Penn Gallery on the High Street

Penn Gallery, Fenkle Street, Alnwick

Penn Gallery is a high street shop as well as an online store. In fact there are two doorways. The Fenkle Street entrance includes a 19th Century shop window and a recessed door with a metal gate cover.

At one time this shop was where H C Coates & Son (the printers) sold stationary and took orders for printed posters. Some of these posters are in the Baliffgate Museum collection, and show coloured ink on coloured paper, which was probably quite special for the time.

Penn Gallery’s main entrance is on Narrowgate. This very pretty narrow street has recently been pedestrianised and nicely paved. It is now busy with pedestrians and much nicer than a couple of years ago when it noisy with traffic.

Narrowgate was famous for being a narrow bottleneck on the Great North Road, when it was the main London to Edinburgh coaching route. The Narrowgate coaching inns ‘The Black Swan’ and ‘The Dirty Bottles’ are still serving customers to this day. Narrowgate was designated the A1, when roads were numbered in the 1920s. The A1 now bypasses Alnwick to the East, although sadly the railway link from the East Coast Main Line does not go to the town any more. The old Alnwick railway station has been repurposed as Barter Books.

This old photograph is of Gibb & Bell Saddlers that used to occupy the front of both Penn Gallery and what is now the shop next door, ‘Swinging Hammers’. The original premises was separated into two smaller shops in around 1985, according to the County Council planning archives. In this photo you can see the very narrow pavement in front of the shops, which was all that separated them from the traffic. It was noisy and dusty.

Penn Gallery occupies a Grade 11 listed building, first listed in 1952. It is described as an early 19th Century ashlar stone building of three storeys. This sketch was required as part of the planning permission for Penn Gallery.