the Teesdale Mercury described the building erected in 1818 as the schoolroom “now baths and washhouses.” It is a tiny phrase, but it settles something important. This was not simply a bath house later constructed somewhere on the old school site. The old schoolroom itself had been given another job.

The timing also fits with another detail recorded in 1880. The man looking after the baths had already been in charge for around twelve years, taking him back to about 1868. Everything points to the conversion taking place around 1868–69, with 1869 providing the clearest dated record for the establishment of the baths.

So the same building had already seen more than half a century of Middleton life before its second chapter really got going. Children had once come through its doors to learn; now miners and their families were coming through them to wash.

The former miner who ran the baths

The man in charge in 1880 had previously been a miner himself. He was no longer fit enough to continue with his ordinary work, and responsibility for the baths and wash house had become his new job. By then he had been running the place for around twelve years, apparently without any difficulty in its management.

His name has not yet surfaced, which is a shame because there must be more to his story somewhere. What we do know already gives the place a much more personal feel. The man keeping the baths running was not an outsider brought in to manage a Company institution. He came from the same working world as the men using it and had probably spent years doing the same hard physical work himself.

For around twelve years or more he had responsibility for an establishment that had become part of everyday village life. Keeping the boiler going, managing the baths and overseeing the wash house may have been very different from his old work as a miner, but it allowed him to remain in employment after mining itself had become too much.

Inside the baths and wash house

The old schoolroom had been adapted to provide warm baths and a wash house, with a small steam boiler forming part of the hot-water arrangements. We get a particularly good glimpse of how useful that system was in 1880, when W. Pinkney became involved in plans to improve the cooking and clothes-washing arrangements at the Teesdale Union Workhouse while also cutting the amount of fuel being used.

Pinkney had seen the Middleton system and thought something similar could be useful at the workhouse. The principle was straightforward: a small boiler could produce low-pressure steam which could then be used to heat or boil water for washing and other purposes. Rather than relying only on a description, a committee was sent to Middleton to inspect the arrangements for themselves.

The group included Mr Bell of Middleton, Mr Raine of Romaldkirk, Mr Hunt, Mr Hall, and the Master and Matron of the Teesdale Union Workhouse, although Mr Bell was not at home when the visit actually took place. They looked at Middleton’s bakery before moving on to inspect the wash house and baths, paying attention to how the equipment worked and how much fuel was being used.

Mr Raine came away particularly impressed. Having seen the wash house and baths, he thought the inhabitants of Middleton enjoyed what he described as “exceptional privileges” in having facilities like these available to them. The visit tells us plenty about the place without needing to imagine anything that is not in the records. More than a decade after the baths opened, the old schoolroom was functioning well enough for another institution to come to Middleton and study how things were being done.

What did a warm bath cost?

By 1887, the surviving evidence gives us one of the clearest pictures of how people actually used the building. Barnard Castle was debating whether public baths and wash houses should be provided there, and Middleton was used as the obvious nearby example of a much smaller place that already had them.

A London Lead Company worker or member of his family paid 2d for a warm bath. The d was the old abbreviation for pennies in Britain’s pre-decimal currency, so this meant two old pennies. Anyone outside the Company workforce could still use the baths, but paid 4d, while the wash house cost 1½d per hour.

The establishment belonged to the London Lead Company, so it was not technically a public bath owned by the local authority. In everyday use, though, the difference was much smaller than it sounds. Company workers and their families had their own cheaper rate, but other people from Middleton could simply pay the public charge and use the same facilities.

By 1887 the baths and wash house were being used not only by Company families but by other residents of the village, who regarded them as a considerable convenience and comfort. What had begun as a Company welfare facility had become useful to Middleton much more widely.

Had the baths been there even earlier?

The same 1887 account remembered the Middleton baths as having existed for “above 20 years.” If taken as an exact figure, that would push their beginnings back before 1867, but the wording itself gives us a reason not to force the date. The writer said “I believe above 20 years,” clearly recalling a long-established institution rather than quoting the year from a building account.

The better dated evidence points to 1869, and the 1880 description of the former miner having been in charge for around twelve years fits the same period extremely closely. There may have been work taking place slightly earlier, but 1869 is the strongest date for the establishment of the baths and wash houses.

By the time people were writing about them in 1887, the exact opening year probably mattered far less than the fact that Middleton had enjoyed the facility for a generation.

After a day in the mines

The remains of Middleton’s mining years are still all around the village. Hudeshope, Coldberry, High Skears and the surrounding moors are covered with levels, spoil heaps, old mine shops and other workings, while buildings such as the Lead Company school and Middleton House survive much closer to the village centre.

It is easy to concentrate on those bigger remains and forget what an ordinary working day looked like for the people behind them. Lead mining was dirty, wet and physically demanding, and coming home did not mean walking upstairs and turning on a hot shower. Heating enough water for a proper wash took fuel and time, while the clothes worn around the mines needed dealing with as well.

The baths at Hude gave Company families another option. A worker could pay two old pennies for a warm bath, his family received the same reduced rate, and washing could be taken to the wash house for a charge by the hour. Other Middleton residents could use the building too, which meant its importance reached beyond the Lead Company workforce.

For the people living here, that probably mattered far more than we can appreciate simply by looking at the building’s name on an old map.

Part of the London Lead Company’s wider welfare system

The baths make more sense when placed alongside everything else the London Lead Company was doing in Middleton. The Company built schools and houses, supported medical provision and encouraged education beyond childhood through lectures, reading and other activities. Its influence reached far beyond the point where a miner collected his wages.

The thinking behind those arrangements included health, sobriety, recreation and education, all things that appear together when the Company’s welfare provision was discussed in the nineteenth century. A healthier and more settled workforce clearly benefited the business, but the practical benefits to the families living here were just as real.

A child could attend school, medical help was available, lectures and reading offered opportunities away from work, and at Hude there was somewhere to have a warm bath and wash clothes. The baths were not some separate curiosity in the Lead Company story; they belonged naturally alongside the school, housing and medical provision that helped shape life in Middleton.

Barnard Castle looked to Middleton

The debate in 1887 gives a nice idea of how unusual Middleton’s facilities were for a village of its size. Barnard Castle had a considerably larger population, yet people there were still arguing about whether public baths and wash houses were necessary and whether the cost could be justified.

Middleton already had them.

The smaller Upper Teesdale village was being held up as evidence that such facilities could work and that ordinary people actually used them. The Company’s own workers received special privileges, but the wider public had access at reasonable charges, making the establishment useful well beyond the mining families it had originally been intended to serve.

That is quite a position for Middleton to have been in during the 1880s. The village was not merely following what larger places were doing; in this case, a larger neighbouring town was being told to look up the dale and see what Middleton already had.

Where did the baths stand?

The baths and wash houses stood at Hude, immediately west of The Grove and only a short distance from Middleton House. On the historic Ordnance Survey map the site is labelled clearly as “Lead Company’s Baths & Wash Houses,” placing it within the little group of land and buildings connected with the London Lead Company in this part of Middleton.

The Durham Historic Environment Record gives an approximate position of NY 94387 25787, while the Historic England research record places the point slightly farther north-east at around NY 94400 25801. Both fall within the same small Hude site and are best treated as pointers to the complex rather than the exact front door of the old schoolroom.

The difficulty comes when trying to match the walls of the 1818 building to the modern landscape. The Ordnance Survey lettering stretches across the site rather than sitting neatly inside one footprint, and the later heritage records also allow some uncertainty over the precise position. We know the small piece of Hude in which the building stood; the last few metres are the part that remain difficult to untangle.

The baths were part of a much bigger Lead Company landscape

This was not an isolated building standing on its own at the edge of Middleton. A short distance to the east stood Middleton House, the London Lead Company agent’s house and office, while other buildings nearby were connected with the administration and daily running of the Teesdale mines.
The clock tower, weighbridge, stables and other Company property all belonged to the same Hude landscape. Education, administration and welfare were therefore concentrated remarkably close together, with the old schoolroom and later baths sitting among buildings connected with the management of one of Upper Teesdale’s major employers.
For much of the nineteenth century this little part of Hude must have felt very different from the quiet collection of houses, roads and fields we see today.

Grove Cottage and the 1905 date stone

One surviving building here immediately attracts attention because of the large stone panel above its entrance. Grove Cottage is dated 1905, with a crowned letter above the date.

That year is much too late for Grove Cottage simply to be identified as the original schoolroom. The building we are looking for had already been standing since 1818 and had been operating as the baths throughout the later nineteenth century.

An older building can of course be rebuilt, altered or incorporated into something newer, so the date stone alone does not tell us everything about the fabric beneath it. What it does show is that this part of Hude was changing in 1905, almost exactly when the London Lead Company’s long presence in Teesdale was coming to an end.

For now Grove Cottage belongs to the later story of the site rather than being something we can simply label as the former baths.

What happened to the old schoolroom and baths?

The London Lead Company’s withdrawal from Teesdale took place through the opening years of the twentieth century rather than on one single closing day. During the period around 1902 to 1906, mines, roads, property and other Company interests were being dealt with as an organisation that had shaped Middleton for generations gradually disappeared from the dale.
The old baths also disappear from the story around this changing period. The historic complex no longer survives in the form shown on the nineteenth-century map, and no present-day building can yet be identified with certainty as the original 1818 schoolroom.
Whether the old building was demolished outright, heavily rebuilt or partly absorbed into later development is the one part of its history that still needs a firm documentary answer. The 1905 date on Grove Cottage makes that period particularly interesting, but it would be wrong to turn a good clue into a demolition date without the evidence to support it.
Everything before that final chapter is much clearer.

From an 1818 classroom to a village bath house

The building began in 1818 as one of the London Lead Company’s early Middleton schoolrooms. For more than forty years children from the mining community came here to learn before the new school opened on Alston Road in 1861.

By 1869, the old classroom had been transformed into the baths and wash houses. A former miner appears to have taken charge at around the same time and was still running the place twelve years later. A small steam boiler supplied hot water, and in 1880 visitors connected with the Teesdale Union Workhouse came to Middleton to inspect the arrangements for themselves.

By 1887, a Company worker or member of his family could have a warm bath for 2d, other residents paid 4d, and the wash house cost 1½d an hour. The building belonged to the London Lead Company, but its usefulness had spread through the wider village.

Then the Company left Teesdale and the old schoolroom eventually disappeared with the changing Hude landscape.

Today the mines have left much bigger marks behind. Their spoil heaps, levels and ruined workings are still scattered across the hills, while several substantial Company buildings survive in Middleton itself. The baths are much easier to miss because almost nothing obvious remains to tell you they were ever there.

Yet this little building had been part of Middleton life since 1818. It spent its first decades educating the children of the mining community and its later years helping those same families wash themselves and their clothes.

That is a long life for a building that has almost vanished from the village story.

Explore more of Middleton-in-Teesdale

The London Lead Company School
Discover the history of the replacement school built in 1861, from its early days educating Middleton children to its later life as a school camp and adventure centre.

Middleton House
Explore the former London Lead Company headquarters at Hude, just a short distance from the old baths and wash houses.

Who Were the London Lead Company?
Discover the mining company that helped shape Middleton, providing employment, housing, education and welfare for generations of families.

Explore Middleton-in-Teesdale
Find more village history, walks, waterfalls and places to explore around Upper Teesdale.