Tributes have been paid to Connie Pickard, who with her former husband, the poet Tom Pickard, set up the legendary Morden Tower poetry readings in Newcastle in the 1960s that attracted legions of poets, including Allan Ginsberg and Basil Bunting to read. She has died at the age of 92 after a long illness.

Tom Pickard posted on social media: “Sad to report that Connie Pickard left this life in the early hours of this morning. It was a peaceful going in the company of family. She will be remembered for her work with poets and musicians at the Morden Tower, and by me with sorrow and gratitude. RIP comrade.”

Connie was born and grew up in the Durham mining village of Leadgate, near Consett. She and Tom took out a lease on the tower, on Newcastle’s mediaeval city walls, for 10 shillings a week in 1964, and staged their first poetry reading later that same year.

In an introduction to the anthology High on the Walls, published in 1990, and which contained contributions from many poets who had read at Morden Tower, she said: “Tom Pickard and I had been looking for an interesting space for books and readings. What we dreamed of was an inviting cellar in an old Georgian house, a little cove of our own where we could deposit the hoard of little press publications, slim volumes and magazines we had collected, where people like ourselves could browse and be in touch with writing from Edinburgh, Paris, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, Liverpool and Ladbroke Grove. But what did I do? I hired a mediaeval tower.

“In those days poetry readings were a matter of Arts Council sponsored tours by BBC Third Programme personages, attended by ladies in flowery hats, and usually took place in Morpeth or Hexham. There was no way you could imagine flowery hats in Back Stowell Street where Morden Tower stood.

“For some poets this was part of its charm, this narrow curving lane which you could disappear into like Jesse James and his gang vanishing into a cleft in the rock. And if you didn’t keep your eyes peeled you could easily miss the narrow postern door in the wall which leads you to the stone steps up to the Tower … The early months were probably the most exciting. There were young poets from Edinburgh, Liverpool, Notting Hill or wherever hitching to Newcastle, giving a reading, and dossing down wherever they could afterwards.”

Connie Pickard continued to play a big part in events at Morden Tower, carrying on with events there for decades after Tom moved on. In an interview with Write Out Loud in 2020, Bloodaxe publisher and editor Neil Astley recalled being involved in the later years: "I helped Bob Lawson, one of the later organisers. Connie continued to support Morden Tower and came back later as the Tower’s organiser.”

She received the Ted Slade award for her outstanding contribution to poetry in 2008. At a 2024 celebration of the 60th anniversary of the first Morden Tower reading at the Tyneside Irish Centre in Newcastle, close to the tower, £500 was raised and donated to the Alzheimer's Society on behalf of Connie. There are plans for a memorial event for Connie Pickard later this year. She and Tom had two children together, Matthew and Catherine.