Roman Catholic Church of St Bede and attached Presbytery including attached walls and detached wall to south

In the first half of the 19th century, the Catholics in South Shields had to travel to North Shields to go to Mass. St Cuthbert's Church there was the closest church to them at the time (it was demolished and rebuilt in the 1970s). In 1832, a Sunday school was started in the Mill Dam area of the town. On 4 December 1849, St Cuthbert's Church in South Shields was opened. It was on Western Approach and the building was a former protestant chapel. It was opened by Bishop William Hogarth, the Apostolic Vicar of the Northern District. He became the first Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle the following year. Later a school and a presbytery were added to the church.

By the early 1870s, St Cuthbert's Church had become too small to accommodate its congregation. The site of the current church on Westoe Street was purchased by the priest Canon Waterton. On 27 May 1874, the foundation stone of St Bede's Church was laid. The architect was recorded by Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England as being Gibson Lidbetter under the supervision of Thomas Cooke Nicholson. On 22 August 1876, the church was opened. Construction work was delayed because of problems with laying the foundations on quicksand. That foundation work also increased the cost of constructing the church. Initially, the cost of building the church was supposed to be around £8,000, but it…