The shutters are once again down on one of Darlington’s more curious buildings, which is just 100 yards from the new Hopetown attraction.
The triangular-shaped building on North Road has spent the last few decades slipping in and out of commercial use, but once it was one of the most fashionable places in town, with customers sipping on the latest exotic taste – drinking chocolate – while looking down from the panoramic window on the people dashing up to the station.
Melville House, as it is grandly called, was Darlington’s first cocoa palace.
It was once the equivalent of Costa or Starbucks.
Cocoa was the great fad of the 1870s. New production techniques enabled the Quaker chocolate company of Fry’s to produce a drinking chocolate that was not fatty or oily, and which was marketed from 1874 as “British Workman’s Cocoa”.
This chimed with the “British Workman’s Public Houses” movement in which the working class were encouraged to visit rooms that had all the allure of a pub except they only sold non-alcoholic drinks. Temperance groups, including the Quakers, promoted this concept, and when workman’s cocoa came along, they had a new taste to tempt people away from the beerhouses and gin palaces.
Robert Lockhart opened the first of his famous cocoa rooms in Liverpool in 1875 and the idea rapidly spread across the north. He opened in Sunderland in 1877, and it was so popular on Tyneside that he opened 12 rooms within a year.
In early February 1879, Mr Lockhart opened a cocoa room in Stockton and then, on February 22, 1879, opened his first palace in Darlington in a curious-shaped building that he been constructed on the corner of Melville Street and Station Road in 1876.
The Northern Echo said: "Since the first Cocoa Palace was opened four or five years ago, they have come to be regarded as an important and even necessary institution in most towns."
Mr Lockhart was too ill to attend the ceremony, but sent a message saying that in the 15 months since he had first opened in Newcastle, 2,759,000 people had visited his palaces, drinking 40,000 gallons of tea, 70,000 gallons of cocoa and 90,000 gallons of coffee.
The town’s MP, Edmund Backhouse, drunk the first cup of cocoa and then, said the papers of the day, all the fashionable men of the town pushed to the counter to get their hands on the “wholesome and nourishing beverage”.
"The principle on which Lockhart's palaces are established is even more public than that of the public house of the present day, for not only can persons obtain their tea, coffee, cocoa etc upon most reasonable terms, but even those who don't require refreshment are at liberty to go into the rooms and read the papers that are supplied," said the Echo.
Those visiting the palaces bought tokens for 1d or 6d (ideal for families in need of refreshment) and exchanged them for goods.
Melville House was said to be the perfect venue for a cocoa palace because it had an “upstairs summer room with a view of the principal thoroughfare” – today, big pot plants can be seen enjoying the views from the distinctive windows.
Within months, Mr Lockhart opened more venues on Prebend Row, Houndgate and Parkgate, and in 1880 on Albert Hill, the North End Working Men’s Club, which was struggling to pull through a severe recession, converted itself into the Nestfield Club and Cocoa Tavern.
This was, though, a short-lived fad, certainly in Darlington. The Houndgate palace closed in 1884, and Melville House didn’t last a decade.
In 1900, Lockharts still had 60 branches across the north, with 11 in Glasgow, nine in Newcastle and three in Leeds, but most of them closed before the outbreak of the First World War and the company shutdown in 1924.
Since losing its cocoa rooms, Melville House seems to have struggled to find a long term purpose, other than its value as a quirky corner ornament, its presence next to the petrol filling station enlivening the streetscape.
Next week, we aim to produce a supersize Memories, looking at the Durham dales and the North York Moors, which will include a piece on the eccentric stonemason from Barnard Castle who built Melville House and many of Darlington’s other more characterful buildings.
In the meantime, if you can tell us any more about Melville House or cocoa palaces, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk. Have you got a Lockharts’ token or china cup?
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