R. & W. Hawthorn, Leslie & Co.

R. and W. Hawthorn, Leslie and Co. was a major Tyneside engineering firm operating the Forth Banks Works in Newcastle upon Tyne from 1817, one of the longest-established locomotive and marine engineering firms on the Tyne — a city whose engineering traditions stretched from the earliest colliery waggonways to the great shipbuilding yards that made Tyneside synonymous with marine engineering. Founded by Robert and William Hawthorn, the firm built locomotives, marine engines, and ships from its Forth Banks site beside the Tyne, employing thousands of workers through the Victorian era and maintaining its position as one of the major Tyneside engineering employers into the twentieth century.

The locomotive side of the business supplied a wide variety of types to British and overseas customers — main-line engines for Indian, Latin American, and British railways alongside industrial and colliery locomotives. The marine engineering and shipbuilding work gave the firm a resilience through the Victorian era that purely locomotive-focused builders lacked, the combination of railway and maritime engineering being a characteristic of several Tyneside firms that reflected the region's dual role as both a railway engineering centre and a great shipbuilding river.

The firm merged with Robert Stephenson and Company in 1937 to form Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns, consolidating the locomotive work at Darlington and the marine and general engineering at Forth Banks. The Newcastle works closed in 1961; the site is now occupied by the Newcastle Centre for Life science park — the physical location of Hawthorn's Forth Banks Works now given over to biological and medical research rather than the steam engineering that occupied it for nearly 150 years.