Hawks of Gateshead

Hawks, Crawshay and Sons of Gateshead — known simply as Hawks of Gateshead — was a major Tyneside ironworks operating from the mid-eighteenth century until its closure in 1889, one of the significant iron founding and engineering establishments that made the Tyne valley a centre of early industrial and railway engineering. The firm built ironwork for Tyneside's developing dock and harbour infrastructure and contributed to the early locomotive experiments on the Tyneside colliery railways, including elements of the Steam Elephant of around 1815 built for the Wallsend Waggonway to the design of John Buddle and William Chapman.

The Tyneside iron founding trade that Hawks represented was essential infrastructure for the early railway age: the colliery railways of Durham and Northumberland required cast iron plateway rails, wrought iron fittings, and the mechanical components that only established ironworks could supply. Without the foundry and ironworking capacity of firms like Hawks on the Tyne, the experimental locomotive work of Stephenson at Killingworth and Hedley at Wylam would have had no practical means of turning engineering designs into working machines. The foundries of Gateshead and Newcastle were the anonymous but essential manufacturing base of the railway's pioneering decade. Hawks closed in 1889, unable to compete with the integrated steel works of the Cleveland coast that were transforming British iron and steel manufacturing.