This view was taken roughly from where Derwent Ave (off Finchale Rd) is today. Look carefully & you can just see the Windermere Crescent housing estate infront of the long gone Slag Heap.It gives you an idea how massive the heap was.
I was born 1944 and those lakes and slag heap became my playground but sadly those beautiful lakes were drained in the late 1950s after young boys playing on the icy lake fell through and drowned.
Soon after draining , houses and streets and 'Hebburn Comprehensive School' was built directly onto the lake bed and ten years ago 'Hebburn Lakes School' was built adjacent to Campbell Park Rd.
I mentioned they were built on the old lake bed because misinformation has been wrote in another Hebburn book saying the lakes were 'worked out quarries' and they wern't.I've put the correct history into my 'Good old Hebburn ' book.
The laked were created directly on pasture land by putting embankments in the shape that the Ellison family wanted.This was in the 1860s/70s and those embankments acted like dams. The little Burn that ran down from Wardley was diverted into 'Sandy Bottom lake' close to Burn Heads Farm which then filled all four lakes. Overflow ran back into the original course of the Burn from the east end of the first lake and flowed through a small valley that in later year had Cambridge Ave on one side of it & Windermere Cres on the other. We called that valley 'The Dip'. When the burn reached the Slag Heap it disappeared underground, emerging at Pig Stye Ave in Jarrow.