History | Growth & Decline
At the end of the 17th century some of the individuals and small companies who owned mining leases in the North Pennines, sold their ore for smelting to the Quaker-controlled Ryton Company, based near Newcastle upon Tyne.
In 1692, the Governor and Company was formed in London, being granted a very important charter for smelting down lead with coal.
In 1704 these two organisations merged to form a new concern, commonly known as the London Lead Company, or the ‘Quaker Company’ as many of the shareholders were Quakers.
The Manor of Alston Moor was owned by James Radcliffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater, but forfeited to the Crown after he was beheaded for his part in the first Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. George 2nd granted the estate to the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich in London in 1735.
In 1736 most of the mining leases on Alston Moor were let by the Greenwich Hospital to Colonel George Liddell, who built the first smelting mill at Nenthead. In 1745, the London Lead Company obtained a transfer of the Liddell leases, and others, to become the major employer.
The Company operated at Nenthead until 1882, when the leases were sold to the Nenthead and Tynedale Lead and Zinc Company. They increased silver production and continued smelting until the mill closed in 1896.
The Belgian Vieille Montagne Zinc Company then became the new owners. They modernised zinc and lead production and brought the last ore out of the mines on the Nenthead site in about in about 1920. Production at the site gradually declined over the following decades and, with the exception of a short period when the spoil heaps were re-worked, the site finally closed in 1965.