Christina Sharp appointed first female president of the Lit & Phil

May 27 2009 by Barbara Hodgson, The Journal

Barbara Hodgson meets the woman who’s making history as the first female president of one of Newcastle’s oldest institutions

Making history

As the meeting place for conversation, and a venue for demonstrations by the North East’s industrial pioneers of the 19th Century, the Lit & Phil was often the first to see new technology.

George Stephenson’s miners’ safety lamp, for instance, was demonstrated there in 1815; the Newcastle upon Tyne Society for the gradual abolition of Slavery in the British Dominions was established at a meeting there in 1820; and the lecture theatre became the first public room to be lit by electric light – during a lecture by Sir Joseph Swan in 1880.