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Name: Swineburne's or Cookson's Glassworks

Region: South Shields, South Tyneside

Date of Origin: 18th Century

Site Type: Glass Making Manufactory

Condition: Not in existance

Status: Land now occupied by Aker Maritime. As the site has not been built on since the demolition, evidence may still remain.

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Last Updated: 20/05/2020

Address: 85-95 W Holborn, South Shields

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https://www.twsitelines.info/SMR/2340

"Onesiphorus Dagnia (of the Ouseburn Glassworks, Newcastle) set up the first glasshouse at South Shields around 1707. In 1756 they mortgaged the glasshouse to John Cookson. Isaac Cookson had set up a glasshouse in South Shields for his son, John, in 1737. John Cookson entered into a partnership with a Thomas Jefferies to make crown glass there. On John's death in 1785, the works passed to his son Isaac and the Cooksons remained the leading glassmakers in the district until the middle of nineteenth century when the works passed to R. and W. Swinburne and Company, who manufactured glass here until 1876. In the early 19th century the largest glass manufactory in the kingdom. The works used the Ballast Wagonway (HER ref. 2427) to take waste to The Bents and to bring in coarse sand to use in grinding. The Glassworks were acquired in 1892 by the Harton Coal Company and demolished to give access to the Harton Low Staiths (HER ref. 2456). The site has been levelled, leaving only chimney base dated 1865, but more features may survive underground." - Sitelines

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"In the eighteenth century manufacturing expanded to include glass-making, the first documented works being Cookson’s Crown and Plate Glass Works, trading from Cookson’s Quay from 1737, although Thornborrow suggests that the company started in South Shields in the mid –seventeenth century (Thornborrow, 1961, p 16). It was taken over by Swinburne’s Glassworks in the nineteenth century. South Shields Bottle Works is shown, to the south of the Mill Dam, on Fryers’s 1772 map as a “Bottle House” with two circular structures which were probably kilns. By the time of Woods survey in 1827 the site included at least three free standing circular structures. It was out of use by 1895 as the site was then occupied by the Stone Quay Boiler Works." - Newcastle.gov.uk

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Swineburnes, 1862

Ordnance Survey, 1862

SWINEBURNE'S GLASSWORKS
SOUTH SHIELDS

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