ONE of Newcastle’s oldest clubs has put its historic headquarters up for sale. The Newcastle Pen and Palette Club was founded in 1900 for men with an interest in the arts, writing, literature, music and the law.

It has occupied its listed premises in Higham Place next to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle since 1908.

The building is one of three survivors from a terrace of town houses – the first project in 1819-20 by Richard Grainger, who was to go on to transform the centre of Newcastle.

The sale of the four-storey premises is being handled jointly by estate agents Naylors and Rook Matthews Sayer, at an asking price of over £250,000.

In recent years the club has let part of the building to restaurant tenants – first CJs and then the Grainger Rooms, but the Grainger Rooms closed in 2009.

The club’s president, accountant David Kilner, said: “We haven’t been able to find a new tenant. We have limited funds and we felt it was time to move elsewhere.

“This is one of Richard Grainger’s first buildings and it is a wrench to leave.”

The club which has 80 members, is holding its monthly meetings temporarily in Newcastle Mansion House in Jesmond, the Lord Mayor’s official base.

“Higham Place has a certain ambience and we wanted to keep that feeling in another building,” said Mr Kilner.

“Number Seven Higham Place has been a wonderful home for the club, but the problem of providing continuous in-house catering facilities, coupled with the costs associated with maintenance of a building approaching 200 years old, has decided us to find somewhere else.”

Until the 1980s, a live-in stewardess provided the catering for the club’s meetings.

The earliest club premises were in Market Street, Newcastle and then the old Academy of Arts building in Blackett Street.

The Higham Place building was owned by the Fenwick store family, which allowed the club to meet there and sold the premises to the Pen Palette in the 1940s.

“A regular feature has been the invitation to well-known personalities to speak at its dinners, and within a year of settling in at Higham Place the club was welcoming Sir Ernest Shackleton to its high table,” said Mr Kilner. Later guests included another polar explorer Dr Fridtjof Nansen, followed by author GK Chesterton, conductors Sir Malcolm Sargent and Sir John Barbirolli, actors Robert Morley and Sir Ralph Richardson, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and politician William Whitelaw.

:: Anybody interested in joining the club can contact Mr Kilner on 0191 222 1757.

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