[This entry is a work in progress, which is why there are significant gaps between owners]

The Old Jackdaw Dock, named so because of the number of jackdaws that "haunted" the dock, was reputedly the oldest stone dock on the Wear. Information pertaining to it however, is less abundant. It was situated under Dock Street, around 100m west of the Wearmouth Bridge on the south side, and stood underneath the Lambton Drops in its later days. It was of a modest size and certainly old, resembling in shape and size the High Dock at South Shields constructed in the 1780s.

The first owner I have found so far are Messrs Bowes Bros., presumably a partnership within the Bowes family. There is scant information concerning their work here, but a piece in the Sunderland Daily Echo from April 1927 states they repaired ships here. There are no records of ships being built by them here.

It was later owned by Thomas Burn when he first took on the Jackdaw Dock in 1814. The family had been building from the 1760s around Hylton and Sunderland, and had a very good reputation on the river. Thomas Burn first had a yard at Hylton from 1797 at the young age of 17, but moved to the Jackdaw Dock from around 1814. He was described by Brockie as "one of the prime masters of his craft and a man of great intelligence, and by no means contemptible scientific attainments".

From here, he built at least 7 ships for various local merchants to work routes to the continent. They were renowned for long working lives, some exceeding 40 or 50 years, and it was claimed they were "as sound in the timbers as at the time when they were built". The timbers were likely from the Coxgreen area where there were copious wood yards and timber merchants supplying the Wearside industries.

The dock was filled in between the 1860s and 1890s, when the Lambton Drops expanded and consumed the site. The 1890s maps show no indication of what once stood, and neither do photographs from this date. The last evidence shown on plans comes from the 1850s Ordnance Survey plans and a plan of Bishopwearmouth in 1846. Photos on the Searlecanada site of the Lambton Drops evidence this. https://www.searlecanada.org/sunderland/sunderland009.html