Thomas Sopwith was a Newcastle engineer and local historian. Following his apprenticeship, he worked as a surveyor for Richard Grainger who was undertaking a massive building project to replace the town’s warren of narrow and unsanitary streets with grand new avenues lined with neoclassical buildings.

This account of Newcastle’s All Saints’ Church was written by Sopwith in 1826. The neoclassical building described in the book was built between 1786 and 1796 to replace a medieval church of the same name.