'A People's History of Gibside' - Book Launch

Gibside is a lasting testament to hard graft: the miners who gouged the coal out of the ground, the workmen who moved huge weights of earth, the carpenters, stonemasons, gardeners, servants, the men and women, the skilled and the unskilled.

This book is about them, but it’s also about the history of the Derwent Valley and all the settlements around the edges of Gibside. It’s about the way the geology shaped our history.

The story of Gibside is a very human one, and part of the collective memory of the people who grew up in the area, for whom the derelict and overgrown estate was an adventure playground, a spooky ruin, a place of thrilling danger from falling masonry, abandoned mines and huntsmen’s guns. 

What happened between the death of the last Bowes owner in 1885, and the coming of the National Trust almost a hundred years later? At the…